The Canadian village that burned down in the 49.6C heatwave of 2021 could be a model for climate resilience — if only the whole community could agree on a plan

Five years after a fire burnt it down, Lytton — the town in British Columbia that is now synonymous with the climate crisis — remains a shell of its former self.

But Romona Baxter isn’t hanging around, waiting for change to come to her. Baxter, a child welfare advocate and a member of the nearby Skuppah Indian Band, is the driving force behind a new childcare centre that’s going up in town. That facility, the Nzen’man’ Child and Family Development Centre, is being built on Indigenous land, just outside the official boundaries of what’s known as the Village of Lytton.

Nzen’man means ‘nest’ in the local Indigenous language. The place is meant as a nurturing ground for Lytton’s littlest citizens.

“We just started building as soon as we could, and here we are,” Baxter tells me, as she shows me around the site on a windy, spring day.

Very few people outside of British Columbia knew about Lytton before June 30, 2021, when the town burned to the ground in a matter of minutes. The temperature had risen to 49.6C the previous day. It’s the highest ever recorded in Canada, breaking the previous record by almost a full 5 degrees C.

Sparks from a passing train were the ignition source; but the tinder was climate change. Today, Lytton is known the world over as the canary in the climate coalmine.

My visit marks five years on from that devastating heatwave and fire, and I find very little to show for in terms its rebuild. The story is not a simple one of strength in the face of adversity (though it is also that). Rather, Lytton’s experience demonstrates how community and climate resilience falters when Indigenous communities do not get an equal seat at the table.

This side of the story of ‘Canada’s hot spot’ hasn’t been told… until now.

Colonial governance in a First Nations town

The actual village of Lytton is tiny. Its pre-fire population was listed as just 210 residents. The village core, or the townsite, is the part that burned down, as did some parts of an adjoining First Nation.

But the population of the broader region — the area popularly understood as Lytton — is much larger, numbering in the thousands. It is also a heavily Indigenous community. Ninety-five per cent of the Lytton area’s residents are First Nation, one of Canada’s three main Indigenous groups (the other two are Métis and Inuit).

The largely Indigenous population lives in six adjoining communities just outside the village boundaries (and, in one case, literally across the street from the townsite). These are the people — the Nlaka’pamux (ing-kluh-KAP-muh) — who shape the identity of this town.

But it’s the village — run by a mayor and council — that gets the recovery cheques, the dignitaries’ visits, and the news media’s attention.

That administration — the mayor and four councillors — is a child of the provincial government in Victoria, and works according to colonial laws, standards and practices established after Canada became a country.

The Nations, meanwhile, have their own governance structures, based on pre-colonial laws, traditions and histories. Where they respond to a colonial government, it’s Canada’s federal government in Ottawa, not the provincial one in Victoria. But everyone uses the services offered by the Village of Lytton, which acts as a service centre of sorts for the region.

What makes Lytton unique is that its tiny nucleus is a settler, colonial government. But the community is overwhelmingly Indigenous, surrounded by First Nations and their national governments.

It’s this complex web — a product of the system that is Canada, and colonialism — that prominent Indigenous leaders in Lytton, along with those that support them, say systematically undermines Indigenous voices as key decision makers.

‘Missed opportunity’

The fire could have been the catalyst for doing away with this lopsided system. Except change hasn’t come to pass — and, on the ground, it shows.

“It was a missed opportunity where we could have had everybody sitting at the table, to have this shared decision-making, and have equal say,” says Chief Jordan Spinks, of the Kanaka Bar Indian Band, just 10 minutes south of Lytton, of the halting rebuild.

This failure to communicate and work collectively, Indigenous leaders believe, has hurt Lytton’s ability to rebuild and become a great community.

“There was the opportunity to have that, but it just never came to fruition,” Chief Jordan told me.

He says Lytton could have been “a good mix of the colonial system, plus our traditional laws meshed together.”

But it hasn’t happened. And it’s not just the Indigenous voices saying that. Even the mayor of Lytton, Denise O’Connor, who is not Indigenous, agrees. “We’re still working under a colonial system,” she tells me over coffee on a hot Sunday morning at the lone restaurant that’s still operating, some five kilometres away from town.

She tells me she would “love to talk about” ways of managing Lytton collectively. In fact, it was her late husband, Chris O’Connor, who, as Lytton’s mayor 20 years ago, made it a point of finding synergies with the local First Nations. He did that, Denise O’Connor says, by starting with the emergency services — the rapid delivery of which everyone could agree with.

Today’s environment isn’t as conducive to those conversations, as people just don’t talk to each other. Romona Baxter tells me the Indigenous communities and the village are further apart after the fire than they were before.

“The Village of Lytton has not been a partner with Nzen’man’ for the past 30 years,” says Baxter, “so why would they be now?” She tells me she’s not being taken up on the opportunity to have a conversation about working together to rebuild Lytton, much less being given financial support.

“I think they feel pretty positive about this space,” Baxter says of the mayor and council’s feelings toward her new childcare centre. “But in terms of money, they’re not going ‘hey, how about we give you some of our provincial money, give you a hand, contribute a million bucks?”

“But, I haven’t asked,” she admits. “I haven’t asked.”

Troubled reconciliation

The lack of communication between the Nations and the Village isn’t because of some deliberate act of malice or negligence. After all, in a place as small as Lytton, everyone knows everyone, and runs into each other on a regular basis. People are friends, polite differences aside.

But invisible walls are just that — established by implicit biases and prejudices that are baked into governance, administration, and society. Those biases affect how things are done, who is hired, and who gets to make decisions.

Unravelling those imbalances between First Nations and colonial governance could be the key to not just building back the village, but also establishing a model for post-colonial relations and climate resilience the world over.

Since the tragedy, the provincial and Canadian federal governments have granted $138 million in recovery money for the rebuilding of Lytton. Of that, $64 million was given by the federal government in Ottawa “to support the rebuilding of Lytton through the construction of net-zero fire-resistant public buildings.”

This, hypothetically, includes Spintlum Lodge, an elder care facility run by Chief Jordan’s Kanaka Bar, right in the heart of the village. It too burned down, taking out six much-needed assisted living beds.

The Chief, who worked as a care aid at Spintlum prior to his current role as the head of Kanaka Bar, says the federal government in Ottawa did not initially think to bring the Nations into the discussion about how to allocate that funding — even though the lodge has deep historical ties with the Band.

Kanaka started looking into why, and “that’s when we found out that there was — maybe they didn’t mean to — prejudices on who could access those funds, and the only entity that could was the Village of Lytton,” he says.

There were hints of those oversights when the feds came to Lytton a year after the fire to announce the funding. The government’s news release, issued at that time, quotes two federal ministers, and the village’s then-mayor, Jan Polderman. But it makes no reference to the Indigenous communities who make up almost all the population of Lytton. Putting it another way, Lytton is the Indigenous communities that surround it.

“That’s when we were, like, ‘that’s pretty prejudiced, or racist,’ because as much as the village was lost, the six communities around it also made up that village, and we utilize the services,” Chief Jordan said.

Late last year, he reached out to Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Canada, the federal department responsible. We “made them aware of the prejudices we found, and we started working on how we could get that changed so that the money couldn’t be just for the village of Lytton, and all the local First Nations could apply for it,” Chief Jordan told me.

It took six months — relatively fast for the federal government to make a major correction. It went as high as the housing and infrastructure minister. “We attacked the issue from all angles, and worked together to ensure the outcome that we wanted,” Chief Jordan said.

Even then, Kanaka Bar was only able to apply for the leftover funds that the village had not used. It amounted to $14.9 million. The money’s finally been allocated to the rebuild of the elders’ facility — a fact that the Canadian government subsequently announced in a news release on December 19, 2025.

Throughout the entire process, the Chief says, the federal government’s default position was to defer to the Village.

They “were asking whether we had done our due diligence and tried to work with the Village. They were suggesting that we partner with the Village, and have the Village do the project, and we either project manage or consult, but the Village didn’t have any capacity or any experience in building an elders’ lodge.”

“They added hurdles and hoops,” he says. (I reached out to Housing and Infrastructure Canada. The federal department did not acknowledge my correspondence, much less respond).

Delays exacerbate the trauma

It’s not just Indigenous people who worry about the invisible barriers hampering Lytton’s ability to function properly and to rebuild efficiently.

Resident Meghan Fandrich almost lost her home, which sits on a bluff overlooking the townsite. She’s not Indigenous. But she says the failure of reconciliation is apparent in Lytton.

“It was, really, an opportunity to decolonize and have nation-to-nation relationships that we haven’t seen,” says Fandrich. “It could have been just this really beautiful way to get rid of what was colonial and colonized and start [again as] one community that’s gone through this together.”

The delays have, in turn, only exacerbated residents’ trauma. That another thing that everyone in Lytton can agree on. It took months for residents to be able to visit their lost properties, and this only made the sense of pain and loss all the more difficult to accept.

“You lose whatever it is that’s normal [and] all you want is to regain that normalcy,” Fandrich says. “If I had been able to set foot on the ground a week after the fire, I would have had volunteers from all over. Everyone who had ever been to my coffee shop would have come in, brick by brick, [to] clear that rubble.”

Instead, it took nine months of agonizing waiting before she was allowed to even set foot on what used to be her coffee shop, Klowa. It took almost another two years before the remediation was complete.

Her coffee shop was essentially worthless after the fire. “For years after the fire, I was still paying a mortgage on a building that didn’t exist.”

The delays, in the end, became too much, and Fandrich decided to get out of the coffee business. She sold the property to the Skuppah Indian Band, “in my own small gesture of reconciliation,” she tells me, ironically over a coffee in her quaint, compact home.

Little to show for

The Village has faced multiple challenges with rebuilding. It got tens of millions of dollars in funds for the reconstruction of Lytton. But that didn’t mean those funds were accessible right away, or that bureaucracy, red tape and political differences didn’t get in the way. Some of the problems were outside of its control; but many others have been self-inflicted.

Mayor O’Connor pointed out how it took well a year after the fire for the federal government to announce its funding commitment. That happened in June, 2022.

Even then, the feds wanted “net-zero, fire-resistant public buildings.” The hope was that Lytton’s rebuild could meet the most stringent provincial building codes, which were still aspirational at that point, and become a model for climate resilience for the world. The previous council was also putting forward futuristic, pie-in-the-sky improvements. For many, the ghost of ‘solar sidewalks’, an idea touted at one point by the previous mayor, still hangs over Lytton like a dark cloud.

Dozens of companies wanted a piece of the rebuilding action. But figuring out how to implement world-beating standards in a tiny, fire-ravaged community, where most people were under-insured added significant confusion, anxiety, and bureaucratic delay.

The Jetsons-esque ambitions have since been scaled back. Lytton’s new buildings are now to meet the existing provincial building codes. They include requirements for building to measure and disclose their emissions, though not necessarily be carbon-neutral or carbon-negative.

More problematically, there was the infighting among members of council. It’s still not on the same page on basic questions like how many lanes the new swimming pool should have.

Ultimately, bureaucracy, infighting and indecision on council about the future of Lytton, costly archaeology and remediation work, and lingering questions about where the money has been spent have all left Lytton with little to show for.

Today, the only structure the village can claim it’s gotten built is a single public works building as you enter town.

Meantime, barely one hundred metres from the townsite, the homes that burnt down on the neighbouring territory of the Lytton First Nation, the Indigenous community closest the village, have been rebuilt. It wasn’t a matter of money; both entities had access to government funds for the rebuild.

But Lytton First Nation, which goes by the acronym LFN, didn’t have to waste time on bureaucracy or grand wishes by government. It had the funds, the green light and, most importantly, political consensus to get the work done… fast. It also hired an experienced manager to oversee the effort.

Her name is Feddie Louie — a project manager with extensive experience doing post-disaster recovery work (she describes herself as an “Indigenous solutions consultant” on her LinkedIn).

The First Nation quickly outsourced the work it did not have experience doing. The band hired three companies, each with extensive experience in post-disaster recovery, to do the environmental engineering and archaeology work.

