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Landslides are common across Canada and they pose hazards to human safety, economic activities, and the environment. Robust risk management strategies are necessary for sustainable development. A slope risk management framework has been adopted by the geotechnical community for approximately four decades allowing a systematic, consistent and transparent framework for managing risks. Implementing this framework is associated with uncertainties embedded in our estimates of risk. This paper presents a brief summary of the sources and categories of uncertainty in geotechnical slope engineering and focuses on two topics: (1) estimates of uncertainty in risk calculations and (2) temporal changes in landslide likelihood as a function of weather and steps towards estimating landslide risk changes with climate change. The paper argues that a quantitative risk assessment should not focus on the final risk calculation, but the overall knowledge gained. This allows comprehensive documentation of sources of uncertainty and how they impact geotechnical and risk assessments. Furthermore, the paper outlines approaches to define quantitative correlations between rock fall occurrences and weather, which can be leveraged to estimate changes in rock fall risk with climate change. The paper corresponds to, and expands on, the 2021 Canadian Geotechnical Colloquium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Indigenous populations in Canada and the United States (US) have maintained reciprocal relationships with nature, grounded in respect for and stewardship of the environment; however, disconnection from traditional food systems has generated a plethora of physical and mental health challenges for communities. Indigenous food sovereignty including control of lands were found to be factors contributing to these concerns. Therefore, our aim was to conduct a scoping review of the peer-reviewed literature to describe Indigenous disconnection from Indigenous food systems (IFS) in Canada and the US. Methods: Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-SR) and Joanna Briggs Institute guidelines, we searched MEDLINE, SCOPUS, International Bibliography of the Social Sciences, Sociological Abstracts, and Bibliography of Native North Americans. Data was extracted from 41 studies and a narrative review completed based on study themes. Results: The overarching theme identified in the included studies was the impact of colonization on IFS. Four sub-themes emerged as causes for Indigenous disconnection from traditional food systems, including: climate change; capitalism; legal change; and socio-cultural change. These sub-themes highlight the multiple ways in which colonization has impacted Indigenous food systems in Canada and the US and important areas for transformation. Conclusions: Efforts to reconnect Indigenous knowledge and values systems with future food systems are essential for planetary health and sustainable development. Traditional knowledge sharing must foreground authentic Indigenous inclusion within policymaking. Highlights: • The main theme identified amongst the SR literature was the lasting impacts of colonization on Indigenous food systems in Canada and the US, which is described through four key areas: climate change; capitalism; legal changes; and socio-cultural changes. • Less than 20% of included papers report author positionality, with only 7% of included papers reporting Indigenous authorship, emphasizing an opportunity for more reporting and Indigenous engagement in the future. • Loss of cultural knowledge and practices was highlighted by many articles reviewed. • Revitalisation of IFS must include authentic Indigenous engagement, support Indigenous knowledge frameworks, community sharing networks, education programs and co-management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we explore how the power wielded by regional incumbents has impacted subnational innovation agendas. Our findings suggest that the design of mission-oriented innovation policies should be more attentive to regional innovation policies and their relationship to how innovation may serve to bolster incumbents and not undermine them. We use a case-study of innovation in fossil fuels. Recently, innovation policy literature has explored innovation policy and global climate as a major topic. On the one hand, carbon lock-in has been used to explain why there has been such difficulty in reducing carbon emissions, in many cases, despite an increasing emphasis of mission-innovation policies. On the other hand, mission-innovation policies are believed to be a key to the development of disruptive innovations that could break this carbon intensive path dependency. Although the two literatures explore the same problem, there could be more integration. While carbon lock-in is being considered in the mission-innovation literature, it nevertheless has been largely overlooked at the mission-setting stage. On the other hand, the lock-in literature has tended to overlook the findings of mission-oriented innovation literature in offering solutions, which suggests that there is a more productive role for mission-oriented innovations in breaking free of previous constraints to serve in the low-carbon energy transition. To make our case, we argue it is important to distinguish among the various impacts disruptive innovations have on the market shares of incumbents'. We propose the following three schema: new market, market rewarding and market destroying. By variegating the potential impact of innovations, we suggest that mission-oriented innovation polices may be designed to only support certain types of