Latest news with #RobertMcLeman
Yahoo
12-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Canada will no longer cover travel costs of experts it nominates to UN's climate science body
In a sudden and unexplained change from previous decades, the federal government has stopped covering the travel costs of Canadian experts volunteering for the next major global climate science assessment. The decision to end travel funding means that Canadian scientists are now wondering whether they can still participate in the United Nations climate science process, perhaps by using their own money or diverting grant funds that could be going toward research and students. "It's almost insulting to all of the Canadian scientists who have volunteered all those hundreds of hours each year of their personal lives," said Robert McLeman, a professor at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont., who was a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) during its last assessment. Canadian scientists who participate in the IPCC's reports don't get paid for their work, most of which they do remotely through emails and calls. But they do need to travel about four to five times to meet their scientific collaborators, who are other experts from around the world. The leadership of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change speaks during a press conference in Incheon, South Korea, in 2018. They were highlighting how preventing even a degree of warming could make a life-or-death difference for people in the next few decades. (Ahn Young-joon/The Associated Press) The government used to cover those travel costs — economy class airfare, food and hotel stays to cities as far away as Singapore or Osaka, Japan — but researchers are now left scrambling to find the money elsewhere. In a statement to CBC, Environment and Climate Change Canada said it is "not able to commit to providing long-term travel funding for academics to participate in IPCC meetings." Scientists left in the lurch Sarah Burch, a professor at the University of Waterloo who studies climate adaptation, urban planning and governance, is a lead author on the IPCC's upcoming report on climate change in cities. In this role, she's had one trip — to a meeting of fellow lead authors in Osaka — that was partially covered by the government. But she's been told no further meetings will be covered. Burch says she will have to tap into her Canada Research Chair funding for what she estimates will be four more trips. "Typically, I would spend that on hiring a graduate student to serve as a research assistant so I could send them to a conference or help them publish papers," Burch said. "So I have to redirect funds away from students … and towards this commitment to the IPCC." Deborah McGregor, a researcher on Indigenous environmental justice at York University in Toronto, is also a part of the upcoming IPCC report on cities, and says she will have to rely on funds through her Canada Excellence Research Chair position. She said that earlier in her career, when she was an assistant professor, she wouldn't have been able to find those funds. "That would be the case for some early-career researchers, or maybe researchers who are more in the social sciences or particularly the humanities. They don't have a lot of research funding to be able to go to four mandatory meetings in person," McGregor said. Former U.S. president George H.W. Bush addresses the U.N.-sponsored Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992. The first major global climate agreement was open for signing there, based on the first scientific assessment on climate change from the IPCC. (Daniel Garcia/AFP via Getty Images) That sentiment is echoed by Patricia Perkins, an ecological economist and professor at York University, who volunteered as a lead author in the previous IPCC assessment, which she said was the first time the agency included social scientists in a big way. She said that academics in the social sciences — such as anthropology, geography and economics — would have a harder time finding travel funding. "What that means is that there's a disciplinary imbalance in who has access to more money, because the bigger your grant, the more likely there could be little bits and dregs around the edges that you can reallocate for a trip that relates to your IPCC work," she said. In its statement to CBC, ECCC said that the government provided about $424,000 of travel funding to support Canadian IPCC authors in the last assessment cycle, which happened partly during the pandemic years and involved a little less travel as a result. The department said that if the usual amount of travel had occurred, estimated costs would be about $680,000 to support Canadian experts at the IPCC. Why is the IPCC important? The IPCC's assessment cycles, which happen about every five years, are considered the gold standard for the world's latest understanding of climate change — what's causing it, how it's affecting countries and people, and how to combat it. The IPCC's first assessment led to the first global treaty on climate change in 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Since then, the IPCC's influential reports have led to many major advances in global climate diplomacy. Most recently, its assessment of how climate change would cause unavoidable damages for developing countries led to a new multi-billion-dollar deal to compensate them. "They're published in all the official UN languages, which makes them a really important resource … in nations where they don't have the advanced research infrastructure that we have here in Canada," McLeman said. "IPCC reporting provides them with current information about climate change risks in their own language and is freely accessible." Activists participate in a demonstration for the loss and damage fund at the 2023 U.N. climate summit in Dubai. IPCC science has highlighted the damages that developing countries will face, leading to a compensation mechanism for them. (Peter Dejong/The Associated Press) But it's a difficult task and a huge personal undertaking for the hundreds of scientists who volunteer for each assessment. McLeman called it "having a second job that you're not being paid for." "You spend hundreds of hours a year doing this work," he said. "On top of my day job, I had to work long into the night, long after my wife and family were asleep, hunched over a laptop, reading through densely worded scientific articles one after another." Burch said that while the work is a huge commitment, the IPCC assessments have been "career-shaping" for her. She's been involved for 15 years, and said that government support for the travel made it possible for her to attend the meetings and build a career in climate research. "Canada is warming at twice the global average rate. We're seeing the effects of floods and fires and all sorts of extreme weather events here," she said. "We want Canadian experts to bring that place-based knowledge, that context and that rich experience into the IPCC."
CBC
12-04-2025
- Politics
- CBC
Canada will no longer cover travel costs of experts it nominates to UN's climate science body
In a sudden and unexplained change from previous decades, the federal government has stopped covering the travel costs of Canadian experts volunteering for the next major global climate science assessment. The decision to end travel funding means that Canadian scientists are now wondering whether they can still participate in the United Nations climate science process, perhaps by using their own money or diverting grant funds that could be going toward research and students. "It's almost insulting to all of the Canadian scientists who have volunteered all those hundreds of hours each year of their personal lives," said Robert McLeman, a professor at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont., who was a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) during its last assessment. Canadian scientists who participate in the IPCC's reports don't get paid for their work, most of which they do remotely through emails and calls. But they do need to travel about four to five times to meet their scientific collaborators, who are other experts from around the world. The government used to cover those travel costs — economy class airfare, food and hotel stays to cities as far away as Singapore or Osaka, Japan — but researchers are now left scrambling to find the money elsewhere. In a statement to CBC, Environment and Climate Change Canada said it is "not able to commit to providing long-term travel funding for academics to participate in IPCC meetings." Scientists left in the lurch Sarah Burch, a professor at the University of Waterloo who studies climate adaptation, urban planning and governance, is a lead author on the IPCC's upcoming report on climate change in cities. In this role, she's had one trip — to a meeting of fellow lead authors in Osaka — that was partially covered by the government. But she's been told no further meetings will be covered. Burch says she will have to tap into her Canada Research Chair funding for what she estimates will be four more trips. "Typically, I would spend that on hiring a graduate student to serve as a research assistant so I could send them to a conference or help them publish papers," Burch said. "So I have to redirect funds away from students … and towards this commitment to the IPCC." Deborah McGregor, a researcher on Indigenous environmental justice at York University in Toronto, is also a part of the upcoming IPCC report on cities, and says she will have to rely on funds through her Canada Excellence Research Chair position. She said that earlier in her career, when she was an assistant professor, she wouldn't have been able to find those funds. "That would be the case for some early-career researchers, or maybe researchers who are more in the social sciences or particularly the humanities. They don't have a lot of research funding to be able to go to four mandatory meetings in person," McGregor said. That sentiment is echoed by Patricia Perkins, an ecological economist and professor at York University, who volunteered as a lead author in the previous IPCC assessment, which she said was the first time the agency included social scientists in a big way. She said that academics in the social sciences — such as anthropology, geography and economics — would have a harder time finding travel funding. "What that means is that there's a disciplinary imbalance in who has access to more money, because the bigger your grant, the more likely there could be little bits and dregs around the edges that you can reallocate for a trip that relates to your IPCC work," she said. In its statement to CBC, ECCC said that the government provided about $424,000 of travel funding to support Canadian IPCC authors in the last assessment cycle, which happened partly during the pandemic years and involved a little less travel as a result. The department said that if the usual amount of travel had occurred, estimated costs would be about $680,000 to support Canadian experts at the IPCC. Why is the IPCC important? The IPCC's assessment cycles, which happen about every five years, are considered the gold standard for the world's latest understanding of climate change — what's causing it, how it's affecting countries and people, and how to combat it. The IPCC's first assessment led to the first global treaty on climate change in 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Since then, the IPCC's influential reports have led to many major advances in global climate diplomacy. Most recently, its assessment