News

In May, we joined delegates from across the country at the University of Calgary for Together|Ensemble, Canada's leading conference on the Sustainable Development Goals. This year's theme “Mobilizing Local Action for Global Impact” kept the conversation returning to one question: how do we localize SDG action so that what happens in our communities adds up to lasting global change?

Our understanding of sustainability performance can change dramatically when we look more widely at the thresholds of our local sustainability systems. This approach using thresholds in sustainability measurement is known as context-based sustainability. We are very pleased to be partnering with Randy Sa’d to use a CBS approach in the Local Futures project.

We are thrilled to join this May in Calgary for the Together|Ensemble conference, Canada’s leading conference for collaborating and accelerating progress on the Sustainable Development Goals.

We are excited to be launching a new Community of Practice on Collective Impact and the Sustainable Development Goals. This community will be a space for Canadian changemakers to come together to share experiences and build skills towards creating a more collaborative Canada.

In an era defined by "post-normal times", where our traditional social, political, and economic structures are strained or no longer fit for purpose, cities are finding that standard approaches to planning are no longer enough. To bridge this gap, cities are experimenting in using future foresight techniques to transform the collective imagination of diverse stakeholders into concrete, transformative actions that navigate the complexities of an uncertain future.

This March and April, we will be travelling to each of our five Local Futures partner communities to run workshops with community stakeholders and municipal leadership. We are excited to ground our Local Futures work in conversations in communities across the country.

The Sustainable Development Goals are a collective impact framework. They embody a “whole of society approach” and explore how each of the issues represented by the 17 SDGs are closely interconnected with each other. The great opportunity of the SDGs is to help guide governments, businesses, academia, and community organizations towards creating aligned and mutually reinforcing actions that harness the depth and breadth of expertise to tackle global challenges.

We are pleased to partner with Dr. Pam Shaw, Research Director and Graham Sakaki, Regional Research Institute Manager at the Mount Arrowsmith Biosphere Region Research Institute at Vancouver Island University to bring the Local Futures project to life in the Mount Arrowsmith Biosphere Region.

We are pleased to be contributing to an exciting upcoming workshop called “Resilient Urban Futures” which invites academic, community, and municipal representatives from our five Local Futures communities to come together in March 2026 in Waterloo to strengthen long-term climate planning using future-foresight techniques and tools.

We are pleased to partner with Dr. Robert Patrick, Janelle Hutchinson, Stephanie Ortynsky, and Matt Wolsfeld from the University of Saskatchewan to bring the Local Futures project to life in the City of Yorkton, Saskatchewan.