It has been a turbulent past few weeks in Quebec’s public service sector. Much of the news and our conversations have been about the teacher’s strike and the lack of support for public transit. We also learned of the passing of Karl Tremblay, whose environmental vision will live on for generations. Here are a few other subjects for which the Équiterre team has mobilized its expertise and energy this month.
Agriculture
Our farmland in danger
Quebec has lost 57,000 hectares of farmland since 1998 (the equivalent of 40 hockey rinks, every day) mainly due to industrial development and urban sprawl. Though we have a vast territory, barely 2% of the land in our province is arable.
Protecting this land is crucial for our food autonomy and our food security, and to do so, there must be changes in our agricultural policies and practices. Équiterre and our partners from the agricultural, environmental and planning sectors have just formed the SaluTerre alliance to work towards these changes.
Mobility
SUVs as a threat to the environment and our safety
The impacts of the trend towards larger and larger vehicles - on our safety, health, environment and personal finances - are not always easy to see. To better illustrate, our Mobility team held a media event, in collaboration with Piétons Québec, to demonstrate the blindspots of SUVs. Journalists were invited to sit in an SUV parked outside our office in Montreal to better see what they could not see. Their reactions were unequivocal (go to 19:16).
As the climate crisis worsens, we're bombarded with ads promoting gas and diesel-powered vehicles, especially SUVs and light-duty trucks. We need a new regulatory framework for advertising gas-powered vehicles.
This year’s international climate summit, COP28, has brought together nearly all the countries of the world to Dubai, to work together to negotiate and adopt measures to slow the warming of our planet. Our colleagues, Andréanne and Marie-Eve, are on hand to analyze the negotiations, collaborate with other organizations and present a panel on climate disinformation and polarization. Since COP issues are not always easy to keep track of, we’ve prepared a short summary of what you need to know, from our perspective.
Please support Équiterre in our work to preserve farmland, rethink transportation, promote reuse, and contribute to climate action at COP28.
RÉCO, a centre for the reuse of building materials, has just opened its doors in Montreal. It’s the visionary work of Bruno Demers, who has been working for many years on how to better reuse materials from the construction sector, which is responsible for nearly 30% of the world’s resource extraction, GHG emissions and waste production.
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