The Village of Lytton hired the same firms to do the work in town. But there were more problems. None of the councillors, nor the mayor, has much experience in recovery work. The one person who did, an experienced recovery manager the village had hired (and who requested anonymity because of ongoing work they are doing in Lytton) was abruptly terminated. The reasons for that dismissal have never been fully explained.

First Nations communities have had their own share of politics. But the difference is — when it came to rebuilding, they mostly were able to put the bureaucracy aside and get to work.

“We’ve just kept our head down, and kept working,” Baxter told me outside Nzen’man’, as construction crews buzzed around us.

From Lytton to…Nova Scotia?

The village has also been widely criticized for hiring a chief financial officer who does not live in British Columbia. Diane Mombourquette, who also doubles as the Chief Administrative Officer, resides on the other side of the country, in Nova Scotia, four time zones away, and travels once a month to Lytton.

Mombourquette also earns a salary that is orders of magnitude higher that every other public worker in Lytton. It’s an issue that has generated many negative headlines.

Financial disclosure documents list her total earnings in 2025 at $277,944.82. That is 23 times the total earnings of the mayor. More problematically, the generous compensation also puts Mombourquette in the same salary league as big-city CAOs, with populations order of magnitude larger than little Lytton.

The mayor, Denise O’Connor, acknowledged that Mombourquette’s salary is very generous. But, she insists, Mombourquette has shown she’s getting the work done. “I don’t care where she works,” O’Connor says. She’s cutting through the red tape, and finally getting the wheels rolling where they need to roll, she tells me.

The Village is finally hoping to break ground on its new community hub and village office. The latter was destroyed in the fire (as were all of the municipal regulations and bylaws).

In Lytton, rebuilding can never come soon enough.

Lifelong bonds, invisible barriers

Everybody knows everybody in a small town. This makes the invisible, systemic barriers that exist all the more difficult to accept.

“The thing is, the village council, and the chiefs and councils of all the communities, we’ve known each other across our lifetimes,” says Romona Baxter. She tells me, during our visit to the construction site, that Mayor O’Connor taught her how to swim when she was a toddler. “So this is where it’s just hard for me, like, I don’t understand”, she says, of the rifts that have formed since the fire.

The problem, she stresses, over and over, is not with the people. It’s with a system that disprivileges cooperation and partnerships with Indigenous Peoples — even when those Indigenous communities are showing how to cut through the noise and get the work done.

“I have a lot of respect for [Denise] and for all those women on council. My concern is they haven’t really taken advantage of what is available to them in terms of the people here and the knowledge that we have — including being able to project manage this.”

She adds, “We have to remember — we have to be hard on the system, and soft on the people.”

Ultimately, the story of Lytton is the story of Canada, and so many other post-colonial countries that gloss over the potential of their Indigenous populations, their work ethics, and their knowledge.

It also happens to be a story about climate change and the devastating impacts of rising temperatures.

“Because of lived experience […] when these climate change impacts do happen, we’re prepared to continue moving forward and continue looking after our members,” says Kanaka Bar’s Chief Jordan.

There are some rumblings of changing the political architecture of Lytton, perhaps by giving the broader community administrative and governance control. But any such change would require signoff from the province, and the First Nations, and would be complex. It could also set precedent for other communities who might also want to see such ‘constitutional’ changes.

What’s clear, though, is that there needs to be cooperation and communication that’s currently lacking.

“We need each other,” Baxter tells me, with a tinge of exasperation in her voice. “I don’t think we want to be in bad relations with the village, at all — what’s good for Nlaka’pamux is good for everyone. But I just don’t think the same applies.”

“I don’t think they think about us. And that’s what’s sad.”

Lessons from Lytton: Five Years After the Devastating Fire was originally published in The New Climate. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The ever-evolving conflicts in the Middle East, the prospect of more inflation, the persistent threat of A.I. destroying the future of work — oh, and the ever-worsening climate emergency.

There is a lot to be genuinely worried about in 2026.

In the context of all this bad news, there is one specialized method of information delivery that you should know about. I’ll resist the urge to call it ‘a silver lining’ or a ‘little bit of good news’ in a sea of doom-and-gloom.

It’s called ‘solutions journalism’ (I’ll use the acronym sojo in this essay). The idea with sojo is to vigorously challenge conventional news reporting’s focus on problems — on all that’s wrong, broken, hopeless, failing. That’s the ‘disease model of the world,’ and as any regular news reader knows, the way journalism usually goes.

In these trying, depressing, seemingly hopeless times, sojo sounds great. At least on paper. But it’s had a hard time finding uptick among many mainstream news organizations. In my view, the reason isn’t because of sojo’s emphasis on solutions. Counterintuitively, it’s because sojo’s not focused enough on conflict. I’ll unpack this argument here.

The need for sojo

For starters, why do we need to think about sojo as an alternative to conventional news reporting? One reason is obvious. For at least two decades, social media has been fragmenting and splitting audiences. It’s not like the 1970s and 80s, when most people got their news and information from a handful of sources (e.g., CBS News, NBC News, ABC News). These days, what we believe is not just a function of where we get that information from, but from whom.

The other reason we need to think about different ways of producing journalism is simply that all the depressing news and information around us is pushing more news audiences away from news. The latest report from the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford found that four out of 10 potential news readers avoid the news, up from 29 percent of respondents who said the same thing 10 years ago. The main reason for skipping out? The negative impact of news reporting on their mood.

Why did this style of news reporting come about?

So what is sojo and why can it help heal some of the wounds inflicted upon news audiences from this algorithm-curated, doom-scrolling information landscape?

First, let’s clear up some misconceptions. The name solutions journalism suggests an emphasis on positive stories, happy news, and uplifting information. But fluff pieces are exactly what sojo is not. Solutions journalism is modelled on hard-hitting news. It’s just hard-hitting news that’s supposed to focus on what’s working and who is leading the way. These most certainly are not stories about teddy bears and fluff.

It’s no secret to the news-reading public that journalists write mostly about things that are not working: problems, wars, crises, conflicts, disease. Yes, death and destruction, and that tired adage of ‘if it bleeds it leads.’ This emphasis on ‘bad news’ (for lack of a better term) is partially about psychology. We are naturally drawn to stories about deviation and disorder. If beef prices are in step with people’s expectations, that’s not a news story; if they’re 15 per cent higher than they should be, then the news hook is obvious.

But the choice to report on what’s not working is also baked into the biases of conventional journalism itself — the way journalism came about as a practice. It’s a choice by news editors to report on failure. In the book News: The Politics of Illusion, journalism researcher W. Lance Bennett describes four news biases, of which disorder, and the effort to bring back some semblance of order (usually by experts and authority figures) is one of those biases (the other three are about the emphasis on personalities, on dramatization, and on reporting about individual events as opposed to unpacking larger systemic issues or describing underlying causes).

What’s more, journalism, in most of the world, and certainly in the way it’s taught in journalism schools is, focused on monitoring and sounding the alarm when something’s fallen out of step with the ‘normal.’ This approach is described as the ‘monitorial’ or ‘watchdog’ role, in the foundational book Normative Theories of the Media: Journalism in Democratic Societies. The monitorial role — the standard approach to news reporting — is built on the standard of journalistic objectivity, the holy grail of journalism. Journalists are supposed to be passive, detached, unbiased observers, watching from the sidelines and reporting on what’s going on. They don’t get involved in solving conflicts, challenging status quos, much less activating for change.

They monitor and report. The challenge with that approach is that the news tends to become a ‘stenographic’ account of the world.

The idea with sojo is to flip the equation around the principle of leading with problems, all the while staying true to journalism’s monitorial role and the principle of objectivity. The concern in journalism circles — unfounded in my view — is that telling the audience about solutions to problems is somehow automatically tantamount to advocacy (i.e., many journalists feel that reporting on solutions is for non-governmental organizations, not news outlets).

The Solutions Journalism Network, a U.S.-based organization that trains reporters and editors in solutions reporting, takes great pains to emphasize the delicate equilibrium between ‘monitoring’ and ‘reporting on solutions.’ On its homepage, SJN defines sojo “rigorous reporting about how people are trying to solve problems.” In other words, lead with the solution, but keep it firmly in the journalism camp, not the activist camp or the op-ed column.

To do that, SJN emphasizes the need for sojo-minded reporters to include plenty of evidence about how, where and why a particular solution is working (i.e., keep it the journalism column) and to reflect up on the limitations to that solution’s implementation (i.e., keep it out of the activism column).

This delicate tightrope is, in large measure, happening because conventional, mainstream newsrooms have long been opposed to, if not suspicious of solutions reporting. I know because I worked in one for close to 25 years, and have, over those years, spoken with dozens of reporters and editors whose eyebrows were firmly cocked every time I brought up the issue of solutions reporting.

But, to challenge the misperception of sojo as somehow tantamount to ‘activist’ or ‘advocacy’ work is, as I’ve discovered, uphill climb. That’s not to say there isn’t some really good sojo happening in some quarters, and some great reporters doing sojo. There is, for example, lots of evidence of sojo finding purchase in parts of the world that are less focused on the conventional journalistic tenets of monitoring, objectivity and conflict orientation. Here, I’m thinking of post-conflict states primarily in the developing world, places like subsaharan Africa, Indonesia, Colombia, etc. (SJN maintains a helpful and healthy database of sojo stories).

Still, among many journalists, and the journalism academy, there’s a nagging perception of sojo as somehow less robust then ‘actual’ journalism. To me, the way to address that concern is to abandon the idea of sojo as a response to social problems. Instead, emphasize the conflict frame (journalism’s natural posture), and do that using a model facilitation, instead of the conventional journalistic model of monitoring. Basically, conflict mediation applied to news reporting.

How would that work? Let me explain.

Conflict mediation is the aspect to emphasize. Not objectivity.

In practice, the conflict mediation approach might require abandoning the name ‘solutions journalism.’ That would make this type of journalism less about foregrounding solutions (which, to a lot of journalists, feels like activism, even though it’s not), and more about drawing out nuance, explaining underlying trends and patterns and, ultimately, presenting news as less of a duelling joust between ‘two sides’ (e.g., Democrats want x, Republicans want y, and there’s zero daylight between them), and more about facilitating conversations between different perspectives with a view on finding ways to move forward (solutions).

In short, conflict mediation, or facilitation.

In fact, facilitation is one of the four ‘roles’ for journalism described by the authors of Normative Theories. What’s more, journalism-as-facilitation has been tried in the real world before.

In the 1990s, when sojo was still an embryo of a concept (mostly used as kickers to close television newscasts on an uplifting note, something that still happens today,), a group of U.S. journalists, led by Jay Rosen, Davis “Buzz” Merritt Jr. and the late Cole Campbell promoted the idea of ‘public journalism’ (sometimes known as civic journalism) to newsrooms around the country. The primary role of journalists, in this tradition, is to facilitate conversations and dialogue within the community, and to create a public forum of sorts for ideas through that reporting. (It might not be advertised as such, but a lot of local news reporting is essentially public journalism).

To its credit, the Solutions Journalism Network is largely implementing the conflict facilitation frame in sojo. The group calls the approach ‘Complicating the Narratives,’ a term coined by journalist Amanda Ripley, who has spent years studying how conflict mediators think and work. Here’s a video in which she summarizes the approach:

The trouble is, sojo still gets stuck with a whiff of advocacy and activism. So, short of a name change (which feels performative), how do we go about challenging that?

Deliberative democracy

One approach is going back to journalism’s foundational relationship with democracy. Journalism and democracy are often thought of two sides of the same coin. But as the journalism scholar Michael Schudson convincingly argues in the 2008 book Why Democracies Need an Unlovable Press, journalism does not necessarily need democracy (though, arguably, democracy needs journalism). For instance, there are plenty of places where good journalism happens in the absence of any real democracy.

The point is not to parse out whether journalism and democracy go together or not. Let’s assume that they do, that they both need each other. Rather, the point is to think about what kind of democracy allows journalism to live up to its full potential?

Democracy is a catch-all term. Unfortunately, we rarely stop and think about the different types of democracies that can take shape. In the western world, most democracies nowadays are administrative. Citizens vote in elections every few years, the news media reports on that process (mostly as political entertainment, not news), and governments, which come and go with election cycles, manage the affairs of the city, state or country. It’s democracy for the people (and to line the profits of corporate media), not democracy by the people.

