Climate change may be a debatable topic for some, but Gibsons Mayor Barry Janyk is hoping his council will tackle the issue head on.
Janyk recently attended a week-long conference in Trinidad addressing rising sea levels on coastal communities and other matters related to climate change.
"The large part of the conference was really about what environmental effects we are anticipating in low-lying communities, Gibsons being one of those places," said Janyk.
Entitled Sustainable Development of Coastal Communities: Challenges and Solutions, the June conference was organized by the International Community University Research Alliance (ICURA) and its C-Change project.
With an emphasis on co-learning, the conference gave Janyk the chance to work and share ideas with delegates from a variety of Canadian and Caribbean communities while examining numerous international papers and reports on climate change.
One issue addressed was the matter of those who question the validity of climate change.
"A lot of people in fact are still wondering truly if the effects are going to be as significant as many predict," Janyk said. "But I think what all of the papers intended to do was to illustrate very clearly that what we're seeing is inevitable."
Developed in 2007, ICURA links community members and university researchers from Canada with members of Caribbean communities in support of research ranging from coastal adaptation to environmental change.
In 2009, as part of the first awarded ICURA projects, the C-Change project was formally funded by Canada's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the International Development Research Centre to carry out its research program from 2009 through to 2014. This funding enabled Janyk to participate in the conference with no cost to the Town.
The Town of Gibsons was a chosen participant due to Janyk's work as the former chair of the Coastal Community Network, an organization dealing with economic and social well being of coastal communities. Through the network, Janyk built a working relationship with Dr. Ralph Matthews, professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia and C-Change project participant.
Other Canadian communities chosen to participate included Charlottetown, P.E.I.; Isle Madame, N.S.; and Iqaluit, Nunavut.
"I came away with the fact that by putting our collective worries together, it will allow us to understand there are ways to find solutions, some of which they have and some of which we have. Just recognizing the implications is going to help us to do some planning," he said.
