crc blog feed

By: Jaime Clifton, Research Curator

Goodbye guilt; hello cooperation, integration and meaningful action. This abstract emphasizes that people are far more inclined to be proactive about climate change if it is framed as a collective issue, and not a personal responsibility. Instead of focusing attention on the individual contribution to climate change, and all the guilt and grief that can accompany that realization, it makes more sense, and has a bigger impact, to represent it as a collective issue.

“Soil is the living, breathing skin of our planet.”

                        -- Authors of the Global Biodiversity Soil Atlas

By: Jaime Clifton, Research Curator

There is no denying the complexities of the messy, wicked problems we are currently facing. Climate change threatens 1.3 billion people and $158 trillion in US assets. There are $2 trillion in fossil fuel assets that fail the 2-degree stress test.

Home is more than a suburban house, a city apartment, or a log cabin in the woods. It is our refuge, our foundation. It is built from the soil covering the ground, the trees lining our forests, the coral reefs populating our ocean, and the starry sky enclosing us above. It gives us comfort and it shelters our families. If we don’t take care of our home, it cannot take care of us.

The now decommissioned Eastview landfill site in Guelph, Ontario, spans 45 hectares of degraded landscape. It’s hard to tell that this place is home to mountains of waste since its transformation into a vibrant pollinator garden and community park.

By: Jaime Clifton, Research Curator

The G7 nations have put forth a landmark pledge to end oil and gas subsidies by 2025. At the summit in Japan, they declared that these types of subsidies were “inefficient”, and since commodity prices continue to fall, subsidies are as well. The updated pledge builds on plans put forth in 2009, which until now, were lacking a concrete timeline.

Canada’s status as an “energy superpower” is under threat because the global dominance of fossil fuels could decrease faster than previously believed, according to a draft report produced by Policy Horizons Canada, a federal government think-tank. Driving this  very real future are two trends—renewables will become cheaper than fossil fuels and faster than anticipated and electric cars are now becoming fully competitive.