But democracy goes much deeper than just voting in elections every two or four years. Deliberative democracy, as the name suggests, is about the public — citizens — deliberating over matters of public concern, not necessarily during in an election cycle, but continously. In the context of journalism, it means writing stories about ordinary people showing up at city hall to voice concern over certain policies, tenants rallying together to pressure greedy landlords, Indigenous nations working together to challenge giant resource companies that threaten their lakes and rivers.

Conflict is central to this project. But it’s not the type of conflict that pits a Democratic congressperson arguing about something with a Republican member. Instead, as Simon Fraser University journalism professor Shane Gunster argues, the conflict inherent in these stories is mobilizing: it’s about people standing up to protect the places they call home, the values they cherish.

Often, the conflicts are internal (within communities, cities, even strata councils!), hence the need for deliberation. If a city wants to eliminate a policy banning natural gas in new home construction, the conventional news approach is to report on what the governing administration at city hall is proposing, and why people are opposed to it. This is Lance Bennett’s authority-disorder bias. But a more deliberative approach would unpack the tensions underlying the policy’s implementation or repeal. For example, it would look at the impact of burning fossil fuels in buildings, or it would introduce readers to groups working behind the scenes to promote or repeal the existing policy(ies). This, as opposed to providing stenographic accounts of the machinations at city hall.

As journalist, getting our hands dirty by picking at the deliberative activities happening within our democracy is, essentially, the work of facilitation and of conflict mediation.

If I just write about why this group of people hates that group of people, it’s unlikely I’ll get to any resolution or understanding as to what’s going on. But if, as SJN’s Amanda Ripley suggests, I ask my sources why they think the way they do, what they want the other side to understand, what they think other people misunderstand about them — and a whole host of other questions that come straight out of the handbook of conflict resolution– then I might get a handle on what’s really going on, and what people are (or could be) thinking about to fix it…without sounding like an activist or advocate.

That’s just good journalism.

This is also solutions journalism. But it’s solution journalism that puts the conflict and the deliberation — the messy work that’s happening behind the scenes (and that almost always gets lost in the noise of the journalistic ‘jousting’) — at the forefront of the journalistic discussion. It’s a totally different way of thinking about journalism.

By flipping the switch on journalism, and foregrounding conflict (with an eye on facilitation and mediation), we can not only do a better job cutting to the underlying reasons for why things are the way they are but, importantly, we can help come up with new questions and perspectives to investigate — which might help our sources (and ourselves, as journalists) reflect upon solutions.

That’s not advocacy. That’s research, investigation, and just good journalism.

For more on what is and what is not solutions journalism, see here and here.

The Solutions Journalism Network is the biggest and most influential group. But for other organizations promoting sojo, here and here and here.

To learn more about how investigative journalism and solutions go hand in hand, see the work of The Catalyst Journalism Project at the University of Oregon, here.

Solutions journalism needs better conflict, not less of it was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It is hard to believe, amid the endless noise and traffic of Mexico City, one of the world’s busiest metropolitan areas, that there once was an extensive network of rivers and lakes beneath the maze of concrete and buildings that cover the landscape now.

Less than 200 years ago, this region, ringed by volcanoes and once-fertile fields, was covered by a network of lakes. Today, all that’s gone.

In the cacophony of noise, dust and asphalt, Mexico City offers some of the best insights into how city planners can learn about building with nature. These were lessons that the Spanish colonizers who took over the Aztec capital of Tecnochtitlan never paid heed to, and flouted outright.

“It’s bizarre that Mexico City used to be known as the aquatic city — the water city,” says Thomas Kole, a Dutch 3D technical artist who mapped the region’s historic rivers and lakes in dramatic detail for his website (see his ‘A Portrait of Tenochtitlan’ above, in the lead image of my article).

“If you have a bright sunny day, and you go up a tall building, you can see little dust tornados from what was once Lake Texcoco” (the original lake upon which the city is built), he says. “There’s some crazy irony there.”

Hidden waterways

Many of the waterways that made up the Aztec capital no longer exist — unless you know precisely where to look. Recently, a group of hydrologists and biologists, along with representatives of SEDEMA, the municipal environmental authority, visited a tiny section of the Rio Tacubaya that is still flowing, largely unimpeded, next to a highway overpass. Here’s what it looked like in late April, 2026.

Like in other major cities, many of the rivers in Mexico City have been encased in concrete and buried. There are now concerted efforts to change that equation — to undo the mistakes of the past.

Elías Cattan is a Mexico City-based architect working on a series of projects to reduce the imprint of cars (he calls it a ‘car diet’) in one of the world’s busiest, most congested cities. At the heart of the effort is restoring the rivers that used to course through the city, “to create a ring of wetlands around Mexico’s central city,” and to connect those wetlands to watersheds via bike routes.

The hope is, Cattan tells me, that ‘greenifying’ the city will go hand-in-glove with the development of a ‘complete street network’ in Mexico City. “There should be a little wetland, or a rain garden or food production, or at least beautiful trees creating shade, in every street of the city.”

Undoing errors of the past

In Mexico, the disappearance of rivers and lakes stems from the colonization of the city, and the view of Spanish conquistadors, as several experts told me, that water had to be dredged in order to make the city more ‘sanitary,’ more ‘modern,’ and more ‘European.’

Today, the results of those disastrous decisions to multiple lakes and entomb rivers are plain for all to see. Frequent dust storms and terrible air pollution. Urban heat island effects. Flash flooding due to a lack of surfaces that naturally absorb the water. And, in a cruel twist of irony, depleting ground water reserves, and a city that’s literally sinking, as just-published data from NASA shows.

“Extensive groundwater pumping, combined with the weight of urban development, has resulted in the compaction of the ancient lakebed beneath the city for more than a century,” the newly-published research says. “By the 1990s and 2000s, parts of the metropolitan area were sinking by around 14 inches (35 centimeters) per year, damaging infrastructure including the Metro, one of the largest rapid transit systems in the Americas.”

The aquatic city

To get a glimpse into Mexico City’s watery past, you need to go well beyond the famous central square, the Zócalo, or the tony neighborhoods of Polanco and Roma Norte, to the barrio (district) of Xochimilco. There, past the slabs of concrete and asphalt, almost out of nowhere, emerge a series docks, lined with dozens of colourful boats called trajineras.

The trajineras double as party boats. But for those who get into one of them for a cruise around the sensitive ecological area — no booze and loud music allowed — an entirely different experience awaits. It’s like going on a secret expedition into a part of the city’s history that most don’t know exists. So, of course, I couldn’t resist.

The trajinero (the person steering) of my boat gingerly manoeuvers his vessel into a narrow lock, which raises, then lowers the wooden, flat-bottomed skiff onto the lake bed.

There’s no motor pushing this boat along. Just the trajinero, and a pole that provides remarkable propulsion through the narrow channels and calm, shallow water.

One of the first things a visitor to Xochimilco’s waterways encounters is a series of floating gardens, called chinampas. These represent the traditional farming system that was developed by the Mexica people who farmed here prior to the Spanish conquest. The chinampas are human-made agricultural islands built right on the lake bed. As such, their soil is highly fertile, providing food while naturally irrigating the water and supporting biodiversity.

The chinampas are a remarkable form of climate-resilient agriculture from pre-industrial times. In Xochimilco, they’re thriving. So far, they are not at risk of getting paved over for roads and highways (though major roads skirt by the lake, and there is the constant threat of illegal housing construction on what’s supposed to be farmland).

Thus, the paradox of protecting urban waterways: how to preserve the ways of the past while propelling a country into the future. It can be done, but, exerts told me, it requires, among other things, much more science education, and education about the natural world.

The younger generation that’s growing up around the chinamapas, Alejandro Alva, a hydrologist at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, tells me on my visit, are looking for jobs in the city. Alva says that unlike their parents and grandparents, young people living on the chinampas nowadays are less keen in a life of farming.

Conversely, city residents may not even be aware of the existence of these hidden waterways and agricultural lands along the southern edges of their city.

To change that calculus, some have been spearheading efforts to re-introduce the role that water plays in ways that are highly visible. One such effort is the Ecoducto de la Ciudad de México — a linear park built with water in mind.

‘A river runs through it’

Cattan, whose firm is working with local governments to demonstrate the viability of urban wetlands, describes himself as a ‘recovering architect.’

He’s had projects pulled from under his feet by government officials-including Claudia Sheinbaum, the former mayor of Mexico city, and now the president of the country, because, Cattan says, of his opposition to “obsolete urban highways.”

The world’s cities, including his, have long been built around the private automobile. He’s made it his goal to de-prioritize cars and to bring back elements of the natural world to places where highways and concrete rule the roost.

In 2017, and against the odds, Cattan and his team at the Mexico City-based architecture firm Taller13, came up with an idea for an elevated park right in the middle of one of Mexico City’s busiest roadways, the Viaducto Miguel Alemán. That park, el Ecoducto de la Ciudad de México, follows what was once a river — the Rio de la Piedad.

It was, he says, a demonstration project in response to government wanting to spend $100 million pesos (around $5 million Euros) and “us trying to demonstrate that a constructed public wetland is possible.”

Like other rivers, Rio de la Piedad has long been encased in concrete, and paved over to make way for the roadway.

But the Ecoducto aims to bring some modicum of life back to it by filtering rainwater through a series of mini-wetlands and back into the underground waterway. It essentially captures rainwater that would otherwise flood streets, by channeling it through the wetland.

The wetland function works in another way as well. The park also is marked by a series of biodigester units. Contaminated water from the concrete-encased, subterranean river is pumped up into the biodigesters. Those units use oxygen and plants to mimic how wetlands naturally purify water. Gravity does the rest — slowly releasing the purified water back into the river. The park, therefore, is a mini urban oasis, and dual-use wetland.

Colonization, Cattan tells me, “has broken our relationship to the rivers.” The Spanish conquistadors, he says, came from arid regions in the ‘motherland’ and saw Mexico City’s watery footprint as somehow something to be conquered.

Learning from the Netherlands

If there’s one country that knows about water, it’s the Netherlands. Thomas Kole, the 3D artist, was inspired to impart some of the lessons from his own country’s experience to understanding Mexico’s complex relationship with water.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, “when everyone was looking for something to do,” he came up with a project to map CDMX’s watery past.

The Netherlands and Mexico City, it turns out, face some of the same problems of hydrology. Both, Kole says, made mistakes trying to control the water. In the Netherlands, “we have had a lot of work to undo these changes. It took a lot of sacrifices in terms of giving up farmland and undoing construction projects.”

Easier when it’s a matter of a few farms, as was the case in Holland; much more difficult in a city of over 20 million.

The perception is that Mexico City’s air pollution problems are because the mountains lock in the pollution. But this perception is only partially true. The other reason is that a region home to lakes, wetlands and forests has now been transformed by humans into an endless sea of concrete.

“I think people see the basin of Mexico [City] today largely as problematic — earthquakes, the flooding, the drought, you’ve got the sinking of the soil,” Kole says (a problem that’s familiar to people in the Netherlands). But, he adds, without wanting to portray the pre-colonial past as a utopia, “it used to be a very pleasant place to be.”

It’s no surprise that the Mexica — the Aztecs — selected this place as their capital. The soil is extremely fertile given the volcanoes. It’s not too hot, not too cold. There were plenty of lakes and waterways. The Indigenous Peoples of the Valley, Kole says, “built in tandem with nature, as opposed to seeing nature as a problem to overcome,” as the Spanish colonizers clearly did.

Conquering nature?

That’s a sentiment echoed by Dr. Natalia Verónica Soto Coloballes, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Geography at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

“Air and water — they’re intricately connected,” she tells me. “In the 19th century, they were only thinking about modernizing and becoming more of a European city” with little regard for the region’s natural hydrology.

Today, one tiny restored piece of the original Lago de Texcoco is an artificial wetland next to Mexico City’s international airport. It’s called Lago Nabor Carillo. A plan to build a new airport 15 kilometres east on the same lakebed was cancelled in 2018 due to the multiple ecological and engineering concerns.

The cruel irony now is that not only is the city perpetually at risk of flooding from all that pavement — but that the dredging of the lakes, followed by decades of using up the groundwater, has left Mexico City at constant risk of running out of water.

Floods. Lack of water. Air pollution. These are all problems that stemmed from those catastrophic decisions to ‘re-engineer’ a natural landscape that should never have been re-engineered in the way that it was.

“They thought that removing the water would ‘clean up’ the city,” make it more ‘sanitary.’

“They had no idea…”

Lessons locked in language

The lack of science literacy is clearly a challenge when it comes to engaging politicians and the general public on environmental topics. One opening, however, is history. There is, it appears, a growing appetite in learning about how the lessons of the past apply to the world that’s shaping up today.

That’s something that Thomas Kole noticed when he made an effort to have his site translated into Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec civilization (spoken by around a million people today). He noticed that many people were clicking on the Nahuatl tab.

Kole has observed that about 10 per cent of visitors to his site click the tab to display the information in Nahuatl.

“I don’t think 10 per cent of people speak Nahuatl, not even close,” he says. “But people are interested, and are clicking on it.”

Translating, Kole says, is “easy from a technical perspective,” but you still need to find someone to accurately and authentically do the work. And so he did — his friend, Rodrigo Ortega Acoltzi, translated the entire site into Nahuatl.

Learning about Indigenous ways of knowing and being is seen as one of the springboards for environmental action.

“There are many people who want to improve the environment,” echoes professor Natalia Coloballes.

But, change happens slowly, especially when the political winds don’t blow strong enough to challenge the status quo, either because of special interests, competing priorities or, at worst, corruption and graft, which is endemic in Mexico.

Still, baby steps, like the Ecoducto, or translating a site into an Indigenous language, are visible change that everyone can see, even if it’s small. Seeing is believing. Especially when it’s local.

I ask hydrologist Alejandro Alva if he’s inspired by how other cities around the world have restored and protected their ancient waterways, such as Seoul’s experiment with daylighting the Cheonggyecheon river. His response? Why look far, when you can look close?

“I’m not inspired by Seoul,” he replies. “I’m inspired by the chinampas. I’m inspired by Xochimilco. I’m inspired by my knowledge about wetlands.”

In other words, it all comes down locally-inspired action and political mobilization. Local efforts to improve the built environment — for example, building the Ecoducto linear park to inspire a network of ‘complete streets’ — take time, energy, communication and resources. But they’re also shifting attitudes, and, slowly, pushing the status quo out of the way.

The ‘Watery’ Secrets of Mexico City was originally published in The New Climate. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Donald Trump warned congestion pricing would spell the end of New York City. The policy, he posted on Truth Social, would turn New York into a “ghost town.” Charging drivers to enter Manhattan would be unfairly punitive, echoed New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, who ‘indefinitely paused’ the policy in 2024 citing ‘hard-working New Yorkers are getting hammered… the economic vitality of our City must be protected’. New Jersey’s former governor, Phil Murray, called it a ‘disaster’ for commuters in his state.

In spite of all those doomy prognostications, New York City’s experiment with congestion pricing, one year on, has been a huge success by almost all accounts.

“The scaremongers were wrong,” declared The New York Times in an editorial last month. Even the local Fox News affiliate in New York couldn’t help but mention a decline in vehicle noise-related complaints. While Governor Hochul herself now says: “Congestion pricing has been a once-in-a-lifetime success story, leading to cleaner air, better transit, and faster and safer traffic throughout the city”. Adding on X, as if now happy to claim the credit:

So, what convinced these car-loving leaders that controlling the car population was the way to go after all?

The numbers are striking

Since the program in New York started on January 5, 2025, about 11 per cent fewer cars enter Manhattan below 61st Street each day, according to a report published by the city’s Metropolitan Transit Authority, the MTA. That’s around 73,000 fewer vehicles daily, according to The Times’ analysis. This amounts to 1.2 to 2.7 million fewer car trips per month, or about 21 million fewer vehicles in the first 10 months of the program, according to the MTA.

Fewer cars means more room to breathe (literally and figuratively), more space for people to walk, less noise, and increased safety.

There were 300,000 additional passengers riding the city’s extensive subway network each day — that’s almost 93 million extra riders in 2025 compared to 2024. As for vehicle speeds in the congestion zone, those, said the MTA, improved 4.6 per cent.

New York City’s bold plan shows that congestion pricing can attract support from unlikely quarters once critics see the transformation. When a city is less car-logged, people can get around more freely. This benefits local businesses, and the broader economy, as less time is wasted sitting in traffic. In British Columbia, where I live, the conservative think tank C.D. Howe Institute estimates that sitting in traffic costs the economy of the province’s most populous city, Vancouver, anywhere from $500 million to $1.2 billion (Canadian dollars) each year. Those are real dollars in the real economy.

Fewer cars, obviously, is good for the health and safety of residents as well. This is especially true in the developing world, where, the World Health Organization (WHO) concludes, 92 per cent of road deaths take place.

Gasping for clean air

Deadly air pollution is a daily reality for residents of some of the world’s biggest cities, notably Jakarta, Delhi, Tehran, Mexico City, and, yes, even sometimes Los Angeles still.

In rich countries, residents might not think of air pollution as a serious public health concern. This is in part because air quality warnings only go out when the air is obviously bad. But chronic exposure to much less ‘obvious’ levels of air pollution is also bad for health, as a growing corpus of scientific research shows.

A 2019 King’s College, London, study calculated that chronic exposure to air pollution in Bristol resulted in 260 premature deaths per year that city. There were similarly grim findings in Birmingham. There, the King’s College researchers found the population “would gain around 440,000 life years over a lifetime to 2134 if air pollution concentrations improved as projected from 2011 to 2030, compared with remaining at 2011 concentrations.”

It has also been argued that ‘low’ air quality readings are misleading because they underestimate the risk posed by chronic exposure to pollutants. In other words, the ‘low’ or ‘moderate’ air quality readings we’re used to seeing on our phones are real-time readings. They do not take into account chronic exposure to airborne pollutants, especially nanoparticles which are small enough to enter the bloodstream — and are present on our roadsides everyday.

Sounding the alarm

If that wasn’t enough of a under-reported health concern, here’s another one: noise pollution.

Cars are the number one source of urban noise. Yet, municipal noise regulations typically focus on annoying noises such as barking dogs, construction noise, or leaf blowers.

Noise from traffic, conversely, is constant and chronic in cities, and being exposed to it is a major public health concern. There is, moreover, extensive, incontrovertible evidence pointing to the harms of exposure to urban noise. The trouble is, people think it’s not a big deal, because they think they just get used to it.

One of the most comprehensive studies on the impact of urban noise was done in 2012 by researchers at the University of Connecticut and the University of British Columbia.

The population-level study used the anonymous health records of close to 450-thousand residents in and around the city of Vancouver, Canada. The study found that the risk of heart attack from chronic exposure to noise pollution were worse than exposure to toxic levels of air pollution. In every category, the negative health impacts of noise exceeded those of exposure to toxic air pollution, known as black carbon — the soot most commonly associated with diesel engines.

The common perception that you just get used to noise, says Hugh Davies, the co-author of this massive noise study, is simply not true.

He says you may think you are fast asleep, but your brains is still processing noise from a passing truck, a train, an ambulance siren, or whatever. Over time, this information processing leads to long-term stress (‘you can close your eyes, but you can’t really close your ears’). The evidence, per the chart above, and many other studies, clearly shows this chronic stress leads to higher rates of coronary heart disease over time.

“You can close your eyes, but you can’t really close your ears”

Thus, one major benefit of keeping cars out of cities is to keep the noise manageable. Parts of New York City are extremely noisy, even with congestion pricing. Still, “honking and vehicle noise complaints to 311 are down by 45% in 2025,” according to a news release posted by the governor’s office after the first six months of congestion pricing in The Big Apple.

Building connection

There’s one other, under-appreciated, little-understood benefit to making cities more walkable. It has to do with psychology.

A remarkable 2016 study by American urban planner Bruce Appleyard found some fascinating connections between childrens’ perceptions of safety and how they go to and from school.

Appleyard’s research concluded that children who are driven to school through car-dependent suburban communities were not only less able to describe their neighbourhood in detail (through drawings), but that their perceptions of the safety of those neighbourhoods ranked lower than kids who were driven in low-traffic neighbourhoods or, better yet, who walked to school.

He reached his conclusions by asking students to draw a picture of their commute. Here’s what he found.

This child drew a picture of their car-centric neighbourhood. The caption in Appleyard’s paper reads: “This child showed a high association with the threat of traffic before improvements (e.g., see the note in the lower right, “the cars never stop and there is too much trafick.”)

The child who lived in a light-traffic neighbourhood and who was able to bike or walk to school drew a much more accurate, detail-oriented map of the neighbourhood. The child also offered a much more positive description of the neighbourhood: “I like my neighbourhood because I have lots of friends, and because I can play there whenever I want. I like everything in my neighbourhood, and I dislike nothing in my neighbourhood, and I also ride my bike everywhere or I walk.”

In a third experiment, Appleyard showed how a child who lived in a low-traffic neighbourhood (e.g., bedroom community) but who was driven everywhere perceived their surroundings. The drawing did not impart upon safety. But it shows a series of disconnected ‘modules’ connecting the key spaces in the child’s world–home, school, the mall, a friend’s house, etc.

The moral of the story? Communities built around people (as opposed to cars) are perceived as safer, more interconnected, and happier.

Challenging car-centric urban planning

Congestion pricing is nudge to move already car-centric cities in a different direction. Other cities have made much bolder efforts to reverse the tide of car-centric urban planning.

The most famous example of such a reversal is Amsterdam. The capital of the Netherlands, known for its bike culture and canals, had at one point, been planned around the private automobile, not unlike so many cities in America.

This ‘futuristic’ rendering of the city, published in the late 1960s by an American traffic planner, David Jokinen, and looking ahead to the year 2000, argued that the way to save Amsterdam’s historic neighbourhoods was to build a huge ring road around them. The highways, Jokinen argued, were central to the city’s modernization — and Amsterdam’s city planners initially bought into the idea.

These photographs from the 1960s show that city was adopting thatcar-centric planning with gusto.

Then, in the 1970s, a series of deadly traffic accidents involving children (over 400 children were killed in traffic accidents in 1971), led to a chorus of residents pushing back against the car-centric planning. They called it “Stop de Kindermoord” (or stop the child murder).

The city stopped the sprawl just in time. Otherwise, the Amsterdam of today could have looked more like Houston, Texas.

Bucking the trend

Back in New York, there is another reason to think positively about congestion pricing — and this one’s something everybody can get on board: money.

There’s clear evidence that the revenue generated by the program is substantive, and far higher than the expenses associated with the initiative. The data looks like this:

Around the world, more cities are realizing that the car-centric urban planning of the 1950s has no place in the 21st century. There’s also growing awareness that car-centric design makes for less desireable, liveable neighbourhoods. That’s a point made by Charles L. Marohn, Jr. his book, “Confessions of a Recovering Engineer.”

“Our neighborhoods are simply not valuable enough as places either to warrant or sustain themselves without some automobile access,” Marohn writes. Transportation planning, he says, “is ultimately about making the places we inhabit so prosperous, so productive, so valuable, and so inviting that they transcend the need to accommodate the automobile.”

For decades, traffic engineers adopted contingencies to make driving more safe. This included wider roadways, clear zones on both sides of a road allow space if a driver were to lose control, and other types of auto-first ‘forgiving design.’ The equation, Marohn says, should be flipped in cities to prioritize pedestrian and driver safety.

The thinking away from car-centric design is starting to show up in urban planning policy.

In British Columbia, where that massive noise pollution study was carried out, the government recently passed Bill 47. That law is meant to accelerate high-density, and theoretically, less car-centric design, living along transit corridors.

Montreal has seen a rapid transformation of its cycling network over the past 10 years. The crown jewel of the system is a 191-kilometre protected bike lane network known as “réseau express vélo” (fast cycling network). The French-speaking city is one of the best examples of cycling-forward urban planning in North America.

But the contemporary poster child for challenging moto-normativity in urban planning is Paris. Its former mayor, Anne Hidalgo, turned a car-centric megacity into a haven for urban cycling.

Hidalgo’s transformations in Paris were radical and multifaceted (and have many drivers fuming). They didn’t even rely on congestion pricing; it went much further than that. Instead, Paris created low-emission zones, implemented parking restrictions put in place and steeper parking fees, even banned cars from certain neighbourhoods.

London has been on this path for even longer. Its Congestion Charge was launched in 2003. Back then, private vehicles clogged the roads and the time lost to congestion cost the economy an estimated £4 million per week. It was so successful (and surprisingly politically popular) that it was followed by the Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) in 2019, targeting the oldest, most polluting private cars, vans and motorcycles. Until the ULEZ was introduced, meeting the UK’s legal pollution limit for NO2 was set to take almost 200 years. Thanks to the ULEZ and the congestion charge, London met this limit in 2025 — just nine years after the ULEZ came in.

Not every city’s going to have the political wherewithal to go as far as Paris and London. But, adopting a congestion price in North America — the spritiual home of modern autombile culture — one could argue, is just as radical and transformative as what Hidalgo did in Paris. The challenge now is to expand that people-forward thinking in urban planning, and start designing all our cities for residents and not for cars.

The Remarkable Success of New York’s Congestion Pricing Plan was originally published in The New Climate. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Jared Girman is passionate about waste. But not in ways you might think. Girman is the Director of Strategic Initiatives at West Coast Reduction. It’s a waste organics company based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

In his role, Girman is responsible for finding ways to take organic waste material — think of the oil that is left behind in a deep fryer after your fries are cooked — and finding a market for that leftover organic waste product.

“The roots of the business,” Girman tells me over a Zoom call, “are finding useful things to do with materials that other people discard.”

The problem is that too much used cooking oil ends up where it’s not supposed to — in the drain. This leads to those giant, disgusting, sewer-clogging blocks of fat that cause all sorts of headaches for cities.

Last December, London learned the hard way — again — the mess that these ‘fatbergs’ cause. A solid block of gunk, weighing an estimated 100 tonnes, was discovered blocking sewers in east London. This, after an even bigger fatberg was discovered in 2017.

One solution is taking used restaurant cooking oil (often canola or soybean oil in deep fryers) before it makes it way to the sewers, and turning it into a low-carbon biofuel.

This requires cleaning the used cooking oil of impurities and refining it to meet the standards required by industrial petroleum refineries, Girman tells me. Those refineries then blend up to 10 per cent of the treated organic (e.g., cooking) oil into their crude oil feedstock. This process can be used to produce lower-carbon gasoline, diesel or even jet fuel.

If the latter sounds like a technological pipe dream, it isn’t. Sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF, is made with biofuels. This happens by chemically transforming the biofuel in a lab. The synthetic product that is produced is typically blended into conventional jet fuel, which is derived from crude. The process reduces the overall carbon content, leading to a ‘sustainable’ aviation fuel.

However, the cost of SAF is between two and five times the cost of ‘regular’ jet fuel. The RefuelEU regulations in the European Union — arguably the world’s most ambitious SAF regulations — call for two per cent of jet fuel used in the EU to be SAF, with that proportion going up significantly over the next 20 years (70 per cent has been floated, but a lot is still TBD).

So why biofuels at all? They are considered low-carbon since the carbon content of the organic material from which the oil was made has already been accounted for the first time that material was used. In the case of used cooking oil, the primary use is deep frying your food. Any secondary use is a net-zero bonus.

The challenge in producing biofuels is not a lack of deep fryer oil, or any other leftover organic product, for that matter. The taller order, experts like Girman say, is creating an economic market, free of government subsidies, for organic byproducts. This includes everything from used cooking oil to more conventional sources of biomass such as wood chips or agricultural residues — all of which release carbon into the atmosphere unless they are ‘recycled’ into biofuels.

Theoretically, anything with a carbon molecular chain is a candidate for conversion into biofuel. This even includes plastic water bottles. Yet currently the market and supply chain is such that it’s still cheaper to send a single use water bottle to landfill than it is to melt it down and turn it into a biofuel.

But that is changing, thanks to government subsidies, savvy entrepreneurs, growing scientific research — and awareness by the general public that organic waste is not technically ‘waste.’

Biofuel headwinds

One strategy for amping up the market for biofuels is to offer price incentives. This typically happens through carbon credits. For example, in Canada, where West Coast Reduction, and its refinery partner, Parkland, operate, the carbon credit for biofuels trades was trading at $375 per tonne of CO2 equivalent in late October, 2025.

That’s a lot.

The pricing scheme gives everyone along the supply chain, including restaurants needing a place to send their cooking oil, a reason to get behind the biofuels manufacturing supply chain.

It’s literally from the deep fryer to your gas tank.

But biofuels are not cheap to produce. There’s a lot of chemical engineering and upgrading that needs to happen for a biofuel that meets fuel producers’ specifications.

Biomass is typically high in oxygen content. “Nearly 45 to 50 per cent [of it is] oxygen”, Animesh Dutta, a mechanical engineer at University of Guelph, tells me. That oxygen needs to be removed through a process called hydrogenation. This involves pumping hydrogen into the oil to remove the oxygen content.

In the case of used cooking oil, there are also plenty of impurities that need to be accounted for as well. And yes, these include leftover bits of french fries. But also, says Girman, detergents and other products may end up in the oil. None of these impurities can exist in the biofuel that’s sent to a refinery for mixing into crude oil. That oil, he says, has to meet very precise specifications, and be traceable.

That and the fact that “every refinery has a little bit of a different mousetrap, so they require different specifications,” Girman adds.

Pyrolysis oil

At a nondescript lab in a corner of the University of British Columbia, Professor Tony Bi and his team of engineers aren’t trying to solve the mysteries of used cooking oil, as tantalizing as that may be.

Used cooking oil, Bi says, is in high demand — fetching a price, he says, that is almost as competitive as fresh oil. You can thank the carbon credits for that.

But at his lab at UBC, the researchers are working on another type of biofuel: pyrolysis oil.

It, too, is a liquid fuel that comes from biomass. But unlike used cooking oil that is already in liquid form when it’s collected from those kitchen deep fryers, pyrolysis oil is made from solid biomass – things like agricultural residues and forestry waste.

How does it work?

To make pyrolysis oil, the UBC chemical engineers feed organic waste material — most commonly, wood chips, but also coconut shells and plastic water bottles — into a giant reactor known as a pyrolizer.

It’s essentially a giant cooker that heats up the material without allowing oxygen to get in. Think of a barbecue with an apparatus that prevents oxygen from entering the grill. The high heat and low-oxygen conditions melts the carbon chain in the biomass. It produces a carbon-intensive product that can then be condensed back into liquid form.

But bio-oil, which is a type of biofuel, has its own technical hurdles. “That’s nasty stuff,” says McGill University bioresource engineering professor Mark Lefsrud. It’s heavy, full of oxygen, and is a generally low-quality product, Lefsrud informs. In short, none of its properties make it ideal for transportation fuel.

Forget about the challenge of finding enough wood chips or corn husks to feed into the pyrolysis machine for conversion into bio-oil. The real challenge, Bi concurs, though in less colourful terms, is “still the quality” of the bio-oil that comes out of the giant cooker.

Dutta, and other experts I spoke to all agree: Nobody has quite figured out a way to take the heavy, unstable and sludgy bio-oil and upgrade it at scale to supply petroleum refineries.

There is, theoretically, enough of a supply chain of forest residues, to say nothing of used water bottles. But even creating a supply chain for those products — say, finding a cost-effective way to ship wood waste to a pyrolysis reactor, or changing the market dynamics of water bottle recycling so it’s cheaper to melt them than to landfill them — is an challenge.

There’s also the fact that you need millions of tonnes of pyrolysis oil, if petroleum refineries are going to use it. Refineries, McGill’s Mark Lefsrud tells me, don’t pay you attention if you’re producing one or two tonnes.

“Most people think I’m producing a lot when I produce 30 tonnes,” he says. The refineries, meanwhile, say “no, no, no. A lot is when you hit 300 million tonnes. It’s not even a thousand tonnes. It’s millions of tonnes. Now, we can start playing the game.”

It might surprise you that, to date, biomass cooked up in a pyrolyzer is primarily used as a food additive. But even then, the use-cases and the market are relatively small. The principle feedstock for creating the additive, known as ‘liquid smoke,’ is hardwood, such as oak or maple. That’s where the smoky flavour of substance comes from. On food labels, it often shows up as ‘natural smoke flavour’ or ‘natural flavours.’ Sometimes terms like ‘hickory’ show up as well. The UBC lab isn’t producing anything for human consumption. But the day I visited, the whole place had the wonderful smell of a Kansas BBQ shack!

‘Tallowing’ up the numbers

And so the hunt begins for sources of organic waste that can be more easily and more cheaply converted into the stuff that refineries want.

Even if the chemistry and quality issues are addressed, every expert I spoke with says there isn’t enough of an established supply chain of corn husks, wildfire thinnings, and cooking oil to produce bio-oil or any number of other types of biofuels.

Therefore, “in order to produce the volumes that [refineries] need,” says West Coast Reduction’s Jared Girman, “we have to look to other sources.”

Enter the market for ‘waste’ animal products. Specifically, beef tallow, the hard fat that comes from rendered animal products.

The meatpacking industry, Girman tells me, is perceived as a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.

But good meatpackers ensure that every part of the animal is used. His company, whose slogan is “Nothing Left Behind,” takes waste products from farmed animals — think guts, feathers, even chicken beaks — and converts them into fats and oils, and proteins for the pet food industry.

The fats and oils previously went to the cosmetic and soap industries. But nowadays, Girman says, they “primarily go to renewable fuel production.”

If it wasn’t for these products, he adds, there wouldn’t be enough of a feedstock to supply refineries with the volumes that they need. “Cooking oil,” he emphasizes, “is not the main feedstock” — at least not in Canada, where West Coast Reduction operates. “We don’t necessarily deep fry as much as they do in the [United] States, and so we don’t have the same volume of raw material that other areas have. And, additionally, we’re pretty spread out, so hauling that material great distances is cost prohibitive.”

Dollars and cents

There is something quaint about the oil your french fries are cooked in also being useful to power a car, much less a flight. But is used cooking oil ultimately a reliable enough market for low-carbon fuels?

Not really.

It’s a piece of the puzzle, but not the biggest piece. Instead, for biofuels to really take off, it’s going to take an ‘all-of-the-above’ approach.

The more materials, the bigger the supply chain, the more likelihood of scaling. Ultimately, it comes down to price, technology, and a big-enough supply chain.

The price governments are willing to pay to accelerate the low-carbon energy transition, and the technology required to be able to inject more high-quality, low-carbon biofuel into carbon-intensive crude — the stuff that comes out of the ground and that sends unmitigated, unabated pollution (that would otherwise have never escaped out of the ground) back into the atmosphere.

There is a long way before used cooking oil from your local McDonald’s will be able to entirely replace the crude oil dug out of the ground and refined into useful transportation fuel.

But that’s not stopping entrepreneurs and researchers from trying. And with the market for low-carbon fuels taking off, the refineries, Girman says, are hungry for this stuff. “We provide them with everything that we are able to produce.”

From the Deep Fryer to Your Gas Tank was originally published in The New Climate. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Could it be possible for an ancient technology to act as a real-world solution to the ever-worsening climate emergency?

Those pushing for the widespread adoption of biochar certainly hope so.

Biochar is a charcoal-like substance that is made by smouldering organic material in high-heat conditions. Something as simple as an earth kiln will do. But modern technology uses a machine known as a pyrolyzer. It heats biomass and other carbon-rich material in a low-oxygen environment — without the incumbent air pollution of a traditional kiln.

The purpose of pyrolysis is so the material breaks apart instead of burning. Sapped of oxygen, the biomass turns into a carbon-rich substance known as biochar.

Imagine a loaf of bread in your oven with the door of the oven sealed shut. There is little to no fire burning in there, just heat. That extreme heat, minus the oxygen, converts the biomass — in this case, the loaf of bread — into the burned material known as biochar.

You don’t want to eat the charred bread, obviously. But that char is actually a golden opportunity for reducing the amount of carbon dioxide that ends up in the atmosphere.

How?

Typically, the manufactured biochar gets applied as a fertilizer on farmer’s fields, locking the carbon that would have otherwise escaped into the atmosphere from decomposing biomass, says Kathleen Draper, the U.S. Director at the Ithaka Institute for Carbon Intelligence, a biochar research and advocacy group.

“Biochar is focused on disrupting the carbon cycle for the long-term,” Draper tells me. In other words, it’s a carbon storage method; instead of the carbon seeping into the atmosphere from rotting biomass, biochar produced by pyrolyzing that biomass locks the carbon in and gives it a second lease on life, typically as a product for soil remediation.

Don’t call it ‘waste’

One of the ways that companies are working to mass produce biochar is by using the voluminous amounts of corn residue that are left behind once the crop is harvested.

Farmers in the United States grow around 100 million acres of corn each year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That’s over 40 million hectares of land. It roughly corresponds to 400 million metric tonnes of corn stalks, leaves and cobs that end up on the field after the kernels are sold on the market.

The agricultural byproducts, known as corn stover, decompose slowly as they rot, releasing planet-warming carbon back into the atmosphere.

Often, this product is called plant waste, or agricultural waste. But, if managed properly, there is a massive business opportunity to take those huge volumes of corn stover, soybean husks, and other forms of biomass (including wood) and to convert them into a carbon-rich material that can then be re-purposed and sold.

Charm Industrial is one company that is innovating pyrolysis technology to make carbon-rich bio-oil and biochar, which can be used for permanent carbon removal or industrial decarbonization.

Instead of reinventing carbon capture, Charm, along with other biochar-manufacturing firms, starts with the carbon that plants have already absorbed, and uses modern technology to prevent that carbon from ending up in the atmosphere.

These firms typically use a fleet of mobile pyrolysis machines that operate at high heat and low oxygen, right on the edge of a farm field, or as we will see, a forest.

The powerful reactors convert plant residue into two products. Biochar is applied on fields as a soil amendment, typically mixed with manure or compost. But plant residue can also be liquidized to yield a stable, carbon-rich bio-oil, which companies like Charm transport separately to be stored permanently underground (we’ll have more to say on bio-oil in a follow up story).

In the case of soil remediation, says Colleene Thomas, Charm’s agricultural and forest policy expert, the biochar “can enhance soil carbon and soil structure, helping soil to hold water better and providing nutrients to crops.”

It’s a clever way for farmers to improve the health of their land, using a byproduct they grew on that land in the first place, while preventing planet-warming carbon emissions from decomposing agricultural residue (‘plant waste’) from entering the atmosphere.

It’s also a way to avoid purchasing expensive and/or synthetic chemical fertilizers, which are often imported.

It all sounds great. But the challenge, Thomas, and other experts say, is how to scale.

Corn stalks are bulky and voluminous. They need to be baled, loaded up onto the back of a truck, and hauled to a processing facility. The cost of hauling makes it uneconomic to truck stover long distances, which limits the extent to which it can used.

The mobile units help bring those costs down.

But ultimately, it’s about finding more ways to make biochar commercially scalable.

Enter: woody biomass, especially low-grade wood fiber, from forestry practices.

“Corn stover,” says Kathleen Draper, “is a good feedstock, but I certainly wouldn’t say it’s one of the best.”

Wood fiber optics

As Draper intimates, crop waste (that would leak carbon if let to rot on the field) is just one source of biomass. The other big source is low-value wood products, notably logs that have been cleared (aka ‘wildfire thinnings’) to reduce fire risk in a forest.

In other words, biochar is a ‘desireable’ byproduct of forest management operations. “Mitigating fires by reducing resides,” she tells me, “is huge.” You thin out the forest to reduce the fire risk, and use the forest ‘waste’ to make carbon-sequestering biochar.

Forest manager Erik Leslie is in charge of a community forest in the Kootenay region of British Columbia. It’s called Harrop-Proctor.

For Leslie and his team, adapting to the growing climate risk in the 11-thousand hectare ecosystem he manages near the town of Nelson, B.C., involves everything from planting more fire-resistant species, to improving access for firefighters to reach hot spots in the next fire.

Importantly, the work also involves thinning the tree cover to give a wildfire less fuel with which to spread.

The trees that are cleared to sap the next potential wildfire of fuel are typically low-grade, smaller-diameter, or rotten trunks that are not of great value to the lumber or pulp and paper industries.

This is where the potential market for biochar comes in.

These trunks would either go up in flames in a prescribed burn (releasing carbon into the air), or be used as firewood (also, releasing carbon, when burned), or might be piled at sites in or near the forest, where they would rot and decompose over time.

Leslie says it would be greatly beneficial to small-scale foresters if there were a greater business case for that otherwise wasted wood.

“There is a lot of supply (of woody biomass) out there,” he says. “But the problem is there isn’t demand” — other than shipping wood pellets halfway around the world to places like Korea and Japan where they are burned to generate electricity.

That’s changing — but slowly. Biochar expert Kathleen Draper says, that with carbon removal credits becoming more widely available, biochar from wildfire thinnings is beginning to be more economical. Still, the markets for this product are fledgling.

The scaling challenge

Contrary to conventional wisdom, Draper says, biochar isn’t a substitute for carbon that would otherwise need to come from coal in energy intensive processes like steel manufacturing (which require injections of massive amounts of carbon).

But that does not mean biochar doesn’t have other important applications, or isn’t a hugely useful tool for preventing planet-warming carbon from ending up into the atmosphere.

It is.

The challenge, at the moment, is just creating enough of a supply chain for the use-cases that do exist, namely soil remediation, and even odour control.

In the absence of that supply chain, says Animesh Dutta, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Guelph, it does not matter how good your technology is. “So there’s huge potential. But, again, the supply chain is limited.” You can have all the biochar in the world but if there is no viable market for it, then scaling is devilishly difficult.

Dutta has tried to find companies willing to work with him and his lab; a lot, he says, are not willing to take the risk of sinking money into research and development, not knowing what kind of market is available, if any.

It’s a classic chicken and egg problem, he says. The product and the technology are there. But to use it, you need the policy incentives, which, to date, have not been robust enough to really allow biochar manufacturing to scale.

Trial and error

But some experts are looking at expanding the things that biochar can do. The theory being, that with more applications, the easier it will be to go big.

For example, chemical engineers at the Clean Energy Research Centre at the University of British Columbia are working to enhance the properties of biochar, so that it can be used in more applications.

One of those high-end applications is treating wastewater.

Biochar is very porous, like a sponge, explains Tony Bi, a chemical engineering professor, and the former director at the UBC research lab. This means it is perfect for removing harmful particles and molecules from toxic compounds.

Think of it as a powerful charcoal filter. If scaled, high-end biochar could filter out heavy metals and other toxins from wastewater. It could be used to clean up waterways that are choking with algae. It could even be used to remove ‘forever chemicals’ that leak out of old cookware and end up in the natural environment.

However, to create those high-grade filters would require taking the kind of run-of-the-mill biochar used in soil remediation, and using still-to-be-developed chemical manufacturing processes to create more toxin-absorbing pores on the surface of the biochar.

That’s chemically complex, requires a lot of research and development — what Bi’s team at UBC is working on.

To scale this work, experts say, requires more policy incentives. Right now that incentive structure is not there.

“A lot of the technologies are still at the pilot scale or the demonstration (scale),” Bi says. “That’s why I say the technology still needs to be matured before we can get it deployed.”

Classic chicken and egg.

Biochar-ting a new course

In the fall of 2024, Charm, the San Francisco-based carbon removal company, partnered with the U.S. National Forest Service and the National Forest Foundation to set up a temporary pyrolysis operation in California’s Inyo National Forest.

The trees that had been cut to thin the forest did not have a market as firewood, much less as lumber.

“There’s a fair amount of biomass coming off those mountains right now,” Charm’s Colleene Thomas says, as communities take preventive action to clear the forest floor of fuel that would otherwise supercharge a wildfire.

So the company’s engineers set up shop, creating a mini industrial plant near the forest, to feed the low-grade wood into a pyrolysis machine, for conversion into biochar, and, liquidizing it into bio-oil as well.

This work is happening in other places as well. Erik Leslie, the B.C. forest manager, points to an experimental project in the town of Pemberton, also in B.C., involving two First Nations. They’ve partnered with an engineering research company specializing in pyrolysis to bring in a mobile unit to convert wildfire thinnings into biochar — with the hope of being able to find a market for it.

Elsewhere, in the interior of forest-rich British Columbia, Kevin Smith is running a biochar company using copious amounts of forest residuals the province of B.C. requires logging companies to dispose of. It amounts to “thousands and thousands of tonnes,” Smith says of the leftover limbs, tops, branches and stumps that typically just get burned.

In other words, it’s not just huge industrial players with deep pockets, such as Charm, getting into the biochar business.

To get the business running, Smith partnered with an engineering research company specializing in pyrolysis. That firm, Takachar, does work removing agricultural residues off farmers’ fields in India — a huge source of urban air pollution as those residues are burned by farmers to clear the land, as typically happens near Delhi.

“We take these slash piles, we grind it into wood chips, and then those wood chips go through our reactor,” Smith says.

Much like Charm’s setup, Smith’s company, SilvaChar, set up a mobile unit in a forest cutblock, where a large horizontal grinder converts the wood waste into the feedstock, which is then fed into the pyrolyzer.

Again, selling the biochar at scale is the big challenge. There is a lot of awareness and education that needs to happen. He’s even looking to elementary and school groups to sell little ‘care packets’ of biochar ahead of Earth Day, to raise awareness.

“Eventually, I would like to see biochar in every garden centre across the country,” he says. “People simply don’t know that it’s an option” — for everything from lawns, soil remediation, to odour management and sopping up oily messes on your driveway, he tells me.

“We’re really trying to build awareness and education, so that people can come to us and and learn about biochar and the different applications for it,” Smith says.

The year of biochar?

So, will biochar finally ‘come of age’ in 2026? That’s the million dollar question for a lot of producers.

“Biomass holds a great potential to manage carbon and it has been doing that for millions of years,” Charm’s Colleene Thomas says. “Plants are the original carbon sequesterers.”

But, “it comes down to cost,” says SilvaChar’s Kevin Smith. “It is costly to make, at scale.”

Despite this, surveys of biochar producers have shown that the market is rapidly expanding. It was worth $156 million in 2021. But it was estimated to hit $2.95 billion (with a B) last year.

So there’s clearly something in the air.

But for the average producer, like Smith, developing a brand new market in the absence of incentives, or more awareness, is still a lot of work. He says he’s reached out to big box stores “‘until I’m blue in the face” — but retail managers won’t take on his product because they simply do not understand how it works and what its benefits are.

“There are a lot of people that have tried and failed to make and sell biochar,” he says.

He’s doing everything he can to not be one of them.

Will 2026 Finally Be the Year of Biochar? was originally published in The New Climate. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Twenty years ago, city planners in South Korea’s capital chose to do something highly disruptive and transformative. They ripped out an ugly, noisy and highly-polluting elevated expressway that had been built right in the middle of this bustling metropolis of 10 million.

To make a statement of sorts, Seoul preserved three of the highway pillars as a reminder of the scar the roadway cut through the city.

In its stead, engineers daylighted the original stream that had once coursed its way through the centre of South Korea’s capital region.

Today, that stream — the Cheonggyecheon — runs unimpeded for over 10 kilometers through downtown Seoul. It is the centrepiece of a massive linear park full of mini waterfalls, birds and, of course, people (no cars allowed).

It is remarkable to think that, just over a generation ago, the landscape here was a place that hardly any living creature would ever want to ever set foot in.

Still, a visitor to this unlikely park might be forgiven for wondering why there are no restaurants, cafés or shopping plazas anywhere in sight along the banks of the Cheonggyecheon (pronounced chong-ee-chon). To take a stroll through the Cheonggyecheon can feel a little, well, underwhelming.

Contrast that to other river reset projects around the world.

In San Antonio, Texas, visitors and residents marvel at an array of enticing food and entertainment establishments lining that city’s extensive River Walk. Sure, they can walk along the river, just as in Seoul. But they can also stop for a beer, a burger or an ice cream all the same.

The same can be said for Singapore’s riverwalk. Nice, right? I don’t disagree.

But there’s an understated difference between the public park represented in Seoul’s experiment versus the commercialized experience of ‘public’ spaces in other cities.

In Vancouver, B.C., another city known for its premiere waterfront real estate, some planning influencers want to see food and entertainment venues along the park-like seawall. This would presumably be to ‘liven up’ a precious urban gem they describe as “kind of boring” and a “no man’s land” after dark.

Seoul’s city planners opted for a different approach (and hopefully Vancouver’s will too). They never saw the public park that became the Cheonggyecheon as boring. The objective of the Cheonggyecheon redevelopment was always about ecological restoration — not commercial development.

Inadvertently or not, the engineers and planners in Seoul realized that what makes cities strong are not privately-managed plazas lined with cafes, bars and restaurants — as attractive as such venues are.

Instead, what makes cities strong is the preponderance of public spaces. Places that are welcoming to anyone and everyone and at any time. Places that might not be as posh or enticing as shopping plazas, with fancy patios and tony cafes.

But places that anyone can amble through — without worrying that some mall security guard is going to kick you out because you’ve been lingering for too long, or dressed too inappropriately.

Places that you don’t need to apply for a permit to join your friends in the morning for tai chi or an impromptu picnic.

Places that are not meant for private vehicles to barrel through, on busy roads, with little concern for the surrounding neighbourhoods or the original unbuilt environment.

Barcelona’s superblocks

One of the most famous examples of reclaiming space from private automobiles — and converting it into public space for people — is in Spain’s second-largest city, Barcelona.

The planning department, in concert with some supportive city councillors and active transportation advocates, made a conscious decision around 10 years ago to convert traffic-clogged arteries into blocked-off quadrants – known as superislas (or superblocks in English) – primarily for the benefit of pedestrians and cyclists.

It was contentious at first. Some businesses in the Poblenou district, where the initiative was first trialed, fretted that the loss of vehicle traffic would make accessing homes and businesses a nightmare. Others worried about an increase in noise onto adjoining streets as traffic was diverted out of the superblocks.

But none of those initial concerns really came to pass.

The blocked off streets are open to vehicular traffic, but only in very constrained fashion: couriers, emergency vehicles and the like.

Now, instead of being thoroughfares for car traffic – and largely devoid of urban street life as a result – the superblocks are hives of pedestrian activity, with parks, public benches, and street-level games and activities sprinkled throughout.

The initiative has also brought a modicum of peace and tranquility to areas previously racked by the thrum of motor vehicles — areas that were once devoid of life, and meant solely as space to get cars from A to B. Now, in some communities, that space has been turned into places where people can congregate, and the neighbourhood can thrive.

Cities are for people — not for private interests

The Cheonggyecheon riverside park in Seoul might not be glitzy. It might not be brash. It might not even be ‘fun.’ But in all its simplicity and its sereneness, it is a reminder that cities are first and foremost for people.

For residents to stick their feet in the river on days when the mercury hits 40 degrees. Or for residents to go for a jog whenever they please.

They are not for private vehicles to take over public space. They are not for glitzy commercial development that make nearby public libraries look like second rate establishments. They are not for private investors or mall landlords to squeeze profits out of tenants and shoppers.

The strongest cities in the world emphasize the point about the public — and remind residents of it repeatedly. They prove it through actions and infrastructure. They widen streets for trees and sidewalks and street furniture, not for more car traffic.

The urban planners in these places feel empowered to celebrate and encourage more public spaces. They know that these spaces encourage civic engagement and public participation. And businesses thrive too, as people turn up to enjoy those new public spaces. This happened in Barcelona.

A different kind of noise

The noisy public protests and rallies that you see in the civic square — from Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto to Place de la Bastille, Paris — are not the kinds of events you would see in the outdoor plaza of a privately-managed shopping centre or in the lobby of an office complex. Those would be shut down in short order.

Rather, the public square is meant to enhance what German philosopher Jürgen Habermas’ described as the “public sphere” in his foundational text, “The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.”

Because public space is, at its core, it’s about citizenship and public participation in democratic life.

Habermas says the public sphere is the glue that binds society together, affording residents (by which he mostly meant European white men hanging out in the bourgeois cafes of Paris, of course) the possibility of coming together to engage with important matters of the day, to voice collective opinions on issues of mutual interest, and/or to influence the political class — ideally in ways that are free from commercial or market forces.

The cafe culture that is one example of Habermas’ public sphere is not a perfect analogy for free, unfettered public spaces. But the idea is: a public space is one where you are not bombarded with advertisements, not lured in by competing private interests, not subject to the gaze of private guards who might not like what you’re wearing.

In short, public spaces are where there is nature, free services (e.g., libraries, recreational centres), walks, relaxation ponds – and most importantly space for free expression and protest (as ‘inconvenient’ as that may be to some governments, from the municipal to the national level).

From private property to public interests

If there is one thinker who should get credit for inspiring the concept of ‘public’ property over ‘private,’ it should be the 19th century American political economist Henry George.

He’s not exactly a household name, especially in his home country — but his ideas are finding new purchase, including among some unexpected audiences.

George argued that land belongs to everybody, that it is a divine right: everybody needs land, literally, to live on.

He said that privatizing it — essentially turning land into a commodity, bought and sold on the open market, and exposed to the expansionary tack of capitalism — exacerbates inequalities, including making housing affordability and homelessness worse, by enable rent-seeking.

George’s ideas, which he expressed in his 1879 book “Progress and Poverty,” have long been dismissed as leftist ideology, especially by more right-leaning leaning citizens of his own country, who, in general, support the notion of privatized land, which George was critical of.

But George was not a socialist. In fact, he believed in private markets and capitalization. But he felt that capitalizing land was fundamentally unfair, because everybody needs access to land (much like they need access to air; imagine if you had to pay for that, or if you could ‘invest’ in it).

Now, with home prices out of reach for ordinary citizens in most of the developed world, George’s ideas about controlling the influence of privatized land in society (think: condos as investment vehicles) are finding a foothold among a broader range of analysts and planners, including centrists and conservatives, to say nothing of his committed fans, known as ‘Georgists.’

(Fun fact! The famous game of Monopoly was invented by a fan of Henry George by the name of Elizabeth Magie. Her notion for the game included a version that highlighted the problems with rent-seeking, as well as a version emphasizing the cutthroat nature of property markets. Only the second version of the game ended up being mass produced into the famous board game everybody knows today).

The theories of Henry George help cut through the simplistic (and oft-repeated) view posited by governments and the news media that real estate prices are high simply because there is a shortage in the absolute supply of housing.

Instead, Henry George identifies land speculation (i.e., using land, and housing, as a private investment tool and piggybank) as the real culprit for skyrocketing housing prices.

His theories can be used to pick at the idea that it’s not a shortage of the absolute number of homes that leads to housing unaffordability, as we often hear from politicians (‘we need to build more housing’ — as thousands of condos sit vacant in some of the world’s most expensive real estate markets).

Rather, it’s the lack of the right kinds of housing: housing built with the intent, first and foremost, for people to live in, not for investors to make a buck from (i.e., housing as a human right, not an investment vehicle, to be traded like a stock or mutual fund on the stock market).

For years, it’s been the other way around: an investor-fueled private condo market that’s given government a convenient excuse to get out of the work of promoting purpose-built rental housing and other affordable types of housing (which, no surprise, costs money).

To address the problem of land speculation, Henry George proposed a tax on land, rather than a tax on income (which is the conventional approach). This, he argued, would clip the wings of rent-seeking and profiteering on what every human being depends on: a place to call home.

The theories of Henry George are specifically about landed property, and controlling land speculation (and by extension, housing speculation).

But his ideas are often ignored and even maligned.

They are even mocked by some developer-friendly politicians as the privileged NIMBYism of well-off homeowners who purportedly do want more condo development in their quiet, tree-lined single-family neighbourhoods DURING A HOUSING CRISIS!!

But this attack misses the point. George’s principles are precisely about creating more equality not less…by discouraging housing from becoming a commodity, sold to the highest bidder like corn futures.

Georgism is not, in fact, against development. But it is about equitable development…and yes, during a housing crisis.

The point of Henry George is really that private capital is only looking out for one thing: growing more of it. Developers and their enablers in government, naturally, do not want to hear that.

It’s ultimately the public sphere — and public investment — that looks out for the rest of us… and the most livable, most fair, and most equal cities in the world know that.

In defence of the public square

It’s not a huge mental leap to go from George’s critique of privatized land, and toward promoting more more public space in our cities.

The concepts are not directly the same, but the philosophy behind them is: strong cities promote the public over the private. It’s that concept of the public — of shared interests, mutual goals and collective action — that we have to protect.

Amid the constant din of advertising and overconsumption, and the constant pull of the algorithm, civic spaces are more important than ever.

It’s crucial to preserve public parks (including linear, waterfront ones), libraries, and civic squares — to forge a collective identity, and to create a shared memory for the places we call home.

Benedict Anderson referred to this idea as ‘imagined communities.’ In any city, much less a country, you’re not going to know the vast majority of the people around you personally. But there’s still a way to create a sense of shared identity.

This is, ultimately, the best thing that public spaces do, and why we need more of them to impart a greater sense both of self, and of collective, in the places we call home.

The Case for More Public Space in Cities was originally published in The New Climate. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Insurers know something that anyone who wants to grow a business or to make money should understand by now: Treating the environment like a dumping ground comes with a significant cost. It is a cost that can no longer be ignored. Yet it continues to be. With reckless abandon.

Why?

Capitalism is the art of maximizing profits. That means getting the price signals right. Otherwise, why bother with labour and capital cost calculations, or even a business plan? You might as well just triple your capital costs and bankrupt the whole shop in the process. Ditch those project management courses!

Today, we know that the cost of environmental inaction is nothing to sneeze at — so why do the costs of environmental harm keep getting buried? Floods, fires and heatwaves cost billions (the insurer Swiss.Re estimates insurance losses globally will hit $145B USD in 2025). These costs can no longer be ignored, or relegated to the ‘deal with later’ folder.

We know that bumper-to-bumper traffic (and the pollution it entails) eats into productivity. Poor harvests resulting from weather extremes are terrible for the economy. Poisoned water causes cancer and kills.

So how come the costs of poor environmental planning are still not factored into balance sheets and investment calculations of businesses small and large?

I spoke with Catherine McKenna, Canada’s former environment minister, as well as an advisor to the United Nations on climate action, for this story.

She attributes the difficulty of challenging business-as-usual to the fact that the fossil fuel industry, with its tremendous political sway and massive capital reserves, “fought everything,” and “weren’t real partners” in cutting emissions.

But government inaction, she says, is a huge part of the problem, she tells me.

It’s “bonkers,” she says, that government subsidizes a highly-destructive industry to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars per year— and that this industry then turns around and returns its massive profits back to its shareholders.

This, she says, is an affront to rational market economics — and to ‘green growth.’

“If you were to allow market forces, then we would be able to actually make a tonne of progress.”

That’s because, she tells me, “the reality is, the economics are such that there is an absolute case for green growth. The clean tech sector is massively growing, there’s huge innovation. There’s huge job opportunities, but we are not being rational.”

So why aren’t more firms, to say nothing of government, stepping up to the plate to correct these massive distortions? In short, why are investments in clean technologies still a sideshow for the world’s biggest oil and gas companies, when the price signals of climate inaction clearly indicate we’re heading off a cliff?

Sure, a business — say a coal-fired utility, or a textiles manufacturing plant — might not notice a change in its bottom line from year to year by continuing with business as usual and releasing massive amounts of pollution into the air or into a river.

Out of sight and out of mind, right?

But conveniently pretending like pollution isn’t a cost to be factored to keep the engines running (and/or the shareholders happy) doesn’t make sense when the information signals of polluting the planet with reckless abandon are available, plentiful… and scary.

Thus, the limitations of green growth. It may be needed to – but is relying on market dynamics enough?

First, some background.