innovations that do not directly undermine the market share of incumbents. Using a detailed case study of the Province of Alberta, Canada, we then explore the role of the province's mission-oriented policy in the development of technology to produce the Canadian oil sands. The case study illustrates how incumbents influenced the establishment and direction of the mission's goal. Shifts in incumbency opposition toward the province's mission-oriented innovation policy coincided with the changing impact of the innovation from being market destroying to market rewarding. We suggest that future research should be more attentive to the role of incumbents in influencing mission-oriented innovation policy and the importance of their influence at the mission-setting stage. Furthermore, we suggest that to meet the grand challenge of addressing climate change through mission-oriented innovation policies, these policies must be designed to break free of these institutional constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate changes are happening at an unprecedented rate, as identified in the 2021 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Environmental philanthropy, those acts of contributions toward the conservation and preservation of the environment, need to be better understood, as research suggests there is insufficient literature in this area. For Muslims living in Canada, the concept of charity, khalifa (a sacred entrustment whereby Muslims strive to support and preserve all of the Earth and what is in it), and worship take root and have developed within a context of immigration, identity formation, and broader Canadian contexts. The Muslim Canadian identity is informed by the social, political, economic, and historical elements of the Muslim Canadian experience. In turn, this informs the Muslim Canadian environmental philanthropy narrative. This paper explores the relationship between Islam, eco-consciousness, and its manifestations in environmental philanthropy in Canada and how this is informing the climate change crisis. Centered on the narratives of ten Muslim Canadians currently leading and involved with environmental philanthropy, the paper also offers insight on future considerations for environmental philanthropy within the Muslim Canadian context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of nuisance and negligence tort claims in the US against “Big Oil” companies have grown significantly in the last five years. The Netherlands case of Milieudefensie et al v Royal Dutch Shell represents the first major success of such a claim internationally. While the US cases and Milieudefensie demonstrate starkly different approaches as to how to seek accountability from Big Oil for climate change harms, the increasing judicial engagement on these issues may mean the time is right for similar lawsuits in Canada. Three Canadian common law causes of action are examined: nuisance, negligence, and unjust enrichment. Defences and arguments which stem from society’s (and any potential plaintiff’s) acquiescence and authorization to allow the defendants’ conduct may present difficult barriers to success. This paper focuses on these types of defences, and argues that the responsibility of Big Oil for climate change harms should not be completely vitiated even if governments and plaintiffs have acquiesced, authorized, and arguably contributed to our climate crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an outlook on the effects of climate change and the severity and frequency of extreme weather events on the performance of flexible pavements across North America. Now more than ever, the climate is changing at a rapid pace, which will alter long-term environmental loading parameters and extreme weather events. Such alterations will pose implications for the design, maintenance, and rehabilitation of flexible pavements, especially in terms of their serviceability, safety, and functionality. In northern Canada, roads are founded on various terrain types, including thaw-sensitive ice-rich permafrost underlying terrains. Such roads have experienced signs of embankment and pavement damage, which are usually induced by the degradation of the underlying permafrost due to climate change. Therefore, the development and implementation of new permafrost thaw mitigation techniques for vulnerable roads are essential and will be discussed in this paper. Resilient flexible roads should be designed to withstand the conditions that are likely to occur during their design life, taking into account the impact of the climate change on pavement performance in response to daily and seasonal changes in heat, precipitation, freeze–thaw cycles, and extreme weather events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present the results from a systematic literature review of subsistence research that was conducted in northern Canada between 1950 and 2019. Our analysis identified trends in subsistence research, including the breadth of research topics, influential scholars and scholarship, and the emergence of research networks. Our results identified 245 publications authored by a multidisciplinary network of 365 scholars. Research conducted through ArcticNet and the International Polar Year is responsible for 75% (n = 183 of 245) of all subsistence-related publications during this period. Subsistence publications cover a wide range of topics, including climate change, nutrition, and wildlife management, but Indigenous food culture and the roles of women in subsistence have received comparatively less scholarly attention. Given the profound changes occurring in northern Canada, whether a result of anthropogenic or non-anthropogenic disturbances, greater attention to the cultural and gendered dimensions of subsistence will be particularly valuable to northern scholarship and the public policies it can inform. This attention will be increasingly necessary in a time when critical thinking about the future of subsistence in northern Canada is of critical need. