Transition Brockville

Backyard Food Day

Transition Cornwall+ / 04 August 2019

Canada launches new climate data portal

Environment and Climate Change Canada / 15 August 2019

Climate change is real and it is accelerating. Climate change can also intensify extreme weather events like floods, droughts, and heatwaves. And Canadians across the country are feeling the effects of these changes through the impact it has had on their homes, businesses, and their health. That is why the Government of Canada is providing access to climate data and information that will help protect Canadians from its worst impacts.

Today, Catherine McKenna, the Minister of Environment and Climate Change, announced Canada’s newest climate data portal: ClimateData.ca. This website provides engineers, public health professionals, urban planners, mayors, and anyone else doing long-term planning with user-friendly climate change information, data, resources and tools.

[ FULL MEDIA RELEASE ]

Prison farms up and running again

CBC News / Amanda Pfeffer / 15 August 2019

The federal government released details Thursday about the relaunch of Canada’s prison farm program.

Cows have already returned to prisons in Joyceville and Collins Bay, Ont., which are located in and around the Kingston, Ont., area. Goats have also returned to Joycevillle, and are expected to arrive in Collins Bay in 2020.

Inmates have been involved in the work to get the farms back in order, but they have not begun actually farming.

“It’s very satisfying to see that it’s been restored,” said Dianne Dowling, a member of the national farmer’s union and a founding member of the Save our Prison Farms campaign, which fought for years to see the program restored.

[ FULL ARTICLE ]

‘Ecological grief’: Greenlanders traumatised by climate emergency

The Guardian / Dan McDougall / 12 August 2019

The climate crisis is causing unprecedented levels of stress and anxiety to people in Greenland who are struggling to reconcile the traumatic impact of global heating with their traditional way of life.

The first ever national survey examining the human impact of the climate emergency, revealed in the Guardian on Monday, shows that more than 90% of islanders interviewed fully accept that the climate crisis is happening, with a further 76% claiming to have personally experienced global heating in their daily lives, from coping with dangerous sea ice journeys to having sled dogs euthanised for economic reasons tied to shorter winters.

[ FULL ARTICLE ]

Animals adapt to climate heat, but too slowly

Physics World / Tim Radford / 09 August 2019

Earth is home to many millions of species that have evolved – and adapted or gone extinct – with successive dramatic shifts in climate over the last 500 million years.

The rapid heating of the planet in a climate emergency driven by profligate fossil fuel use threatens a measurable shift in climate conditions and is in any case coincident with what looks like the beginning of a mass extinction that could match any recorded in the rocks of the Permian, or other extinctions linked with global climate change.

The difference is that climate is now changing at a rate far faster than any previous episode. So can those animals that cannot migrate to cooler climates adjust to changing conditions?

[ FULL ARTICLE ]

Helping pollinators in Ottawa, one native plant at a time

CBC News / Robyn Miller / 10 August 2019

Her garden is alive with butterflies and buzzing with bees, and all Berit Erickson had to do was plant flowers native to eastern Ontario.

Now, Erickson is encouraging others to roll up their sleeves and install similar pollinator gardens in Ottawa.

“There’s really a critical need. Pollinator populations are declining and all insect populations are declining. Insects are the foundation of food webs,” she said.

Erickson has been gardening at her home in Carlingwood for 20 years, but only recently did she make the switch to cultivating native plant species.

“I realized that the plants that I used to grow, they might as well have been plastic plants because they had very little wildlife value,” she said.

[ FULL ARTICLE ]

Former Homestead flagship to set sail as Greenside Organics

Eastern Ontario AgriNews / Tom Van Dusen / 31 July 2019

The sidelined Berwick organic feed mill is expected to be up and running under new ownership by September.

Former flagship of the collapsed Homestead Organics operation, the mill will also have a new name: Greenside Organics. The name change isn’t a slight on Homestead, said buyer Peter Jegachandran; legal issues require new company identification.

While Jegachandran has limited agricultural experience, he does own cropland which he leases to conventional farmers. A businessman involved in software development and commercial storage, he sees tremendous future potential in the organics sector and in the Berwick facility.

[ FULL ARTICLE ]

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