In response to the threat of climate change, the province of British Columbia introduced innovative legislation and policy in 2009 that went far beyond those of other North American jurisdictions. To explore municipal approaches and innovative local responses, the MC3 research team identified 11 leading climate innovators in the province as case studies during the first phase of the project (2011-2013). During the second phase (2014-2017), we re-interviewed a sub-sample from our initial case studies to explore how and in what ways their current development paths had changed and their actual GHG reductions.
The MC3 team captured leading edge innovations and lessons learned at the local level through a series of eleven case studies focused on BC communities during the first phase of our research. The primary criteria for selecting the cases centred on communities demonstrating the following:
1. Leadership on adaptation, mitigation, integrated adaptation/mitigation approaches, and sustainability. We chose examples of particularly innovative action that has either transformed emissions pathways and/or vulnerability or holds significant promise to do so in the future.
2. Evidence of multi-stakeholder involvement and social learning. The scale of the cases were not limited to municipal governments, thus opening up the possibility of studying compelling action in neighbourhoods, regions and other scales. We chose cases where action at one scale has been taken up by, or is of direct relevance to, other scales.
The MC3 project was committed to mobilizing knowledge and stimulating discussion around climate change issues and best practices. To this end, the team held virtual, real-time online e-dialogues using the Changing the Conversation platform. They brought together over 100 researchers, practitioners, government, community leaders and the broader public to discuss climate action within Canada and how best to engage in adaptation and mitigation.Two e-Dialogue series, listed below, have been completed through the MC3 project. To access and explore the e-Dialogues within a series, click on the series respective link or image.
During the two phases of the MC3 research project, the team brought together a diversity of climate leaders and champions, selected from a cross-section of BC communities for 3 peer-to-peer learning exchanges. Participants exchanged, discussed and reflected upon innovative climate solutions being undertaken to meet the climate change challenge. Designed as peer forums to facilitate the exchange of knowledge, these events facilitated discussion and exploration on unique policy, technical, institutional and social climate innovations occurring in the province. They also created spaces for exchanging effective tools for climate action and facilitated the sharing of lessons among innovators, researchers and practitioners.The knowledge gathered during these events have informed our presentations, publications and also the development of an assessment framework tool. It contains 34 action areas organized into 6 categories and plots climate-related actions undertaken at any given moment by a local government (LG) as either incremental, transitional or transformative.
This captures the insights of participants from our 2013 peer-to-peer learning exchange that brought together over 40 climate leaders and champions from across British Columbia.
Visual analytics can be a powerful tool for sharing research outcomes and ideas with diverse audiences, with knowledge mobilization being one of the main objectives of MC3. They illustrate qualitative and quantitative information in graphics and figures that communicate complex patterns, relationships and contexts between scientific concepts and theoretical frameworks. Adding a spatial dimension to the presentation of data enables a richer understanding of concepts, ideas and theories by engaging our visual pattern recognition and spatial reasoning abilities (Risch, Kao, Poteet & Wu 2008). In addition, visuals reduce the complex cognitive requirements for processing information and enhance our ability for synthesizing data and gaining insights on its meaning and / or implications (Keim, Mansmann, Schneidewind, Thomas, & Ziegler, 2008).
A picture of electrical use in Canada
This interactive visualization was developed through the Community Research Connections (CRC) program and Meeting the Climate Change Challenge (MC3) project, and it explores Canada’s electrical energy production and consumption over the last 50 years. We invite you to enter this visualization and explore the last half-century of Canadian electrical energy use, looking at where our electricity has come from, how much we have produced, and what our levels of usage have been.
Emerging MC3 Data (Phase 2)
This visualization depicts the top topics between the first phase of MC3: Meeting the Climate Change Challenge case study interviews and the second phase, when we re-interviewed a sub-sample from the original interviewees. We used the ‘text mining’ methodology to analyze our data.
Top Richness Across Both Phases
This visualization represents topic richness across both phases of the MC3 research. Topic richness measures the diversity of topics in each phase; the more topics that are discussed, the richer that phase is. This visualization has filtered the data so as to show only the top 0.5% of topics in each phase.
Umbrella Topics
When we talk about sustainability and climate change, what other terms come into the conversation? Using the interview data from both phases of the MC3 research project, this visualization shows the topics that are most closely connected to three 'umbrella' terms: sustainability, adaptation, and mitigation. A connection between two topics is here determined by sharing a context of ten words. The more connections there are throughout the entire corpus of interviews, the more closely these topics are connected. For example, 'sustainability' and 'policy' were spoken about in the same context 81 times throughout the interviews. This visualization includes only connections that occurred more than ten times throughout the corpus. Highlighted topics mean that they show up under multiple umbrella topics.
