Two successful proposals have been awarded $10,000 each as part of an SDSN Canada seed funding initiative to support member research to achieve the SDGs within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The main aims for the seed funding are to support members to secure larger funding streams from which to build their research, as well as to create opportunities for members to work together in pursuit of the SDGs.
The two successful proposals are:
Determining the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on water, food and energy security in Indigenous communities, and rapidly deploying renewables technologies in response.
Dr. XiaoYu Wu, Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering, University of Waterloo and Dr. Sami Khan, School of Sustainable Energy Engineering, Simon Fraser University.
In partnership with the Center for Sustainable Development at SFU (also an SDSN Canada Network Member), the proposed research will consist of three main research items:
- Reviewing COVID-19’s impacts on energy-water-food supply and consumption trends in remote Indigenous communities in Canada.
- Evaluating levers of opportunity for increasing energy-water-food sovereignty in response to the heightened urgency introduced by COVID-19, including enhancing existing energy-water-food delivery systems and identifying and recommending rapidly deployable technologies.
- Studying nascent clean energy technologies that have shown promise in pilot-scale adoption in small communities, such as electrochemical and thermochemical conversion of CO2 to liquid fuels, low-cost energy storage, and water harvesting and CO2 capture from the air.
The research will also include policy recommendations to redirect specific stimulus funding packages to make these technologies rapidly available, and evaluations on the ease-of-use and adaptability of each technology in Indigenous communities.
International Summer School in Societal Transformation
Mohamed Cheriet, Centre Interdisciplinaire De Recherche En Opérationnalisation Du Développement Durable (CIRODD), Étienne Berthold, Institut Hydro-Québec en environnement, développement et société, Université de Laval, Glyn Bissix, Department of Community Development, Environmental and Sustainability Studies Program, Acadia University, and Jason Ens, Academic Policy, Planning, and Strategic Initiatives, Office of the Provost, Concordia University.
The international summer school in societal transformation aims to increase local empowerment for achieving the SDGs through the training of 50-70 “change agents,” or sustainability leaders, every two years, and exploring scaling opportunities in Québec and Canada for enhanced impact.
The summer school aims to enhance local SDG appropriation through training in key competencies for sustainability (KCS) as well as adopting an experiential approach that integrates case studies of Montréal communities and municipalities through the lens of the SDGs. New pedagogical models and approaches recognized by UNESCO and well documented in the literature call for a KCS approach focusing on five core areas: systems thinking, anticipatory, normative, strategic and interpersonal competencies. The KCS approach focuses on the acquisition of integrated problem-solving skills by learning to better understand, anticipate and manage complexity and uncertainty, along with engaging in innovative co-creation and systemic change strategies.
To create conditions for participative and interactive learning, the summer school will experiment with a learner-centered and interdisciplinary pedagogical model with the objective to co-create solutions through collective intelligence. In this way, the summer school embarks on a living laboratory journey to test novel methods in teaching, learning and real-life problem solving to achieve the SDGs locally by tapping into the richness of the city and its institutions and actors.