McMaster students look to solve Hamilton’s climate crisis with new podcast

The summer of 2021 will be remembered as a time weather interrupted Canadians' sense of normalcy.

There were the deadly heatwaves across Western Canada, the hundreds of wildfires in rural Saskatchewan, the unprecedented floods in the Yukon and the extreme droughts in Manitoba.

All came within a three-week stretch, one after the other, like dominoes.

And while Hamilton hasn't been subject to the same extreme weather events in recent months, we ought not to rest on our laurels, says a group of climate activists from McMaster University.

We shouldn't be just waiting for (the climate crisis) to explode on us, like we did the pandemic," said Ananya Yadav.

Yadav is one four Mac students behind an innovative new podcast series that looks at finding practical, sustainable solutions to the climate crisis in Hamilton.

The series - dubbed Resilient Cities" and part of CityLAB Hamilton's CityCAST podcast - spans 13 episodes and hosts a wide range of guests, including local environment experts, neighbourhood association leaders and climatologists.

Yadav said it's meant to serve as an educational forum and a call to act against a crisis that has only shown signs of worsening.

Indeed, shades of climate change are already present in Hamilton.

The city again had the highest-per-person carbon emissions in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area - 10.9 megatonnes - in the latest study of 2018 data for The Atmospheric Fund, a rate largely attributable to industrial pollution.

There are also no safe beaches in Hamilton Harbour - Pier 4 shuttered this week, Bayfront Beach is permanently closed - due to the discovery of toxic blue-green algae. The cyanobacteria, which can produce toxins harmful to people and pets, thrive off warmer water and more storms.

Without a concrete, long-term plan to mitigate these issues, they will only continue to plague the city's environment, said Yadav.

Because climate change is a slow burn, you don't necessarily feel it right now in Hamilton as you might other places," she said. But we need to take action because we will be facing it very soon."

Yadav said the podcast was a side project the group undertook during their semester in residence at CityLAB, a program offered each fall that connects post-secondary students with city staff.

That experience culminated in a 95-page report that included six-dozen recommendations to guide Hamilton's sustainable growth in areas like transportation, water management, infrastructure and land use.

It was modelled after the best practices of four Canadian and four international cities renowned for their progressive climate actions.

Create a Hamilton Superblock" in Jackson Square, reads one recommendation - a land use project inspired by work in Barcelona that restricts non-essential traffic on inner streets. Test the viability of biofuel buses, like piloted in Stockholm, by using waste from water treatment plants, reads another. Deploy hydrothermal district cooling - cold lake water used to supplement air conditioners - as done in Copenhagen. Or replace parking lots with parks and ponds, creating a reservoir during heavy rain events, like Calgary's Braeside dry pond.

Hamilton has set a lofty goal to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

But doing that, Yadav said, requires innovative solutions reflected in city budgets, consultations with community leaders and reasoned actions that commit to sustainability in the long term.

A lot of people in Hamilton might think, Oh, climate change doesn't affect me. The summers are just getting a bit hotter, that's all,'" she said. But it's not a question of it impacting you now - it definitely will. The point of it is to stop it in its tracks before it happens."

Sebastian Bron is a Hamilton-based reporter at The Spectator. Reach him via email: sbron@thespec.com