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fire activity in 288 areas (2.5° N × 10° E) in the Arctic region (50°–70° N, 0°–360° E) was analyzed using about 4.4 million satellite hotspot (HS) data from 2002 to 2021. A total of 21 high fire density areas from eastern Europe to western Canada were selected, and their fire–weather conditions during each active fire period were analyzed using about 1820 various weather maps at the upper and the lower air level. Analysis results showed that the active fires in the Arctic region occurred under the fire–weather conditions associated with the northward movement of cut-off high (COH) and warm air masses detached from the south caused by large westerly meandering (LWM). LWM is a sign of the beginning of an active fire period. Very active fires on HS peak days occurred several days after the start of the northward movement of COHs and under mainly high-pressure conditions in the upper air and strong wind conditions in the lower air. The time lag of these several days suggests that we may be prepared for very active fires. The fire–weather analysis approach described in this paper has shown that future large-scale fire outbreaks are predictable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Canada's climate is warming at a rate about double the global average, leading to potential negative impacts on public infrastructures such as jointed plain concrete pavement (JPCP). In light of this reality of changing climate, the work contained in this paper is aimed at evaluating JPCP's early-age behaviour in response to environmental conditions. HIPERPAV® software and the associated models developed by the U.S. Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) were used to identify cracking potential. A sensitivity analysis was performed to assess the effect of different levels of air temperature, mix temperature, base layer temperature, wind speed, and relative humidity. Additionally, projected extreme temperatures predicted by the Canadian Regional Climate Model (CanRCM) were used to determine the relative impact of climate change on cracking risk. The results demonstrated the increased cracking risk under changing climate in several Canadian cities by mid-century and highlighted the importance of developing a pathway forward for climate adaptation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Storm surges and waves are key climate-driven parameters affecting the design and operation of ports and other infrastructure on the coast. Reliable predictions of future storm surges and waves are not yet available for the west coast of Canada, and this data gap hinders effective climate risk assessment, planning and adaptation. This paper presents numerical simulations of storm surges and waves in British Columbia coastal waters under a future climate (Representative Concentration Pathway) scenario (RCP8.5). The numerical models were first forced by wind and surface pressure fields from the ERA-5 global reanalysis, and calibrated and validated using historical wave and water level records. The models were then driven by atmospheric data from four regional climate models (RCMs) to investigate potential changes in the frequency and magnitude of storm surges and extreme waves over the 21st century. The model outputs were analyzed to determine the potential impacts of climate change on storm surges and wave effects at key ports and transportation assets in western Canada. The study is the first of its kind to utilize unstructured, computational models to simulate storm surges and waves for the entire western Canada coastal region, while maintaining the high spatial resolution in coastal sub-basins needed to capture local dynamic responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through tests conducted at the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority's (TRCA) Archetype Sustainable Houses, a hybrid residential space heating system with a supervisory controller was monitored and studied to evaluate its performance and effectiveness for the heating season. A high efficiency natural gas furnace (NGF) and an electric air source heat pump (ASHP) were coupled together to meet the space heating demand of the house. This integrated system is called the cloud based Smart Dual Fuel Switching System (SDFSS) that considers time-of-use (TOU) pricing, fuel cost, short-term weather forecast, and equipment efficiencies and capacities. This multi-variable decision-making process defines an optimal schedule for the hybrid system to run more cost effectively. This paper analyses two separate SDFSSs. According to these analyses, the SDFSS systems showed lower operating cost with respect to the furnace or the ASHP system alone with various carbon tax (CT) levels from $0 to $250/tonne of CT with an increment of $10/tonne of CT that were simulated, along with a significant GHG emission reduction relative to the conventional heating systems. Furthermore, with these technologies, Canada's residential sector could potentially meet Canada's Paris Agreement goals. The SDFSS technology is a is flexible, user friendly, ubiquitous technology for the smooth transition from today's natural gas dominated space heating system to the future's low carbon infrastructure powered by a heat pump and renewable energy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]