Strategies for advancing climate thinking and action

Shannon Miedema, Director of Environment & Climate Change, City of Halifax

Successfully addressing the climate crisis will require swift and significant action from everyone – in all sectors and places. This includes research and innovation, where new ideas can be grown, tested and, if they work, scaled. In Halifax, we are taking a collective impact and prototyping approach to climate action.

Through climate action challenges offered via the Halifax Innovation Outpost, there are small grants and coaching support available to people and organizations with good ideas for climate mitigation and adaptation as well as food security. We are also training staff to move from long planning processes and business-as-usual thinking to short, rapid cycles of creating and testing – to amplify our collective impact by implementing solutions that work and shifting away from approaches that aren’t effective.

While local governments are not in the business of research and development, we certainly support – and benefit from – this critical work. Halifax is a leading research hotspot for ocean science as well as battery storage, among others, with many players in our community working on difficult climate-related questions.

In collaboration with our economic development organization, the Halifax Partnership, we created a new, inclusive economic strategy. Called People. Planet. Prosperity, it looks a lot different than what came before – with a green economy stream and climate targets embedded in the five-year plan. It also envisions developing a CEO Charter for Climate Action with major employers and impactful organizations to help bring climate thinking and action in the business community into the mainstream.

Advertising feature produced by Randall Anthony Communications. The Globe’s editorial department was not involved.