Coincidentally, the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 26), considered by many to be the last chance meeting, takes place the same week as the Quebec municipal elections. If current policies were to be maintained, projections point to an overall increase in temperatures of around 2.7 to 3.1 ° C by 2100. Such a scenario risks triggering a chain reaction in the regions. natural systems, whose dramatic consequences would become highly unpredictable. In this regard, municipalities and local communities are at the forefront, both in the fight against climate change and in the race against time to adapt to the consequences resulting from this crisis.
We must now reduce our GHG emissions and simultaneously increase the resilience of our built, ecological and social systems. These aspects are interrelated; thus, does renovating our building stock reduce the demand for electricity that we need to electrify transport and buildings? Rethinking land use and residential densities, can it reduce car use and protect agricultural land and ecosystems?
The urgency of the situation calls for exceptional measures. The usual development processes that engage the public, private and community sectors, individually or in concert, are too slow and sorely lacking in coherence.
In our academic context, the Institute on New Generation Cities was founded at Concordia University; which provides us with a framework allowing us to present the problems and to articulate answers outside the usual modes of university functioning. The Institute intends to facilitate collaboration between researchers and educators from the most diverse backgrounds in order to develop integrated and transdisciplinary approaches. At the heart of our approach is in particular the desire to collaborate, at all stages, with local communities and stakeholders, who are the primary “customers”, users or beneficiaries of the fruits of our efforts. This innovative approach aims for greater efficiency and speed of action to develop and deploy knowledge, technologies and practices that respond to the climate emergency with a concern for inter and intragenerational equity and social inclusion.
The nature of the problems and the urgency of tackling them collectively call for such transversal and concerted approaches. Even the best technologies or public policies, on paper, can be useless if they do not reach their intended recipients. It is useless, for example, to build carbon-neutral homes at great expense if their inhabitants depend on cars for their journeys, or to deploy public transport networks without countering urban sprawl. We must aim to maximize the “return on our investments” public, private and community based on environmental, social and economic and cultural criteria.
Collective mobilization is only possible if a principle of equity prevails with regard to the efforts to be made and the anticipated positive results. Quebec has a long tradition of collective mobilization and consultation at the local, regional and national levels. This practice is deployed from neighborhood consultation tables and sectoral tables, to the conduct of general states.
We call on future municipal officials to exercise their leadership as soon as the elections are over and to use this model that they know well in order to mobilize their community for the fight and adaptation to climate change. In general, municipalities are already well aware of the environmental impacts associated with their development practices and the way of life of their populations, as well as the threats hanging over them, on ecosystems and on infrastructure. But here as elsewhere, we are moving forward in dispersed order and much too slowly. We therefore encourage municipalities and local communities to establish local tables to fight against climate change in order to define local issues and unite the efforts of citizens and organizations of good will to define priorities and an action plan. Governments should facilitate these exercises by devoting substantial resources to them and by promoting the dissemination and transfer of knowledge and know-how with educational and research institutions.
We look forward to sharing our expertise and mobilizing our students in the context of research and teaching activities to do civic work. We strongly encourage local communities to turn to the resources available in the CEGEP and university networks. We are confident that our peers and their students share our will to act.
* Text co-signed with Carmela Cucuzzella, Pierre Gauthier, Govind Gopakumar, Me-ghan Joy, Janis Timm-Bottos, Chun Wang and Erkan Yonder, researchers at the Institute on New Generation Cities at Concordia University