News and Resources

Here you’ll find articles, resources and other materials related to climate change, income security and their connections to community resilience. We’ll also post relevant updates about the project and its community partners.

Explainer: What is community resilience?

Community resilience is a community’s ability to meet, respond to and recover from complex challenges like the ones brought on by climate change and income insecurity. When we talk about building resilience, we’re talking about ensuring communities have the tools they need to respond to the impacts of things like severe weather, global pandemics or the wide-ranging impacts of a low-carbon transition. So, in conditions like ours, how can communities build or maintain resilience?

You are not alone: coping with climate anxiety

Learning about the scale and urgency of climate change, or the work that lies ahead of us to seriously manage the climate crisis, can be overwhelming. It’s easy for this fear to keep us from taking action—but it doesn’t have to.

Resource roundup: climate, income, resilience and more

One of the Green Resilience Project’s goals is to share news, information and resources related to the ideas explored in our community conversations: climate change, income security, community resilience and the transition to a low-carbon economy. With that in mind, we’ve pulled together a (non-exhaustive) list of resources for anyone looking to learn more about these topics, their Canadian contexts and the links between them.

Explainer: What is a basic income?

Basic income has a long history in Canada. From a basic income pilot that took place in rural Manitoba in the 1970s to a recent and prematurely cancelled pilot that took place in Ontario in 2017-18, basic income has grown from a trendy economic idea to one that is currently being discussed and debated at the highest levels of government. So what is it?

What is greenwashing? How terms like “net zero” and “carbon neutral” are used to justify continued fossil fuel use

When we use terms like net zero and carbon neutral, it’s important to understand how they and other climate buzzwords are repurposed and reinterpreted by a wide range of actors – from governments to corporations – who want to appear as though they’re doing more to respond to climate change than they really are. This practice is sometimes referred to as greenwashing, i.e. when a company claims to care about climate change or environmental practices without meaningfully supporting those claims.

Explainer: what is a net-zero transition?

Many countries are responding to climate change by setting net-zero emissions targets, meaning that by a set date they will either produce zero greenhouse gas emissions or offset the impact of their emissions through activities that remove greenhouse gases from the air (eg. through tree planting or carbon capture and storage technologies). What will net-zero look like, and how will we get there?