Learn-CC, a project out of McMaster University’s Centre for Climate Change, has created an interactive map of climate change in Hamilton.
A trio of green-minded individuals from the school have created a map website on which members of the local community are asked to submit any climate change impacts (flooding, wind damage) or climate change counter-actions (solar panel installation, composting).
Jay Brodeur, a finishing Ph. D student at McMaster who teaches a class in the Integrated Science (iSci) program on Climate Change, originally got the idea after some conversation with the city of Hamilton’s Air Qualtiy Co-ordinator, Brian Montgomery. Following their conversation, Brodeur proposed the idea for the project to Dr. Altaf Arain, the director of the McMaster Centre for Climate Change.
The two went on to apply for a small grant from McMaster’s Forward with Integrity program, to do this project. The goals of the project are as follows:
“To enable residents of Hamilton to report Climate Change-related actions and impacts that they have observed, and to centralize this information and display it in a way that is publicly available and visually engaging. And to collect information about these activities and impacts, so that they can be used for future research, planning and communication activities,” wrote Brodeur.
Around the same time as Brodeur and Dr. Arain were applying for the grant, undergraduate student, Jonathan Farrow, a former student of Brodeur’s, approached him about securing a research position for the summer.
“I talked to him about this project, and we then worked with Dr. Arain to apply for NSERC undergraduate funding for Jon to work on this project over the summer. After both of these were successful, I then organized a meeting with Jon, Brian Montgomery and Dr. Arain, where we laid out the framework for what you now see as LEARN-CC,” said Brodeur.
“We’re hoping that if you can go on the map and see that next door, your neighbour was using low-flow shower heads or was participating in a carpool program or they were doing something cool with their garden, maybe that would get you thinking about what you could do and give you contact if you needed information or help,” said Farrow.
Farrow also went on to say that the project will hopefully show Hamilton that lot of the solutions and the things that we can do to help combat climate change and reduce our impact, are everyday solutions.
Members of the local community are invited to visit http://www.mapclimatechange.ca/ to submit any impacts of climate change or any of their actions made to combat the impacts.