The Toronto Climate Observatory (TCO) is an interdisciplinary research initiative at the University of Toronto that brings together researchers, students, practitioners, and community partners to support just, plural, and place-based climate action in the Greater Toronto Area. Climate change is global, but its impacts are experienced locally and unjustly. In Toronto, they are shaped by the legacies of settler colonialism, extraction, and deindustrialization in the Great Lakes region. Thus our work on climate information frequently intersects with issues including housing affordability, food security, labour and migrant justice, and Indigenous rights. In the GTA, as with everywhere, it is the people and communities who have contributed the least to climate change who experience its effects most directly.
Toronto is awash in data about climate change, ranging from emissions dashboards, flood maps, heat alerts, risk models, and climate-risk disclosures. These tools are, by necessity, abstractions, and in creating this data we make choices about what to include and what to leave out – choices that tend to reproduce the worldviews and the priorities of those who make them. Our research has documented this: across our work in the GTA, we have identified climate projections that are not downscaled to the neighbourhoods where adaptation decisions are made, impact assessments that count only property damage and infrastructure losses, and climate projections that are never put into terms meaningful to the people who may benefit from it.
How we work
Our work draws on climate science, the social sciences, the humanities, and human-centred design. We conduct research with municipal staff and climate modellers, with residents, and above all with civil society organizations – environmental research and advocacy groups, disaster response organizations, and neighbourhood social service agencies – which hold much of the community trust and relationships on which climate response depends, particularly among communities most exposed to climate risk, and yet are rarely considered in the design or delivery of official climate information. We also build and study the data platforms through which the city’s climate information circulates. Current projects range from financed-emissions accounting and flood data equity to urban heat, hazard reconnaissance, and a collaborative water atlas. In each, we attend to the knowledge and practices of impacted communities, and we work with approaches such as technical analysis, oral history, citizen science, and collaborations with artists.
A significant part of our work is convening. Through the Toronto Climate Summer School, workshops, a data summit, and a growing network of partners, we seek to create the conditions under which students, city staff, community organizers, and artists can develop their own accounts of climate change in this city. Research on disasters has repeatedly found that communities with stronger social foundations recover faster and more equitably from climate shocks than those relying on physical and technical infrastructure alone, and in our experience the relationships and capacities built in the course of this work are often as important as the data it produces. Such work is slow, and its outcomes are rarely as straightforward as a single technical fix.
Though our work is grounded in the GTA, we draw lessons from, and occasionally work in other regions. We hope that what we learn here can be adapted by other cities across Canada and beyond. See Our Work for current projects and Connect for how to get involved.
Values
Equity & justice
We seek equitable responses and decision-making to the climate crisis to ensure basic human needs and rights for all and more just outcomes for those who are most impacted by climate change.
Place-based
We are committed to action and research that are grounded in place and informed by local and Indigenous knowledges, place-based problem solving and adaptation, and cultural relevance.
Action-oriented
Our goal is to help affected communities monitor and respond to the impacts of climate change, and we design our projects and evaluate our progress according to these metrics.
Accountability
We are accountable to each other and all those who work with us. We work towards developing purposeful and considerate research practices, and critically evaluate the benefits as well as the potential harms of our activities.
Partners
Some of the organizations across the GTA that we’ve partnered with:
Funders
Some of the organizations that have supported our work:
