Accelerating Climate Change Education for the Next Generation of Professionals (ACE)
The Waterloo Climate Institute has been awarded a grant from Natural Resources Canada’s Climate Change Adaptation Program to accelerate the integration of climate change adaptation (CCA) knowledge and skills into professional degree programs in Canada, specifically Engineering (Civil, Environmental and Systems Design), Accounting, Architecture and Planning.
Resilience to Climate Vulnerability and Environmental Risk (RECOVER)
Small Island Developing States (SIDS) are highly vulnerable to climate change, facing significant challenges highlighted in the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report. The RECOVER project addresses these challenges through “socio-metabolic risk” (SMR), a framework focused on the availability and circulation of critical resources such as energy, water, and materials, essential for societal wellbeing. SMR, akin to circulatory health issues in humans, limits an entity's ability to adapt and respond to disruptions.
Climate vulnerability assessment & experimentation with Southwestern Public Health
In 2023, Southwestern Public Health (SWPH) in partnership with the University of Waterloo’s Climate Institute, conducted an in-depth assessment of climate-related health risks and vulnerabilities for SWPH. A second phase of the partnership between SWPH and the Climate Institute focused on designing an experiment to operationalize and implement selected recommendations from the vulnerability assessment report. Specifically, to address extreme heat risks of selected vulnerable populations in the region.
Building Disaster Resilience across Canadian Business Supply Chains
The Building Disaster Resilience Across Canadian Business Supply Chains project aims to develop and test tools that help Canadian businesses invest in climate adaptation. The focus is on strengthening supply systems—not only at the company level, but also at critical points throughout the broader supply chain.
Can-Peat: Canada’s peatlands as nature-based solutions to climate change
The Can-Peat project will quantify the potential of peatland management in Canada to contribute to climate change mitigation as a nature-based solution.
Municipal Net-Zero Action Research Partnership (N-ZAP)
The main goal of this project is to support Canadian municipalities to monitor, measure and achieve their greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation goals. The aim is to ensure emissions reduction projects, policies and programs are aligned with Canada's national reduction commitments.
Residential development Impact Scorecard for the Environment (RISE)
The research will develop a simple, dynamic carbon and GHG scorecard that will complement existing green building standards by tracking the state and trajectory of residential developments. The scorecard’s potential to induce developer behavioral change by incentivizing green infrastructure investments through social norms and status-seeking behaviour will be tested.
Robust decision making using dynamic adaptive policy pathways for direct air capture deployment in Canada
This project will develop a decision-support framework for direct air capture (DAC) that acknowledges the scale of the enterprise, the immersive nature of the system with other systems, and the substantial amount of uncertainty surrounding its deployment. We use a dynamic adaptive policy pathways approach, a method developed to address decision making under deep uncertainty, to generate a set of policy actions and contingency plans to navigate the development and deployment of DAC in Canada.
Mitigation of methane emission hot-spots from municipal landfills
The project aims to improve methane emission monitoring at landfills by combining state-of-the-art soil measurements with a novel application of hyperspectral infrared imaging. The team will also develop methods to reduce emissions using methane-consuming microbes from landfill cover soils. This project targets the large, poorly quantified emissions from Canadian landfills and provides information, tools, and methods for practical solutions.
SOLUTIONSCAPES: designing climate and water smart agricultural solutions in complex working landscapes
This project will develop nature-based climate solutions that integrate across food-energy-water systems in complex working landscapes. Iterative consultation with stakeholders will guide the design of SOLUTIONSCAPES, portfolios of spatially explicit restoration scenarios, to achieve a net-zero future while also prioritizing water quality and other ecosystem service outcomes.
Quantifying benefits & risks of using hydrogen for sectoral integration in Cdn. municipalities towards net-zero emissions
The project aims to define a future system using hydrogen to complement current clean technologies and integrate different sectors in Canadian municipalities for the net-zero transition, and to quantify the associated economic and environmental benefits and risks