Ignoring the costs of pollution

The cost of polluting has been conveniently overlooked for decades, some would say since the start of industrialization.

The scale of that pollution is staggering, as this chart shows:

In the case of the fossil fuel industry, the costs of inaction have been ignored for short-term profits soaring into the hundreds of billions of dollars, to say nothing of government subsidies in the billions as well.

The result?

The atmosphere is treated like a sewer for burning oil, coal and gas. This, even though clean-energy solutions are available at scale (and available to be researched and developed at even greater scale if only the money went where it ultimately needed to go, as opposed to, say, subsidizing more oil and gas development.

“It was just so depressing,” McKenna says, of the intransigence she witnessed. “I [said], ‘you want to make life more affordable? Get everyone a heat pump.’”

For decades, governments and corporations could pollute with abandon and get away with it. Now, shifts in public opinion, the availability of solutions, and the rapidly shrinking cost of renewables coupled with energy storage solutions, are changing the landscape — despite efforts by the fossil fuel industry, and its supporters in government (i.e., Trump), to stand in the way.

Prior to the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, environmental concerns were hardly a blip on the radar. It took Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” in 2006 to wake millions of people up to terrifying implications of a warming planet.

For years, short term profits and four-year election cycles superseded the costs of environmental action, experts and policymakers tell me.

In the past, at least, the board of directors or the shareholders could ignore the environment as a consideration (though no company would allow garbage to accumulate unfettered outside their corporate headquarters, so why is the atmosphere OK?).

Not any more. The reassuring lie of business-as-usual can no longer be ignored for the inconvenient truth of properly pricing pollution into economic calculations.

The gig is up but the question is: how to factor in environmental considerations into policy and planning… and most importantly, price, as Catherine McKenna tried to do?

“The incentives are so screwed up,” she tells me.

“We actually have the solutions, but the incentives to get to the solutions are just so hard, and in insidious ways.”

During her time in government, McKenna lobbied to put a price on pollution in Canada in the form of a carbon tax — to attempt to at least start correcting those distorted price signals.

At one point, she even saw the fossil fuel industry as a partner for that change. How else, she tells me, would one interpret oil and gas industry leaders sharing a stage with politicians announcing the creation of a carbon tax (as happened in Canada in 2015? You can watch the video below):

However, politics and profits eventually got in the way.

“I just learned they were not real partners,” she says of the fossil fuel industry, who continue to advocate for false solutions like carbon capture and storage or ‘carbon-neutral oil.’

But things are starting to change as the legal arguments against climate inaction mount and — especially — as the costs of environmental inaction become more clear as a threat to economic performance, both micro and macro.

The insurance industry has long known what governments (and corporations) implicitly know but all too often fail to act upon: the climate chickens are coming home to roost and the costs of inaction exceed the costs of cutting into emissions.

Maybe we need a new approach. Enter the idea for a new nature economy.

The nature economy

One intervention that is not discussed as much in climate policy or economic circles is can be described as a ‘nature economy’ (or a ‘nature-first economy’).

This approach — yes, it is still somewhat philosophical rather than practical —requires accurately accounting for price signals, i.e. actually factoring in the costs of environmental harm into the overall calculations of doing business as usual.

In economics, this is known as ‘true cost pricing.’

The idea of a ‘nature economy’ is similar, but slightly different, to at least two other concepts that have been proposed in recent years.

The first — triple bottom line reporting — is akin to ESG, in my view. The idea with TBLR is that companies must take into account the social (including environmental) implications of their business-as-usual. But TBLR, in my view, is predicated more on corporate ‘do goodism’ than an actual and/or accurate accounting of environmental price signals.

The second paradigm, ‘natural capital accounting’ (NCA), treats nature as an asset, with a value that can be calculated. Thus, the natural world (rivers, forests, oceans, etc.) provides a ‘service’ to the economy. If you don’t protect nature, you don’t protect the economy.

NCA is very similar to a concept of a nature economy, as I see it. But the difference, albeit small, is important.

In a nature economy, governments and companies calculate the cost of nature (and of harming it) into their bottom line calculations. In other words, a nature economy is a form of best practice.

Under NCA, nature is capital — i.e., it has a value that can be monetized. But there is no imputation of protecting nature to support the economy. Put another way, NCA is great as a tool for tracking the depletion of natural resources. It is less great as a best-practice for economic development.

If you subscribe to the notion of a nature economy, then a company or corporation that clicks off — i.e., turns a blind eye to — the environmental harm it is doing is, essentially, engaging in a deeply anti-capitalistic practice. It is shooting itself, and everyone else, in the foot (even though it might think it isn’t).

This is because capitalism requires accurately taking stock of price signals: benefits and costs, including long-term ones to society. You wouldn’t hire staff at $50/hour if all you could afford was $25. So why would ignore other externalities?

Of course, the shareholders might not choose to think about long-term costs and negative externalities so long as the (short-term) dividends keep rolling in. But, as the costs of climate inaction start to show up in the real economy, the CEO of any firm should at the very least be thinking ahead.

The approach of some Indigenous Nations in Canada, and specifically their way of reconciling nature with economic growth, is an example where I think a nature economy has worked effectively.

In British Columbia, where I am from, an initiative known as ‘Coast Funds,’ developed by several coastal First Nations, is having an impact on some local economies.

The fund (it’s actually two funds, that manage $118M Canadian dollars) is moving Nations away from extracting natural resources (e.g., old growth trees) for economic development, and toward non-extractive industries, such as Indigenous ecotourism.

So, whereas communities on the coast of B.C., and in the province’s interior, have depended cutting trees to sustain themselves, increasingly, there’s a realization that the most ancient, valuable trees are worth more standing than they are cut down.

Indigenous communities are often on the forefront of that change; they understand that 500-year-old trees can’t be replaced.

Carrot and stick

Trouble is, applying true cost pricing in the day-to-day operation of a business will not happen voluntarily. This is primarily because, for most businesses, the negative externalities of environmental harm do not affect them directly enough, or significantly enough.

Thus, an airline might know its planes are heating the atmosphere, or that short-haul flights are not necessary when trains are readily available for customers. But the negative environmental externalities do not affect its profit-making operations in any existential sort of way, save for perhaps a few more cancellations due to severe weather that it can easily absorb into its business plan. So it doesn’t make sense for it to internalize those externalities.

The same could be said for oil and gas companies — even agriculture (though the line between environmental harm and the economic hit — in the form of a poor crop—is arguably much shorter there).

But government action could change all that. The role of government is, after all, to level the playing field for the greater good. And when the costs of climate change can no longer be ignored — as is starting to happen— change might finally come.

As ‘green’ investment analyst and author of The Case for Climate Capitalism, Tom Rand has told me, government (i.e., public policy) is the best entity for creating a level playing field for everyone, with clear rules and enforcement. He calls government, and public policy, the ‘conductor of the orchestra.’

But for government to play that role, politicians have to put aside their short-term interests and realize the cost numbers are showing up in the real economy — whether in insurance claims or healthcare costs — from all those wildfires or heatwaves.

Nobody every said change was easy.

Then there is the law

Luckily, the legal framework is growing more robust in response to the escalating dangers posed by climate change as well.

The landmark ruling by the International Criminal Court in July reminding each country of its legal obligations to protect the environment is the most important legal stick that has ever been wielded by a legal entity.

The remarkable thing? It took a group of law students from Vanuatu to make it happen.

The ICJ ruling may not be legally binding. But, say legal experts, it should give pause to any government or corporation that carries out economic activities detrimental to planetary protection.

“The bases for lawsuits is getting stronger, and the willingness to take on powerful industries is also increasing as the impacts become more apparent,” says Eugene Kung, a lawyer at West Coast Environmental Law in Vancouver, B.C.

No longer, he says, can corporations pollute with abandon, or without at least looking over their shoulder at whatever group of individuals may be ready to go after them in court.

“I think it’s emboldening certain jurisdictions to hold accountable the handful of oil companies that are responsible for the majority of emissions.”

The China model

China gets a lot of attention for its remarkable transition toward a ‘green economy.’ But green growth, which China has been doubling down on in recent years, is not the same as a ‘nature economy’ — and shouldn’t be confused as such.

There was a time, around 2020, that China’s leader, Xi Jinping, was promoting ‘carbon neutrality,’ toying with controlling coal fired power plants, other carbon-intensive projects, and total energy consumption. This approach, says Lauri Myllyvirta, a Finland-based climate and energy policy analyst, “basically went out the window,” as China turned to ‘green’ supply-side economics. In short, green growth.

Green growth depends on technology to decarbonize key sectors of the economy (electricity, buildings, transportation, etc).

China is flooding the marketplace with a tremendous amount of renewables. But for the moment, says Myllyvirta, it still does “very little to discourage emissions and fossil fuel use.”

That’s green growth, not a nature economy.

The result? A net decline not just in China’s CO2 emissions as well as a ‘green’ ripple effect abroad as well. In a recent report published for his agency, the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, Myllyvirta found that China’s green energy exports shaved one per cent off global carbon dioxide emissions.

Is this approach enough?

Probably not. China has hardly cut its appetite for coal and other dirty fossil fuels, so more incentives — a greater push — are needed.

Beyond green growth

So, we’ve established that green growth is not enough, but, I’d argue, not for the reasons that often get articulated.

The German author and journalist Ulrike Herrmann argues in her book The End of Capitalism, that green growth is still growth, and fundamentally a bad thing, as a result.

That’s because, she says, green growth is a model based on unfettered consumption — in short, capitalism — which she insists is fundamentally at odds with planetary protection.

‘Degrowth,’ or as Herrmann calls it, ‘green shrinkage,’ builds on the standard of cutting consumption, or essentially doing away with capitalism, which, she argues, is what the world needs. The idea was most famously proposed by Naomi Klein in her 2014 book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.

But it is a proposition that is roundly rejected by most environmental modellers and economists.

“The idea that you could convince people in India, Indonesia, Brazil, let alone lower income African countries, that they do not need economic growth, they don’t need industrialization, they do not need any of that, they need to shrink their economies — it seems completely absurd,” says Myllyvirta.

That, and the fact, he adds, that the ecological footprint of the Global South is already increasing rapidly while the countries of the Global North are not about to all of a sudden close down their economies, shutting down their pensions, their trillions of dollars in real estate investments, their consumption patterns, etc.

Simon Fraser University energy modeller, and author of The Citizen’s Guide to Climate Success, Mark Jaccard, challenges the abolish-capitalism argument, too.

“Scandianvian countries today,” Jaccard tells me over email, “are capitalist, market economies and do quite well with environmental protection. In fact, the evidence is strong that humans have acted unsustainably for centuries before the advent of modern capitalism, as technological advances enabled early humans to hunt species to extinction, deforest vast areas, deplete soils and destroy ecosystems.”

Economic growth, he insists, is going to happen because humans want it and have always wanted it.

The challenge, he says, is how to accelerate “intervention at a global scale” and create a system whereby “climate-concerned governments work together to motivate supportive action by other countries.”

This, he concurs, requires an understanding of the price signals for why not to pollute. Because when you do, bad things happen and it costs you more in the long run.

Hence, the nature economy.

Climate change costs… and kills

Thus, to correct the miscalculation of modern economic development — i.e., to apply true cost pricing (i.e., internalizing externalities) — is the essence of a nature economy.

As a concept, it too might seem pie-in-the-sky or wishful thinking — until it is not. It didn’t take the insurance industry very long to figure it out. As Eugene Kung points out, “their whole model doesn’t work with climate change.”

So they had to change.

Some Indigenous groups in Canada (and elsewhere) have known for millenia that nature is better left protected than dead. Now, some Nations are actively incorporating that philosophy into their actual economic development strategies and thinking.

Other sectors know this too, except they are too reluctant, at best, or greedy at worst, to do anything about it. Hence the need for government intervention in the form of public policy…and the critical importance of electing to office what Simon Fraser’s Mark Jaccard calls “climate-concerned governments.”

“What we need is simply to reduce the Earth system effects of our energy and material throughputs. It is not easy. It is not cheap. But it is possible, even with some degree of economic growth.”

Green Growth is Not Enough. Here’s Why. was originally published in The New Climate. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.