of how climate change would cause unavoidable damages for developing countries led to a new multi-billion-dollar deal to compensate them. "They're published in all the official UN languages, which makes them a really important resource … in nations where they don't have the advanced research infrastructure that we have here in Canada," McLeman said. "IPCC reporting provides them with current information about climate change risks in their own language and is freely accessible." But it's a difficult task and a huge personal undertaking for the hundreds of scientists who volunteer for each assessment. McLeman called it "having a second job that you're not being paid for." "You spend hundreds of hours a year doing this work," he said. "On top of my day job, I had to work long into the night, long after my wife and family were asleep, hunched over a laptop, reading through densely worded scientific articles one after another." Burch said that while the work is a huge commitment, the IPCC assessments have been "career-shaping" for her. She's been involved for 15 years, and said that government support for the travel made it possible for her to attend the meetings and build a career in climate research. "Canada is warming at twice the global average rate. We're seeing the effects of floods and fires and all sorts of extreme weather events here," she said.
CBC
21-02-2025
- Climate
- CBC
Backyard hockey rinks are a fixture of Canadian winters. Can they last with climate change?
Social Sharing Skates and hockey sticks on backyard rinks are the definitive sound of winter for many Canadians. But Robert McLeman, a professor of geography and environmental studies at Ontario's Wilfrid Laurier University, warns that climate change is having a serious effect on this traditional pastime. "In the old days when I was a kid, you just flooded straight onto the snow that was packed into the ground," McLeman said. "But the ground doesn't freeze as solid as it used to. If you get one of these little thaw events in the middle of January or February, all of your rink just drains away and you have to start from scratch." And while much of the focus is on the effects on polar bears and mountain glaciers, watching the effect climate change has on more familiar activities, such as family rinks, might spur more action from communities, he said. McLeman is the director of a website called which began in 2012, where people can pin the location of their backyard rinks on a map and help monitor the impacts of climate change. On this map, more than 1,400 rinks are listed across the world, which are updated to keep track of ever-changing ice conditions. About 50 of those are in New Brunswick, spreading from Edmundston and Bathurst to Saint John, Sackville and Shediac. RinkWatch describes itself as "a citizen science research initiative" that asks people to '"help monitor winter weather conditions and study the long-term impacts of climate change." As users update their rink's ice conditions on the website throughout the year, scientists can analyze the changing winter conditions across Canada with verifiable evidence. McLeman says that conditions have caused the creation of outdoor rinks to change drastically. Now, people are "investing in chillers and building… artificial refrigerated rinks in their backyard in barns," or putting plastic liners down on the ground before flooding it for protection. Backyard rinks are a warm memory for many families, he says. "It's used by every generation from grandparents to little ones. Just have a place to go in the dead of winter when the days are short, nights are long and, you know, get the kids out of the basement off those game consoles and out playing with their friends." He often hears people talking about how different winter was in the past and wants them to know that it is not just their imagination. "When you think about it, you know, the last few winters have sort of tricked us into thinking that winter is just this sort of mild, slushy, stormy thing. But the winter we're having right now, if you go back to the 1970s, '80s, '90s, this is a pretty typical winter." The backyard rink drives it home and also shows just how climate change impacts daily life. It is causing the potential loss of something that so many hold so close to their hearts. At the current rate of change, winter will be far milder very soon, McLeman warns. "We're going to have snow that melts really quickly, freezing rain, slush and so on. So we won't be able to play outside in winter anymore, at least not as much as we used to, and that's a shame both for us and for our kids."
