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Browsing MES Major Papers by Subject "Adaptive capacity"
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Item Open Access Bolstering Ontario Land-Use Planners’ Adaptive Capacity for Resilient Climate Change Adaptation through Education(2020) Osei-Akoto Brown, Veronica-Keren; Winfield, MarkFor many land-use planners across the province of Ontario, the region that my research examines, the issue has been raised that the adaptive capacity required to effectively and efficiently implement the climate change adaptation strategies and policies that they have been mandated to employ is lacking. Even though the tools and resources are there in abundance, the ability to implement such strategies and policies has been recognized to depend on land-use planners’ understanding of the climate issue at hand and the number of accessible human and technological resources . This is the central argument of this paper. As such, I use this research opportunity to explore how to bolster the adaptive capacity of Ontario’s land-use planner in these ways for a better response to the challenge that climate warming poses. I begin with a brief history of the climate change regime, along with a brief explanation of the climate science behind the warming. I then proceed to discuss the role land-use planning plays in contributing to climate warming, how it can redirect its efforts to reduce our carbon footprint, the challenges land-use planners face when tasked to implement adaptation strategies and how it can be solved through the bolstering of their adaptive capacity using the resilience framework. This is followed by a discussion on the work that the province of Ontario is doing through the BRACE Project to help bolster the adaptive capacity of the land-use planner. Through this research, my objective is to highlight the gap that currently exists in our adaptation efforts where those we depend on to implement these climate change adaptation strategies are lacking in their ability to carry out the work due to their lack of climate change adaptive capacity and how to bolster this through a resilience framework that presents us with a solution – education.Item Open Access Young Canadians and Climate Change: Vulnerability, Adaptive Capacity, Education, and Agency(2021-08) Walker, Patricia; Perkins, PatriciaCanada’s climate is warming at twice the global rate and its population is already experiencing several adverse effects of climate change. Canadian children and youth are among the most vulnerable to climatic changes due to physiological and developmental factors, yet their vulnerability, adaptation, and adaptive capacity are largely undocumented in the climate change literature. Several factors, including health, socioeconomic, and sociocultural factors, contribute to the vulnerability of Canadian children and youth to climate change. Although health factors of vulnerability and the health impacts of climate change on these groups have been documented in the published and grey literatures to a certain extent, information on the socioeconomic and sociocultural factors contributing to their vulnerability remains scarce. As a signatory to the Paris Agreement and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, Canada has binding obligations to reduce its carbon emissions, plan and implement adaptation measures for its citizens, including children and youth, and to provide the latter with a healthy environment in which to grow up. Although children and youth have contributed very little to anthropogenic climate change and are not decision-makers in policy processes, they are disproportionately affected by the climate inaction of previous generations because their lives will be increasingly impacted. Furthermore, young people worldwide, including marginalized children and youth (e.g., those who live in poverty and/or are Indigenous, racialized, immigrants, disabled, etc.) were largely excluded from consideration as a group in global climate change mitigation and adaptation decision-making processes until their groundswell of activist leadership, beginning in 2018. Despite, or perhaps in response to this marginalization, young people across Canada are taking a stand against climate inaction and playing leadership roles in climate action activism in this country. Their perceptions, experiences, and contributions, however, remain noticeably and regrettably scarce in the published climate change literature. This paper discusses implications for education, research, and policy.