Indigenous Climate Change Futures: Envisioning Well-Being with the Earth

Principal Investigator: Deborah McGregor/Co-Investigators: Lisa Myers and Alan Corbiere Funding: SSHRC Insight Grant. Term: 2021-2025. The project aims to define what it means to "live well" from a self-determined Indigenous perspective. Building on previous SSHRC-funded research, the project team will focus specifically on the Anishinaabek concept of mino-mnaamodzawin (well-being with all life) as aframework for

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Developing practical solutions to climate change

As Director of the International Renewable Energy Academy (IREA), Co-Chair of the Sustainable Energy Initiative (SEI), and founding member of Project Climate Change/Climate Solutions Park, Professor Jose Etcheverry is focused on developing practical solutions to climate change through collaborative efforts with various partners and stakeholders. He is part of York University’s Board of Governors and the Senate Executive where he is working with colleagues towards achieving

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Impact of landscape disturbances and climate change on lakes in the Canadian Arctic

Professor Josh Thienpont’s research and teaching are focused on the connection between physical and ecological processes. His research is primarily focused on the impacts of landscape disturbances and climate change on lakes in the western Canadian Arctic region. Ecosystem changes often occur prior to the onset of environmental monitoring, and so Thienpont uses lake sediments

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Climate, conflict, and co-existence: Identifying the drivers of human-polar bear interaction in Southern Hudson Bay

Principal Investigator: Gregory Thiemann Funding: World Wildlife Fund Term: 2021 - to date The primary goal of this research is to reduce the risk of human-polar bear conflict. This will both reduce the risk of injury to people and reduce the number of polar bears killed in defense of life or property. Secondarily, the proposed

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Using paleolimnological methods to assess environmental change across Canada

The Canadian landscape has an abundance of lakes under pressure from multiple stressors. Lakes are sentinels of environmental change, as they archive changes occurring both within the lake, and in the surrounding terrestrial ecosystems within its watershed. Paleolimnology, that is, the study of lake sediment cores to reconstruct past climatic and environmental changes, helps us

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How the war in Ukraine will shape Canada’s energy policy — and climate change

by Mark Winfield Major wars are often watershed moments in history. Their outcomes define governance structures, politics and policy directions for decades, even centuries, to come. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine already seems certain to have these kinds of effects at the national, regional and global scales. The invasion has quickly come to dominate political and

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Research finds children and youth among the most vulnerable Canadians to climate change

We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children - Native American Proverb What factors contribute to the vulnerability of Canadian children and youth to climate change? How can education and other factors enhance and promote their adaptive capacity? To what extent is Canada’s education system enhancing students’ climate

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Seasons of change: Investigating the influence of time, seasonality, and climate change on mining-related arsenic toxicity to plankton communities in lakes from the Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada

The impacts of climate and land-use change have begun to degrade the natural resiliency of ecosystems, affecting even the most remote locations at both the local and global scale. Lakes, which serve as catchment sites for entire landscapes, have been particularly impacted and many have become highly concentrated with harmful contaminants due to a combination

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Polar bear diet may indicate prey distribution changes due to climate shifts

TORONTO, Oct. 27, 2021 – How are warming temperatures and a loss of sea ice affecting polar bears and their marine mammal prey in the Arctic? A York University-led research team used a novel approach to the question by monitoring what polar bears eat across Nunavut and where they are catching their prey. They found that

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Canada’s federal election made big strides for climate and the environment

By Prof Mark Winfield The outcome of the recent federal election — a Liberal minority dependent on the NDP or Bloc Québécois for support — has been widely seen as having a “Groundhog Day” aspect to it. It left the composition of Parliament very much as it was before, reinforcing questions about the necessity of the election

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