Shannon Miedema connects the climate emergency to the need for coordinated political action

Shannon Miedema is Director of the Environment and Climate Change team with the Halifax Regional Municipality and one of the chief architects of the city’s climate plan, the subtitle of which is “Acting on Climate Together.” In this conversation she defines what that means in terms of what is increasingly referred to as a “just transition,” or a transition that, as she says, isn’t interested in “leaving anyone behind,” one that rejects the idea that we can simply embrace mitigation of climate change or adaptation to climate change without “putting equity first.” This means devising material solutions with and for the disadvantaged communities in our city: racialized and underserved communities, the poor, the uniquely vulnerable. She wants us, on this Earth Day 2022, to recognize the unprecedented momentum the climate justice movement now has, in a context where we no longer talk about just “climate change” or a “climate crisis,” but a “climate emergency” and even a coming “climate catastrophe.” What we need are plans like the one that Regional Council just adopted in HRM: HalifACT (https://www.halifax.ca/about-halifax/energy-environment/halifact-2050-acting-climate-together) acts on the knowledge that the climate emergency is going to take everyone, it’s going to require an “army” of people capable of “deepening” and “increasing” engagement across the board. Shannon talks about the risk that was inherent in even bringing their plan and projections to Council originally. The choice was made to initiate the plan, despite the knowledge that, as she acknowledges, the COVID-19 pandemic had and has municipalities very worried about their “financial future.” But the future is, of course, what’s at stake in climate change, both immediate and long-term. So they moved forward, pushing seven core areas of actionable, conceivable counter-action, mitigation and adaptation. And the goal is to inspire confidence that there are so many things that can be done: against a dangerous attachment to business as usual and a deadly conviction that it is already too late. One of the big themes of our conversation is this idea that–in spite of the globe-spanning scale of the climate emergency, and the desperate need for a still-unrealized form of “multi-level climate governance”--cities are a crucial space where mobilization can materially happen. Especially in Canada. Cities need to be consulted, Shannon tells us, because large-scale plans to act against climate catastrophe which don’t attend to cities will not have “policies and funding programs” that actually meet the needs of people in cities. Cities are important, as well, because places like Halifax, with a high GDP and a lamentably very “dirty grid,” where the majority of our power comes from coal, can and should do more to decarbonize. Another major theme is this unresolved problem of communication: how do we craft messages and create engagement that causes people to care and feel capable of action, rather than encouraging them to turn away or tune out because it’s too late or because they’re too wracked with doubt? What does it mean to inspire stakeholders at every level to not just understand, but commit to the preservation of the local environment, out of love for the land and a knowledge that we can’t go on the way we’re going?