UVic and SDG 13: Climate Action
Local education programmes on climate (SDG 13)
The University of Victoria delivers climate education directly to communities in its region through CIFAL Victoria, one of only two UNITAR-accredited International Training Centres for Authorities and Leaders in Canada and hosted at UVic since 2022. In 2024–25, CIFAL Victoria began co-creating disaster and emergency management training for First Nations with Huu-ay-aht and T'Sou-ke First Nations, the First Nations' Emergency Services Society, and CIFAL York. The curriculum is being built to incorporate Indigenous science and historic knowledge, and covers risk mapping; emergency preparedness, contingency and evacuation planning; infrastructure considerations; disaster response; and post-disaster recovery. The work is framed explicitly around local climate hazards including flooding, wildfire and tsunami, and around drawing on Nuu-chah-nulth knowledge of early warning and preparedness.
UVic also provides open-enrolment climate education for adults in the region who are not degree-seeking students. The Transformative Climate Action (TCA) Certificate, offered jointly by the School of Environmental Studies and the Division of Continuing Studies, teaches learners to engage with the social and political challenges of mitigating and adapting to climate change and to build collaborative solutions that support decolonization and social resilience. It is complemented by shorter micro-certificates, including Climate Action Planning, which is designed for educators, business leaders, community organizers, and people working in communities, NGOs and government agencies, and for which learners may be eligible for provincial StrongerBC future skills funding. Completion is recognized with a certificate co-signed by UNITAR and CIFAL Victoria. Further micro-certificates in Climate Activism and in Politics, Policy and Climate Action address policy and governance contexts from local to global scales, including urban and regional planning under rapid change.
Beyond formal credentials, UVic funds and runs community climate education and public awareness campaigns. The Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions (PICS), hosted and led by UVic, makes Community Climate Action Event grants available to local organizations: a $5,000 grant to the Victoria Native Friendship Centre supported Stepping into Story: Learning on the Land, a six-week Indigenous-led course running 15 January to 26 February 2025 that deepened participants' understanding of climate justice through land-based sessions led by UVic geographer Niitokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles, including field trips to Mee-qan (Beacon Hill Park) and W̱MÍYEŦEN Nature Sanctuary and sessions on water access in First Nations communities. UVic's Climate Disaster Project, an international teaching newsroom based at UVic, runs public workshops that teach community members a trauma-informed process for creating first-person testimonies of climate change experience, such as Stories on Fire delivered in May 2024 alongside the Legacy Gallery's Fire Season exhibit, and in 2024 shared survivor narratives during COP29, through the verbatim play Eyes of the Beast staged in Victoria and Vancouver, and at the Royal BC Museum. Ocean Networks Canada, a UVic initiative, trains coastal and Indigenous community members through its Community Fishers programme, which now monitors local ocean conditions at more than 350 locations and helps communities track climate impacts on ocean health directly.
UVic’s Climate Action Plan
UVic’s Climate and Sustainability Action Plan 2030 (CSAP), launched in November 2022, is an institution-wide climate strategy, spanning academics and curriculum, research and innovation, campus operations, finance and investment, Indigenous and international relations, and community and government relations. It sets three public targets: reduce campus operational greenhouse gas emissions 50% below the 2010 baseline by 2030, reach net zero by 2040 and a climate-positive campus by 2050; achieve a STARS Platinum rating; and demonstrate annual advancement toward the UN Sustainable Development Goals. These are pursued through 11 measurable goals and supporting strategies organized around four themes, with implementation resourced annually and overseen by an implementation committee.
The plan is fully public and freely accessible to anyone, with no registration or paywall: both components, the CSAP 2030 Strategy and the CSAP 2030 Actions, are posted as open-access PDFs, and CSAP is listed among UVic's publicly available university plans. Community engagement is one of the plan's six guiding principles, and CSAP was itself informed through outreach and engagement with internal and external communities, including Indigenous scholars, practitioners, students and communities. Its actions commit UVic to identifying climate collaboration opportunities with local governments and community organizations where memoranda of understanding already exist and developing new agreements where they do not, using university spaces to host community events, public lectures and workshops on climate solutions, advocating to all levels of government for climate investment, and recognizing community partners already leading climate action.
