Get involved in local climate action, be part of one cool island

We all want solutions — and Salt Spring Islanders are ahead of the curve in developing innovative and inspiring responses that build the resilient community we’ll need as the impacts from climate change accelerate.

We have spent thousands of volunteer hours to bring you the Salt Spring Climate Action Plan 2.0 which outlines 250 recommended actions to address the climate change crisis on our island home. Read it here.

Our island is planting seeds of sustainability, and you can get involved in a cutting-edge climate action movement rooted right here on Salt Spring. Read the CAP plan to find out about the key risks our island faces from accelerating fire risks, deeper droughts, increasing storms, and rising sea levels. Join us to dig into the challenge of discovering what we can do about them: together.

Taking action on climate change is about so much more than just burning less fossil fuels, it's about a vision for how we live together as a community and how we can create a more awesome, humane, technologically and culturally rich and socially inspiring future for us all. It was so exciting to see the overwhelming response to our community engagement; to hear about people’s concerns, people’s successes (as well as their failures) and most of all people’s ideas. We heard that, as a community, we need to:

 

  • Stand with the most vulnerable among us as well as in the best interest of our common goals.
  • Come up with creative solutions that take into account people and not just policies.
  • Bring in new voices from often-unheard segments of the community.
  • Treat the people that are in fear for their jobs generously and with thanks, rather than demonizing those jobs and not providing a safety net as those jobs are retired out.
  • Find a way to move forward on climate in a manner that also addresses our other pressing community concerns such as affordable housing, mental health, jobs and inequality.
We know, from everything you said, that we already have all the tools we need to fix climate change. We just need to use them. Our biggest obstacle right now is that we are running out of time. Both people and governments are slower to move than we need and bad ideas die-hard.
We are, at this moment in the midst of an unprecedented triple crisis: a public health crisis, an economic crisis, and a climate crisis, each unlike anything we’ve ever faced. The threads of these three existential threats are intricately and tragically interwoven. Turns out, the most effective way to unravel them all may be to solve them together. If there was ever a time to be bold, this is it. As individuals, as a community and through our political levers and representatives we need to act. Now.
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Protecting Coastal Douglas Fir Ecosystems protects us all!

Forests

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Social Justice is integral to Climate Action!

Justice & Equality

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Let's conserve, collect, and respect freshwater for healthy island!

Freshwater

Agriculture

Let's build our local food systems!

Food & Agriculture

Habitat

Our homes and where we live matters for a healthy and safe future.

Land Use

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How we move around has a big impact!

Transportation

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Homes, Roads, and Public Infrastructure will be impacted by climate change.

Built Infrastructure

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Oceans are our life blood!

Marine Ecosystems

Salt Spring Climate Action

2020 Survey Results

To prepare the CAP 2.0, we ran a survey and were thrilled to get 887 surveys completed and over 5000 comments to make sure the plan belongs to all of us! We compiled a summary report to share some of what we have learned in the survey.

We've been working on this for a while now!

The first Climate Action Plan was done in 2011.

Read about it and what was accomplished since then.