Keyword Adaptation

Warmer temperatures could bring some benefits to farming in Canada, but climate change will also likely lead to new risks that farmers haven’t seen before. Anne Blondlot of Ouranos breaks down some of the key changes the agricultural community could be facing.

Featuring members of the Canadian Institute of Planners (CIP), this video showcases how the planning profession is at the forefront of developing policy, capacity, and climate resilience within communities and environments across the country.

Canada’s forests are some of the largest in the world. They have enormous economic, cultural, environmental, and recreational value for Canadians of all walks of life. [1]

Dr. Amber Fletcher grew up on a farm and has a strong appreciation for farmer knowledge and the importance of rural environments and communities. Now, as an academic at University of Regina, she studies how farmers are seeing and feeling the impacts of climate change in their fields and daily lives. She’s interested in the critical contributions that women make to farm life, especially during climate extremes such as floods and droughts.

Robin Tunnicliffe has farmed for about 25 years, growing a wide range of organic vegetables for local restaurants and farmer’s markets. When she started farming, there was a more predictable climate, but she is now experiencing more weather extremes that put her farm at risk. To combat the problem, Robin is breeding climate resilient seed that is adapted to her specific growing conditions, which gives her hope for the future.

Robin Tunnicliffe has farmed for almost 20 years, growing a wide range of organic vegetables for local restaurants and farmer’s markets. She remembers that “when I first started farming, my mentor gave me a list of planting dates.” This essential farmer-to-farmer teaching gave her confidence thanks to its hard-won wisdom, and she recalls thinking “Good! Now I know what I’m doing!” But she soon found that the lessons of tradition and experience were expiring, thanks in part to climate change.

The Meechim project follows the story of Garden Hill First Nation – a northern Manitoba community that is only accessible via air and ice roads – and its journey to build a self-sustaining farm. Through a combination of both Indigenous and farm knowledge, the community’s efforts to attain food sovereignty show that climate resilience can lead to better social, economic, health and environmental outcomes for all.

Qapirangajuq: Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change was co-directed by acclaimed Inuk filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk (Atanarjuat The Fast Runner) and PCC’s Executive Director Dr. Ian Mauro. It’s the world’s first Inuktitut language film on climate change, released in 2010, and takes viewers into the Arctic and the Inuit knowledge that is bearing witness to rapid climate change. This award-winning film has been screened around the world – the Smithsonian Institution, Berlin International Film Festival, ImagineNative, etc – and its findings and the community-based process that created it continue to be discussed.

Toronto understands the importance of climate action. In recent years it has been hit by extreme weather that has adversely affected services, infrastructure and economic activities. The human impact of climate change is front and centre as the city works to increase its climate resilience, increase awareness about climate change, and to make urban life better.

Roy McLaren has a lifetime of farming experience: he’s farmed in southwest Manitoba for over 70 years. He looks at the Climate Atlas maps of climate projections with concern. “That is pretty bad,” he says, looking at maps showing a huge increase in very hot weather. “With that kind of heat,” McLaren muses, “we’d have to change our farming methods. We’d have to adopt new crops.”