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The reflective process of the 2023 Bonn Climate Change Conference involves examining my initial expectations, reflecting on the conference experience, and identifying key takeaways that significantly impacted my professional development and understanding of climate change. This exercise aims to deepen my knowledge of global developments in climate change mitigation, adaptation, and financing. The conference serves as a powerful platform for raising awareness and promoting change. Additionally, I hope to inspire greater participation in the engineering community, leveraging this conference to increase public awareness about climate change and the vital role engineering plays in addressing these challenges.

This Masters Degree Project applies the concepts of Sustainable Community Development (SCD) and Future State Visioning (FSV) to a specific case study --Revelstoke, in interior British Columbia. This community is struggling to break from its "boom and bust" economy by setting a vision to achieve a sustainable community by balancing environmental, social and economic values. The MDP describes, interprets and assesses Revelstoke's vision setting process and Vision Statement using triangulation of both quantitative and qualitative methods. The research assesses the potential utility ofthe process in SCD and the vision' s initial use. Community visioning shows potential as a tool in SCD if people involved in the process apply principles to other processes, decisions and documents affecting the community's future. Revelstoke vision-setting process would have been more effective had it involved broad based community participation, and if community-supported definitions of key concepts would have been developed. Bibliography: p. R2-R32.

This study brings together plot-scale growing season fluxes of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) from six Canadian peatlands restored by the moss layer transfer technique (MLTT) and compares them with fluxes from adjacent unrestored and natural peatlands to determine: 1) if CO2 and CH4 fluxes return to natural-site levels and 2) whether the ecohydrological controls (e.g. water table, plant cover) on these fluxes are similar between treatments. We also examine differences between eastern (humid/maritime climate) and western (sub-humid climate) Canadian plots, and between restoration of former horticultural peat extraction sites and oil industry well-pads. Our results indicate that restored site fluxes of CO2 and CH4 are not significantly different between eastern and western Canada or between a restored well-pad and restored horticultural peat extraction sites. Restoration resulted in gross primary production rates similar to those at natural plots and significantly greater than those at unrestored plots. Ecosystem respiration was not significantly different at restored and unrestored plots, and was lower at both than at natural plots. Methane emission was significantly greater at restored plots than at unrestored plots, but remained significantly lower on average than at natural plots. Water table was a significant control on CH4 flux across restored and natural plots. Vascular plant cover was significantly related to CO2 uptake (gross photosynthesis) at restored and unrestored plots, but not at natural plots, while higher moss cover resulted in significantly greater net uptake of CO2 at natural plots but not at restored and unrestored plots. Overall, MLTT restoration greatly alters CO2 and CH4 dynamics compared to unrestored areas but fluxes remain, on average, significantly different from those in natural peatlands, in both the magnitude of mean growing season fluxes and controls on variation in these fluxes among plots. Peatland restoration by MLTT results in reduced CO2 emissions and higher CH4 emissions; however, more year-round measurements in more restored peatlands over longer periods post-restoration are needed to improve greenhouse gas emission estimates for restored Canadian peatlands.

The 48th Annual Chacmool Conference explored the concept of sustainability from an archaeological perspective. Sustainability can be broadly defined as the way in which people or communities remain diverse, yet productive while maintaining an ecological balance. As public awareness increases in response to the ramifications of modern landuse and its ecological impact, sustainable practices that probe potential strategies for alleviating current pressures have emerged in a number of disciplines including archaeology. The archaeology of sustainability has the potential to transcend geographical and temporal boundaries through a collaborative, interdisciplinary approach. This is especially true considering that archaeology has the advantage of providing both diachronic and synchronic snapshots of the past which may serve as precedents of sustainable living in modern times. Another important development has been the use of sustainable methods in archaeological research which allow researchers to extract an increasing amount of information from a range of digital and less destructive tecniques. Also emerging from the concept of sustainability in archaeology is a reflexive gaze upon the discipline itself. It would seem as though public and community engagement as well as Indigenous archaeologies provide some of the solutions in creating a sustainable archaeology, now and in the future. The papers in Part I and II of these proceedings touch upon the aforementioned sub-themes of sustainability in archaeology. Additionally, the papers in Part III are included in recognition of the late Jane Holden Kelley, her various contributions in archaeology and anthropology, and most importantly, on the positive influence she had on generations of people who had come to know her. It is hoped that the entirety of this volume contributes to the growing dialogue regarding sustainability and archaeology. ; No ; Bison Historical Services Ltd., Golder Associates Ltd., Lifeways of Canada Limited, Speargrass Historical Resource Consultants ...

Bibliography: p. 153-160

These days randomized-based population optimization algorithms are in wide use in different branches of science such as bioinformatics, chemical physics andpower engineering. An important group of these algorithms is inspired by physical processes or entities’ behavior. A new approach of applying optimization-based social relationships among the members of a community is investigated in this paper. In the proposed algorithm, search factors are indeed members of the community who try to improve the community by ‘following’ each other. FOA implemented on 23 well-known benchmark test functions. It is compared with eight optimization algorithms. The paper also considers for solving optimal placement of Distributed Generation (DG). The obtained results show that FOA is able to provide better results as compared to the other well-known optimization algorithms.

Climate catastrophe throws into stark relief the extreme, life-threatening inequalities that affect millions of lives worldwide. The poorest and most marginalized, who are least responsible for the consumption and emissions that create climate change, are the first and hardest impacted, and the least able to protect themselves. Climate justice is simultaneously a movement, an academic field, an organizing principle, and a political demand. Building climate justice is a matter of life and death. Climate Justice and Participatory Research offers ideas and inspiration for climate justice through the creation of research, knowledge, and livelihood commons and community-based climate resilience. It brings together articulations of the what, why, and how of climate justice through the voices of energetic and motivated scholar-activists who are building alliances across Latin America, Africa, and Canada. Exemplifying socio-ecological transformation through equitable public engagement, these scholars, climate activists, community educators, and teachers come together to share their stories of participatory research and collective action. Grounded in experience and processes that are currently underway, Climate Justice and Participatory Research explores the value of common assets, collective action, environmental protection, and equitable partnerships between local community experts and academic allies. It demonstrates the negative effects of climate-related actions that run roughshod over local communities’ interests and wellbeing, and acknowledges the myriad challenges of participatory research. This is a work committed to the practical work of transforming socio-economies from situations of vulnerability to collective wellbeing.

Across a species’ range, populations are exposed to their local thermal environments, which on an evolutionary scale, may cause adaptative differences among populations. Helminths often have broad geographic ranges and temperature-sensitive life stages, but little is known about whether and how local thermal adaptation can influence their response to climate change. We studied the thermal responses of the free-living stages of Marshallagia marshalli, a parasitic nematode of wild ungulates, along a latitudinal gradient. We first determine its distribution in wild sheep species in North America. Then we cultured M. marshalli eggs from different locations at temperatures from 5 to 38°C. We fit performance curves based on the Metabolic Theory of Ecology to determine whether development and mortality showed evidence of local thermal adaptation. We used parameter estimates in life-cycle-based host-parasite models to understand how local thermal responses may influence parasite performance under general and location-specific climate-change projections. We found that M. marshalli has a wide latitudinal and host range, infecting wild sheep species from New Mexico to Yukon. Increases in mortality and development time at higher temperatures were most evident for isolates from northern locations. Accounting for location-specific parasite parameters primarily influenced the magnitude of climate change parasite performance, while accounting for location-specific climates primarily influenced the phenology of parasite performance. Despite differences in development and mortality among M. marshalli populations, when using site-specific climate change projections, there was a similar magnitude of impact on the relative performance of M. marshalli among populations. Climate change is predicted to decrease the expected lifetime reproductive output of M. marshalli in all populations while delaying its seasonal peak by approximately one month. Our research suggests that accurate projections of the impacts of climate change on broadly distributed species need to consider local adaptations of organisms together with local temperature profiles and climate projections. We conducted laboratory experiments to estimate the development and mortality rates over a range of temperatures for free-living stages of M. marshalli sourced from four different locations in North America. We fit mathematical models from the Metabolic Theory of Ecology to estimate the temperature dependence of parasite development and mortality rates. Using the fitted models, we then estimated the temperature dependence of the expected lifetime reproductive output of an individual parasite with no density-dependent constraints (R0 (T)/ C) under current temperatures and under future climate change for low- and high-emissions scenarios at each of the four collection locations.