by Evelyn Amponsah
As a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with York University’s Climate & Equity Lab, working under the supervision of Dr. Lina Brand Correa with research assistance from EUC PhD student Arsam Muhammad, my work focuses on a question that is becoming increasingly urgent: What does climate resilience look like for people whose housing already places them at risk?
Working with communities in Toronto, Kitchener–Waterloo, and Vancouver, I study how extreme heat, inadequate housing, and uneven access to resources shape everyday life for low-income tenants, newcomers, racialized residents, and people living in single-room occupancies. Much of this work unfolds in basements, aging high-rises, and SROs (Single Room Occupancy’s), spaces where the impacts of climate change arrive first and hit hardest.
Rather than treating climate adaptation as a technical or engineering challenge, this research centers human wellbeing and dignity. Using the Max-Neef Human Needs Framework, I examine how heat, overcrowding, poor ventilation, and institutional neglect cut across nine fundamental needs: safety, subsistence, identity, participation, affection, understanding, leisure, freedom, and creativity. Tenants consistently described conditions that threaten not only their physical comfort but their sense of worth, autonomy, and belonging. At the same time, they shared deeply creative forms of survival including mutual aid networks, local cooling strategies, community repair work, and grassroots knowledge-sharing which reveal an overlooked but powerful form of climate leadership.
Across all three sites, a clear pattern emerges: climate vulnerability is inseparable from housing injustice. Tenants face barriers not because they lack knowledge or motivation, but because systems designed around profit, bureaucracy, and cost-saving fail to protect those with the fewest options. “Green” policies often bypass those most affected, while basic needs such as cool air, safe buildings, reliable information remain unmet.
What the research shows, however, is that residents are not passive recipients of risk. They are builders of care networks, innovators of low-cost solutions, and advocates for dignity in places where the right to safety is routinely compromised. The Climate & Equity Lab’s work brings these insights forward, demonstrating that climate resilience must be shaped with communities, not delivered to them.
This work is ultimately about shifting climate policy toward care, justice, and human-scale solutions. By foregrounding the experiences and expertise of tenants, the research offers a grounded view of what equitable adaptation can look like: cooling centers designed with local knowledge, accessible and culturally relevant communication, tenant-led housing governance, and retrofit strategies that enhance wellbeing without displacement.
What tenants across the country are telling us is both simple and profound: climate action must start at home—with safe housing, accessible information, and institutions that treat people with respect and do not undermine their humanity. Their voices point toward a future where climate resilience is measured not only in infrastructure upgrades, but in dignity, autonomy, and the ability for communities to thrive in the places they call home.
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Dr. Evelyn Amponsah is a CITY/EUC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Climate and Equity Lab, a working partnership between Gore Mutual Foundation, its Cooperators, Social Innovation (SI) Canada, and York University’s Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change. Her research project explores how climate change affects housing experiences and opportunities for vulnerable groups in three Canadian cities. A scholar and advocate, she holds a PhD from York University, where her research examined the political economy of anti-Black racism. She was the co-founder of the York University Black Graduate Students Collective, which spearheaded institutional change, resulting in the creation of Black Studies programs and a commitment to increase Black faculty representation. For more information on the program launch, see YFile News and read more about the Climate Equity Lab on the SI Canada web.