Author name: Admin 2

The Draft Federal Sustainability Strategy 2026-2029 misses lynchpin of any credible sustainability strategy. From the Qualicum Institute’s comments on Canada’s Draft 2026-2029 Federal Sustainable Development Strategy (FSDS): “The overarching goal of the FSDS should clearly identify pathways to reduce Canada’s total material and energy throughput at the system level while maintaining or improving human well-being. This is the lynchpin of any credible sustainability process, and we find it currently missing.” Read the full submission including suggested solutions here. 

Earth enters era of “global water bankruptcy” According to a new flagship report released in January by UN researchers, the world is rapidly depleting its natural “water savings accounts”. More than half the world’s large lakes have declined since the early 1990’s, while around 35 per cent of natural wetlands have been lost since 1970, said Mr. Madani, Director of the UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health.  “This is not to kill hope but to encourage action and an honest admission of failure today to protect and enable tomorrow,” he told a press briefing in New York. The report calls for a transition from crisis response to bankruptcy management, grounded in honesty about the irreversibly of losses, protection of remaining water resources – and policies that match hydrological reality rather than past norms.  https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/01/1166800

Small Acts, Big Change If you’re interested in climate change and degrowth, this article “Small Acts, Big Change? Reconciling the Behavioural Science of Action and the Politics of Systemic Transformation” is a good short read about human behaviour and small environmental acts. (The Minority Report Publication, July 2025). From the article: “Their concern isn’t that small actions are wrong—but that they can be misused. In the policy world, incrementalism is often not a stepping stone to transformation, but a tool to delay it. Getting an electric vehicle, installing solar panels, or buying carbon offsets are framed as steps in the right direction. But in practice, they can create what systems thinkers call a sunk cost trap. Investments in marginal improvements often lock us into status quo systems, making it harder to imagine or enact real change. This is because these policy proposals focus on individual climate actions, locking us into systems that perpetuate business as usual.” “The way out of this trap is neither to abandon individual action nor to double down on personal purity. It is to reorient small acts so they contribute to large-scale transformation. In other words, we need to make individual action political again—not in the partisan sense, but in the collective sense.” For more thoughts also check out the Qualicum Institute’s sustain-a-babble page https://qualicuminstitute.ca/sustain-a-babble/.

Effect of expanding human population on environmental problems By synthesizing findings from hundreds of peer-reviewed studies, the article offers a comprehensive review of the effects of expanding human populations on the most pressing current environmental problems.  https://www.mdpi.com/2673-8392/5/2/45  

Climate change skeptics argue that “climate change has always existed”. That they have “done the research on the internet.” These broad statements contain a kernel of truth, but without details and scientific data to back up the claims, they are misleading. In his book “Rise and Reign of Mammals” (p. 212) Steve Brusate describes the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, 56 million years ago, when volcanic activity caused atmospheric CO2 to rise to between 650 and 3500 ppm. Average land temperature in the Arctic reached 25 degrees C. You know what the earth looked like then? Check out the map of the world as it would have been then – our heavily populated areas were all underwater! Of course, there were no humans around at that time and the changes happened over thousands of years, rather than a couple of hundred years, as happening since the industrial revolution. Click on the image for source of the map. Earth during the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum