The Waterloo Region Climate Collaborative formed in January 2024. Although our Municipal governments have adopted science based carbon emission reduction targets, (50% reduction by 2030) there has not been enough action to ensure we will reach those targets. As a result, our various groups began to meet with the goal of creating tools to better work together, to share resources, and to once again raise our voices together on the critical issue of ACTION to ensure a livable world for all.
Our Collective Mandate
We encourage local groups to work together in directions that create policy and behaviour shifts in alignment with reducing emissions, reaching climate targets and achieving more caring, sustainable futures in the Waterloo Region. We also work to connect groups within the community under common themes that help achieve a reduction in greenhouse gasses, protect the environment, and advance climate justice locally.
Through our efforts, we work to create opportunities for local climate voices to be heard, local climate impacts to be highlighted, and local climate initiatives and solutions to be amplified and supported. We recognize the intersections of climate work with many other issues of concern that also matter to our communities, and strive to act in solidarity across local progressive causes where it works. Guided by our capacity and areas of focus, we seek to support and work with all who are striving towards creating more caring, climate safe realities, whenever it can help and makes sense to do so.
Values and Practices
As a Collaborative, our shared values are:
- Action on climate change for a safe climate future
- Acknowledging relationship and interconnectedness with each other, and all life
- “Caring for all” means recognizing that climate impacts are unequal, and that there’s a need for building more caring, equitable futures in the face of climate change – in part through designing caring climate solutions, and supporting just transitions to more sustainable systems (“climate justice”) Caring for all includes a recognition of the need to care for both human and non-human kin, which together all make up the full web of life as taught in many Indigenous cultures.
- “People power” is needed to help achieve more transformative and caring systems changes, which means learning to work effectively together bringing our priorities, networks, movements, talents, skills, hearts and more together in this work. We acknowledge that we are not the same, are diverse in many ways and have differences between us – yet we can nevertheless be stronger in this diversity by working together, each bringing our different valued strengths and qualities to this shared work.
- Community-building, inclusion and collaboration
- Collective accountability, collective care and striving to be our best selves
- Empowering leadership of both individuals and groups towards deeper climate engagement
- Striving to address root causes of climate-related issues, not just symptoms, for long-term systems change. While we understand that addressing symptoms can be important to help better life and reduce harms now, we also know that to truly address the climate crisis will take transformative systems changes towards more caring, sustainable societies, which we should also play a part in co-creating. root causes includes acknowledging the historical and ongoing impacts of colonialism on Indigenous lands and cultures in many parts of the world, including Canada. Those impacts are intertwined with forms of economic development that are key drivers of the climate crisis, widespread biodiversity loss, and other social/environmental harms. From a broader perspective, we seek to bring together different knowledges and understandings and to connect smaller-scale interventions to broader systems-level changes that also need to take place, towards more caring and sustainable societies.
Key practices
- We strive to create accessible, inclusive spaces
- We meet people where they’re at
- We choose to bring qualities and energy that honour each other’s humanity
- We build relationships with each other
- We honour community leadership
- We nurture a culture of care
- We commit to ongoing learning and unlearning
- We strive to extend grace and assume good intentions
- We strive to embody healthy communication practices
- We bring caring and good intentions to this crucial work when we meet, in the collective goal of striving to co-create far more caring, sustainable futures.