In the spotlight🔎
Ontario Climate RiskWorkshop
The 2024 Beatrice and Arthur Minden Symposium on the Environment focused on Climate Risk in Southern Ontario this year.
Bay Street Climate Report
A new report by the TCO casts a spotlight on the city’s financial sector and its outsized role in driving the global climate crisis.
Toronto Climate SummerSchool
The TCO invites faculty and undergraduate students to apply for an intensive,place-based, six-week full credit course.
Publications and awards 📖🏆
Bay Street Climate Report
Tololupe Oshinowo, Allegra Nesbitt-Jerman, and Robert Soden
According to a new report from the Toronto Climate Observatory, eighteen Toronto banks, pensions and asset managers are responsible for financing emissions that are almost 2x Canada’s emissions, and nearly 100x City of Toronto’s emissions. Toronto’s top financial institutions financed over$1.43 trillion CAD ($1.1 trillion USD)in fossil fuel companies in 2022, contributing to at least 1.44 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions—nearly twice the total emissions of Canada, and nearly 100 times the total emissions of City of Toronto.
27th ACM SIGCHI Conference on Computer-Supported CooperativeWork & Social Computing (CSCW)
Impactful research from the TCO was featured at the 27th ACM SIGCHIConference on Computer-SupportedCooperative Work & Social Computing(CSCW) – the premier venue for research in the design and use of technologies that affect groups, organizations, communities, and networks. The TCO faculty, students, and collaborators presented 5 papers and a workshop at CSCW on their research.
Value Tensions in OpenStreetMap: Openness, Membership, and Policy in Online Communities →
Honorable Mention for Best Paper at CSCW 2024
The social life and long-term trajectories of online peer production communities are shaped and animated in part by value tensions that arise when distributed, heterogeneous participants are brought together into collaboration. This study of OpenStreetMap (OSM) draws upon values-based approaches to investigate how peer production communities enact their values and navigate tensions between them.
Autonomy, Affect, and Reframing: Unpacking the Data Practices Grassroots Climate Justice Activists →
Honorable Mention for Best Paper at ACM Designing Interactive Systems (DIS’24)
What happens when grassroots climate justice activists effectively leverage data? This paper explores this question and examines the ways in which grassroots groups engage with data and reshape its role in their advocacy. The study reveals how activists assert autonomy over data practices, leverage emotional connections to drive their cause, and challenge conventional notions of what constitutes valid climate data and expertise, contributing significantly to the field of HCI and offering critical insights into how data can be reframed to support social justice movements.
Moving towards Mobility Justice: Challenges and Considerations for Supporting Advocacy →
Published in the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
In response to climate change and continued urbanization, urban transportation systems around the world are undergoing transitions to promote lower-emission vehicles, public transit, biking and walking. However, mobility is a complex issue that raises important questions of social justice as a result of its connections to numerous aspects of everyday life and the broader social and political contexts. Drawing on interviews with transportation advocates across Canada, the paper identifies four ways in which the design and use of existing mobility tools and technologies perpetuate mobility injustices, and deepen the divide between urban planners and the public.
Calls for applications and collaborators 👥
Toronto Climate Summer School
The TCO invites faculty and undergraduate students across departments and units to apply for the 2025 Toronto Climate Summer School, an intensive, place-based course(ENV465Y1). The TCSS is a six-week full credit undergraduate course offered at the University of Toronto School of the Environment. We developed this course to fulfill a timely and unmet need for intensive pedagogy that foregrounds interdisciplinarity, applied impact, and climate justice. Applications close11:59 pm ET on February 14, 2025.
Toronto Water Atlas: Call for Collaborators
We’re excited to invite collaborators to the Toronto Water Atlas, an imaginative and collaborative exploration of Toronto’s waterways. This atlas seeks to shift the conversation from managing water to living with water- considering it as a shaper of ecosystems, cultures, and communities. It is an imaginative, interactive, and collaborative project that re-envisions the role of water in shaping the present and future of the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area(GTHA), and the GTHA’s relationship with its rivers, creeks, and waterways. This project is an invitation to critique, speculate, and create. Register your interest by December 15, 2024.
Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies (COMPASS) →
To be hosted at the University of Toronto, 22 – 25 July 2025
For this year’s COMPASS conference, co-organized by TCO, we invite interdisciplinary research on sustainability with a focus on how computing and moves toward sustainability are embedded in and shaped by specific local contexts. The theme is: computing in place. Rooted in the broader discourse of sustainability but also open to questioning its prevailing narratives, COMPASS welcomes work that critically examines how technology intersects with social, environmental, and economic systems. This year’s theme encourages a deeper, situated perspective on how technological practices emerge as solutions, but also contributors to the complexities they claim to address.
Applications for papers are due on January 17, 2025.
Call for papers: Special Issue of the International Journal of DisasterRisk Reduction →
Theme – Redefining Disaster Risk: Equity-Centered Approaches to Risk Assessment
Decades of disaster research have consistently emphasized how natural hazards disproportionately affect marginalized groups. Traditional disaster risk modelling frameworks overlook these disparities, hindering the development of more equitable disaster risk reduction strategies. This special issue, co-edited by the TCO, aims to redefine disaster risk assessment by bringing together studies that explicitly prioritise procedural, recognitional, and/or distributive equity in their risk assessment approaches. Such studies could include new approaches or information that capture disparate impacts, recognize local needs and histories, or include marginalized groups in decision-making.
The deadline for manuscript submission is August 31, 2025.
Conferences and events 🎤
2024 Beatrice and Arthur Minden Symposium on the Environment |Ontario Climate Risk Workshop
The University of Toronto in collaboration with the University of Waterloo hosted the 2024 Beatrice and Arthur Minden Symposium on the Environment on October 30 and 31. This year, the Symposium was delivered as a workshop focusing on Climate Risk in Southern Ontario. We brought together participants from academia, public and private sectors, non-governmental organizations, Indigenous leaders, elected officials, and representatives of the general public to share knowledge, discuss existing initiatives, and co-create a research agenda for addressing climate risk in the province.
AGU 2024 | Elevating Equity: Shifting Climate and Disaster RiskAssessment for a Just Future →
TCO members, along with representatives from several other universities, organized a session at AGU 2024 on equity in climate and disaster risk modelling on December 10, 2024. Countless events have shown that natural hazards and disasters disproportionately impact marginalized groups, yet traditional disaster risk modelling frameworks do not account for these disparities. This can lead to interventions that are poorly targeted or, worse, deepen existing inequalities. This session discussed needs and recommendations for developing risk information that prioritizes procedural, recognitional, and distributive justice identified by a diverse community of practice on equity and risk assessment.
Workshop on visualization for climate action and sustainability→
Faculty from TCO and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto co-organized the first workshop on visualization for climate action and sustainability. The workshop worked to explore and consolidate the role of data visualization in accelerating action towards addressing the current environmental crisis. The workshop invited submissions and discussions around these topics with the goal of establishing a visible and actionable link between these fields and their respective stakeholders. After presentations of submissions, the workshop featured dedicated discussion groups around data-driven interactive experiences for the public and tools for personal and professional decision-making.
TCO in The Media📣
If Bay Street were a country, it’d be the fifth biggest climate polluter in the world | Canada’s National Observer
Art by Ata Ojani/Canada’s National Observer
Canada’s National Observer covered the Bay Street Climate Report’s findings in its Special Report: Financing Disaster on October 8, 2024.
Review: Computing the Climate offers an accessible avenue to learning about the climate crisis | The Varsity
Students from the TCO reviewed Director of the School of the Environment SteveEasterbrook’s book, Computing the Climate, published in the student newspaper TheVarsity on October 20, 2024.
About the TCO
The Toronto Climate Observatory (TCO) is an emerging interdisciplinary initiative hosted at the University of Toronto.
Our mission is to reimagine how communities around the Greater Toronto Area understand and adapt to the impacts of climate change, and support place-based, plural, and just climate action.
Through partnerships with scholars, government, and civil society, we’re developing the next generation of climate informatics. Our work is inspired by climate modelling, human-centred design, Science and Technology Studies, Indigenous scholarship, oral history, citizen science, and art/science collaboration. While we focus on the Toronto
area, our research spans many geographies, bringing valuable lessons home. We are a vibrant and expanding community of researchers from diverse backgrounds and career stages. We’re eager to expand our partnerships with other climate change scholars, governments, community organizations, artists, and academic researchers in the GTA.
