A Uniquely Canadian Dimension To Climate Change

Canada’s Top Climate Change Risks identifies the top risk areas based on the extent and likelihood of the potential damage, and rates the risk areas according to society’s ability to adapt and reduce negative outcomes. These 12 major areas of risk are: agriculture and food, coastal communities, ecosystems, fisheries, forestry, geopolitical dynamics, governance and capacity, human health and wellness, Indigenous ways of life, northern communities, physical infrastructure, and water. The report describes an approach to inform federal risk prioritization and adaptation responses. The Panel outlines a multi-layered method of prioritizing adaptation measures based on an understanding of the risk, adaptation potential, and federal roles and responsibilities.

“This is the roadmap out of climate crisis that Canadians have been waiting for.” — Naomi Klein, activist and New York Times bestselling author of This Changes Everything and The Shock Doctrine • One of Canada’s top policy analysts provides the first full-scale blueprint for meeting our climate change commitments • Contains the results of a national poll on Canadians’ attitudes to the climate crisis • Shows that radical transformative climate action can be done, while producing jobs and reducing inequality as we retool how we live and work. • Deeply researched and targeted specifically to Canada and Canadians while providing a model that other countries could follow Canada needs to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 50% to prevent a catastrophic 1.5 degree increase in the earth’s average temperature — assumed by many scientists to be a critical “danger line” for the planet and human life as we know it. It’s 2020, and Canada is not on track to meet our targets. To do so, we’ll need radical systemic change to how we live and work—and fast. How can we ever achieve this? Top policy analyst and author Seth Klein reveals we can do it now because we’ve done it before. During the Second World War, Canadian citizens and government remade the economy by retooling factories, transforming their workforce, and making the war effort a common cause for all Canadians to contribute to. Klein demonstrates how wartime thinking and community efforts can be repurposed today for Canada’s own Green New Deal. He shares how we can create jobs and reduce inequality while tackling our climate obligations for a climate neutral—or even climate zero—future. From enlisting broad public support for new economic models, to job creation through investment in green infrastructure, Klein shows us a bold, practical policy plan for Canada’s sustainable future. More than this: A Good War offers a remarkably hopeful message for how we can meet the defining challenge of our lives. COVID-19 has brought a previously unthinkable pace of change to the world—one which demonstrates our ability to adapt rapidly when we’re at risk. Many recent changes are what Klein proposes in these very pages. The world can, actually, turn on a dime if necessary. This is the blueprint for how to do it.

An accessible and empirically rich introduction to Canada’s engagements in the world since confederation, this book charts a unique path by locating Canada’s colonial foundations at the heart of the analysis. Canada in the World begins by arguing that the colonial relations with Indigenous peoples represent the first example of foreign policy, and demonstrates how these relations became a foundational and existential element of the new state. Colonialism—the project to establish settler capitalism in North America and the ideological assumption that Europeans were more advanced and thus deserved to conquer the Indigenous people—says Shipley, lives at the very heart of Canada. Through a close examination of Canadian foreign policy, from crushing an Indigenous rebellion in El Salvador, “peacekeeping” missions in the Congo and Somalia, and Cold War interventions in Vietnam and Indonesia, to Canadian participation in the War on Terror, Canada in the World finds that this colonial heart has dictated Canada’s actions in the world since the beginning. Highlighting the continuities across more than 150 years of history, Shipley demonstrates that Canadian policy and behaviour in the world is deep-rooted, and argues that changing this requires rethinking the fundamental nature of Canada itself.

Discusses current and future risks and opportunities that climate change presents to Canada, with a focus on human and managed systems. Based on analysis of existing knowledge.

Cover -- Series Page -- Full Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- Introduction -- 1: Navigating Northern Environmental History -- Part 1: Forming Northern Colonial Environments -- 2: Moving through the Margins:The "All-Canadian" Route tothe Klondike and the StrangeExperience of the Teslin Trail -- 3: The Experimental State of Nature: Science and the Canadian Reindeer Project in the Interwar North -- 4: Shaped by the Land: An Envirotechnical History of a Canadian Bush Plane -- 5: Many Tiny Traces: Antimodernism and Northern Exploration Between the Wars -- Part 2: Transformations and the Modern North -- 6: From Subsistence to Nutrition: The Canadian State's Involvement in Food and Diet in the North,1900-1970 -- 7: Hope in the Barrenlands: Northern Development and Sustainability's Canadian History -- 8: Western Electric Turns North: Technicians and the Transformation of the Cold War Arctic -- Part 3: Environmental History and the Contemporary North -- 9: "That's the Place Where I Was Born": History, Narrative Ecology, and Politics in Canada's North -- 10: Imposing Territoriality: First Nation Land Claims and the Transformation of Human-Environment Relations in the Yukon -- 11: Ghost Towns and Zombie Mines: The Historical Dimensions of Mine Abandonment, Reclamation, and Redevelopment in the Canadian North -- 12: Toxic Surprises: Contaminants and Knowledgein the Northern Environment -- 13: Climate Anti-Politics: Scale, Locality, and Arctic Climate Change -- Conclusion -- 14: Encounters in Northern Environmental History -- Contributors -- Index