Tag Archives: Vancouver

Mongabay @ COP16/CBD: Cities are climate solution leaders: Interview with Vancouver’s Gregor Robertson

Gregor Robertson served as the mayor of Vancouver in Canada for 10 years, earning an international reputation for leading efforts to reduce city carbon emissions through energy efficiency and by creating green economy jobs. He now leads global coalitions of mayors and governors who advocate for more resources for subnational entities to carry out climate action as national governments continue to fall short. Photo by Justin Catanoso for Mongabay.

This story came about on my second day in Cali, Colombia, as I scrambled to find stories at my first UN summit on biodiversity. Late morning, I stopped in the large plenary hall where I knew there was a daylong session on the role of cities and states — subnational entities — in conservation and climate action.

By luck, I entered as one of the panelists was talking about the work that had been accomplished in his city of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. I asked an event organizer who was speaking and she told me: Gregor Robertson. I looked him up on my phone, and up came a long list of impressive credentials as a former mayor and current leader of two large subnational coalitions on the issues being discussed from the stage. I waited until the panel concluded, introduced myself to Robertson and asked if he had time for an interview.

My idea at the time is what became this story: a Mongabay Q&A. Late afternoon, Robertson joined me in the media center where I was set up and answered my questions for about 45 minutes. His enthusiasm for the role that subnational entities are already playing in climate action and conservation was immediately evident. So was his frustration with the lack of action by national governments who control much of the finances that enables these urgent local efforts to take place.

The interview became, as my editor Glenn Scherer wrote to me after he completed his edits, “The first really sensible, and doable climate solution story I’ve read in awhile.” The story was published just as another UN climate summit, COP29, was wrapping up in a corrupt petrostate and predictably, failing once again to meet the urgency of the moment in this ongoing climate crisis.

I took this photo in Amsterdam after covering COP26, the UN climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, in November 2021. The city is this interesting paradox — a place with more bicycles than people (1.2 million vs 821,000) — but also one that burns more wood (largely from North Carolina and the US Southeast forests) than coal for energy. It made a nice complement to my interview with Robertson and ran with the Q&A.

Mongabay: With British Columbia’s last old-growth at risk, government falters: Critics

Anzac Valley clear cuts in British Columbia’s boreal rainforest. What you see was once completely forested. Image by Taylor Roades courtesy of Stand.earth.

In this story, I revisit a part of the world I wrote about last June — British Columbia, its rare and vanishing towering old-growth forests in coastal and interior rainforests, and a progressive government’s promises to protect and preserve much of what’s left. Spoiler alert: it’s not.

“I know what they say [in the National Democratic Party], but I don’t know what this government’s long-term vision is for forestry,” Sonia Furstenau, BC’s Green Party leader, told me in an hour-long interview. “They are adhering to the status quo that is giving us the same outcomes we’ve had for decades. I was on the finance committee a few years ago. I spent a lot of time in small planes flying over the province. When you fly over British Columbia, it is a landscape of devastation. It’s heart-wrenching to see it from the sky, just how little intact forest there is left.”

My in-depth story reveals the sentiments some the top players in this environmental saga of unfilled political promises — leading forestry experts, political insiders, even a statement to Mongabay from BC’s forestry minister. It all adds up to an inescapable conclusion: despite the NDP adopting paradigm-shifting recommendations it commissioned in 2020, the majority government is still prioritizing logging and a growing wood-pellet industry over some of the last great old-growth forests, rare ecosystems and endangered species in North America.

As Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau upped his nation’s carbon-reduction ambition under the Paris Agreement, he will find it increasingly difficult to meet those goals by 2030 as his country’s most powerful carbon sinks are felled for lumber and wood pellets to be burned overseas in power plants.

British Columbia’s remaining old-growth forests aren’t only valuable for the carbon storage they provide; they are also cherished for their uniqueness, the biodiversity they harbor, and the awe they inspire. Image by Jakob Dulisse.