Featured: Images from Beneath the Surface with Climate North (Credit: Varun)
Hey there, Climate North Crew! 🌿
This month, we dove deep beneath the surface of oceans, lakes, and the climate conversation surrounding water, at our event Beneath the Surface: Climate Clues from our Water Systems. We were thrilled for the event to be part of Toronto Tech Week, a citywide celebration of builders, doers, and dreamers shaping the future.
With bluebird skies overhead and Lake Ontario shimmering below, our speakers made waves as we learnt about their innovative research and entrepreneurial initiatives. It was the perfect setting to reconnect with the water systems that cover 71% of our beautiful planet, and to better understand the signals these systems are sending us. A big thanks to Humi for hosting us in their stunning lakefront space.
Together, we explored water through many lenses; off-grid recycling systems, the ways lakes reflect climate change, and the story of the endangered North Atlantic Right Whale. The speakers didn’t just spotlight the impact humans have but shared the interconnection between humans and water systems. Leaving us with a key reminder, we must be part of the solution.
From plastic pollution to the fishing industry, our negative impacts are quite undeniable but so is our ability to create positive ripples through sharing knowledge, community collaboration, and changing systems.
Ryan is the founder of EcoCycle Labs and a global leader in sustainability and social innovation with a focus on scalable solutions to combat ocean plastic pollution.
Ryan has over 17 years of nonprofit leadership and has developed and piloted off-grid recycling technologies in vulnerable coastal communities, aiming to advance circular economies and protect marine ecosystems. He is passionate about environmental justice and recognized with multiple global nominations, including the EarthShot Prize 3 years in a row.
Climate North’s Chloe D'Agostini had the pleasure of sitting down with Ryan for the latest edition of Climate North’s Voices.
Soren is the Allan and Helaine Shiff Curator of Climate Change at the Royal Ontario Museum, and is the Assistant Professor at the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto.
As a climate change curator, his work spans exhibition development, gallery work, public programming, and collections care, bridging natural cultural, and artistic lenses through which the climate crisis and its solutions can be understood and communicated.
Shiva is a Research Scientist with the Canadian Wildlife Federation (CWF), and a Sessional Faculty Member/Lecturer with the University of Toronto and Trent University.
For more than a decade, Shiva’s dedication to marine mammal science and conservation has led her to projects with NGOs in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Greece.
Shiva has helped lead projects aimed at assessing the risk of entanglement from fishing gear to large whales in the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.
🎤 KEY INSIGHTS: WHAT WE LEARNT
From Shoreline to Solution: A Decentralized Approach to Plastic Pollution
Core Idea:
Ryan’s work withEcoCycle Labsdemonstrates how grassroots, mobile, and off-grid recycling systems can address ocean plastic pollution right at its source, the shoreline. Local, repeatable, and sustainable solutions that are community driven are key to long term success.
Why It Matters:
As we learned at our Plastics Unwrapped event, plastic waste is a planetary crisis, but centralized recycling systems are falling short. Less than 10% of plastic is recycled globally, and water ecosystems are bearing the bill.
EcoCycle presents a blueprint for a solution that can engage the community, and make a positive difference on recycling plastics that were once seen as unusable.
Key Takeaways:
Recycling is both underfunded and under regulated; advocate for clear standards and accountability on recycling claims
Leverage your purchasing power, whether that’s skipping the reusable bags at the grocer (that are made from plastic) and bringing your own tote, or digging into potential greenwashing claims of companies using ‘ocean bound’ plastic in their products.
Tipping Points and Turning Tides: Moving from Impact to Interconnection
Core Idea:
Soren revealed how lakes are both highly sensitive indicators of climate change and active participants in global carbon cycles, offering water systems as a strong way to track climate change impacts on our ecosystems.
Why It Matters:
Lakes both influence and are influenced by climate, as they can act as carbon sinks, and changes in the climate can affect the lake’s chemistry and biology.
Creating space to support healthy water systems not only has positive environmental impacts such as increased biodiversity, but also can improve human health - doctors are even writing ‘green prescriptions’ for time spent in nature.
Key Takeaways:
Invest in long-term lake monitoring programs, such as research done at Crawford Lake, to detect climate feedback early.
Promote urban waterway restoration (like in Seoul or Toronto) as climate adaptation tools that also improve public health and biodiversity.
Sheila’s work researching the North Atlantic Right Whale highlights how climate driven changes in food systems are pushing species into new, riskier waters, requiring innovation and collaboration in how we manage oceans and industry.
Why It Matters:
The population of Right Whales has been declining and they are critically endangered, with only less than 70 breeding females left.
Tailing their food to new waters comes at navigating through fishing gear and ship traffic which is leading to entanglements (affecting 85% at least once) and collisions (the cause of 37% of confirmed deaths).
Key Takeaways:
Cross-sector partnerships between marine researchers, communities, businesses, and policy-makers are needed to support development and adoption of initiatives. Examples include, on-demand fishing gear to reduce whale entanglements, expanding real-time monitoring, risk maps to inform dynamic closures, speed modifications, and vessel routing.
Want to keep in the know on exciting events? Check out Climate North’s Luma Event Calender.
►Toronto Climate Week
If you want to be part of the first ever Toronto Climate Week 🌎💚, whether it’s hosting an event, speaking, sponsoring, or volunteering, please reach out via the following:
►Connecting Environmental Professionals (CEP) Living Landscapes: Community Restoration and Biodiversity in a Changing Ontario
Connecting Environmental Professionals (CEP) Toronto is hosting a panel discussion with experts on the intersection of biodiversity and community restoration efforts in Toronto and across Ontario. July 3rd at the Waterfront Neighbourhood Centre.
Register here! Use FRIENDSOFCEP for $5 off your ticket
►Humi
Humi is Canada’s leading all-in-one HR, payroll, benefits and SR&ED built for growing businesses. Designed to simplify people operations, Humi helps companies manage the entire employee lifecycle - from hiring and onboarding to performance tracking and payroll processing - all in one place.
Click here for an exclusive offer for the Climate North community!
YOUR TURN
Grow the Climate North Community!
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We’ve got exciting gatherings ahead, such as our social on July 26th and Climate & AI in September - stay tuned on our LinkedIn and Luma pages for more details.