That commitment is visible in practice: in June 2025 UVic hosted the Vancouver Island Energy Leadership Conference, convening public sector organizations, local communities, utilities and students to share decarbonization progress, and Victoria Climate Connections, which drew more than 100 climate professionals from government, industry, non-profits and community groups. Progress is reported openly each year through the Climate Change Accountability Report, filed with the Province of British Columbia and published in full on UVic's website, and through UVic's STARS submission.
Co-operative planning for climate change disasters
UVic hosts the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium (PCIC), the regional climate service centre providing applied research and practical information on the physical impacts of climate variability and change for Canada's Pacific and Yukon region, established through a Province of British Columbia endowment. In 2025, PCIC contributed directly to the British Columbia Disaster and Climate Risk and Resilience Assessment, released through ClimateReadyBC in October 2025. For that report PCIC provided expert scientific assessment, knowledge translation and applied research including newly analysed projections of extreme heat hazards, helped develop the provincial climate overview annex, and chaired the Climate Change Advisory Group whose members advised on how each hazard is changing across the province.
The resulting resources give local governments, First Nations, emergency-management specialists and provincial ministries risk information for disaster preparedness and mitigation across six hazards plus multi-hazard events. Government emergency planners sit inside PCIC's governance: its Program Advisory Committee includes the Executive Director of Disaster Mitigation and Adaptation at BC's Ministry of Emergency Management and Climate Readiness (EMCR), the Coordinator of the Canadian Centre for Climate Services at Environment and Climate Change Canada, and directors from BC's ministries of Environment and Parks and of Forests. The Province directs local governments to PCIC's Plan2Adapt and Climate Explorer tools as the basis for their own climate adaptation planning.
UVic also hosts and leads the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions (PICS), which received $495,000 from the Provincial government to improve the tools governments and communities use to assess climate risk. Through 2024 PICS convened a 14-member Climate Risk and Resilience Academic Advisory Group spanning wildfire, drought, flooding, extreme heat, health, climate justice and emergency management, hosted workshops on each hazard, and interviewed 22 experts, with the resulting research and knowledge mobilization agenda and recommendations on climate risk assessment delivered to the Province in Spring 2025 under funding from EMCR. That agenda, Bridging Climate Research and Risk Assessments, was published in June 2025.
On climate risks related to wildfire, the POLIS Wildfire Resilience Project at UVic's Centre for Global Studies works on policy, management, reconciliation and governance for wildfire resilience in BC, publishing Learning to Live with Fire: State of Wildfire in B.C. in 2024, which called for a whole-of-government provincial landscape resilience strategy, Beneficial Fire in British Columbia in May 2025, and a September 2025 analysis of cross-government organisation for wildfire resilience.
CIFAL Victoria, one of only two UN-accredited (UNITAR) training and research centres in Canada and hosted by UVic, is working with CIFAL York, the Huu-ay-aht and T'Sou-ke First Nations and the First Nations' Emergency Services Society to co-create disaster and emergency management training for First Nations, building a curriculum incorporating Indigenous science and knowledge, with the long-term goal of Indigenous leaders delivering the training to their own and other communities including those in the BC Interior. Internationally, UVic's Climate Disaster Project and its successor From Catastrophe to Community, awarded a six-year $2.5-million SSHRC Partnership Grant in July 2025 with 27 partners committing over $4 million in matching contributions, will train 500 students and journalists to document the experiences of 1,000 climate disaster survivors worldwide, including people displaced by coastal erosion in Brazil and by the 2021 Lytton fire in Canada, with partner organisations in Brazil, Malawi, the UK and the US.
Informing and supporting local or regional government in climate disaster/risk early warning and monitoring
The Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium (PCIC)'s climate analysis and monitoring program maintains the Provincial Climate Data Set, a continually updated archive of station-based weather and climate observations for British Columbia assembled through the Climate Related Monitoring Program under data-sharing agreements with BC provincial ministries, BC Hydro and other partners, with near real-time data collection. PCIC assesses extreme weather events as they occur and publishes seasonal summaries through its Climate Anomaly Viewer, and provides local governments with free access to hazard-relevant projections through tools including Plan2Adapt, which is structured by regional district, health authority and First Nations language family so that municipal and regional staff can retrieve information at the scale at which they plan.
In November 2025, the Province of British Columbia released the British Columbia Disaster and Climate Risk Assessment through ClimateReadyBC, a comprehensive assessment of six natural and climate-related hazards and their risks to populations across the province. PCIC scientists contributed expert scientific assessment, knowledge translation and applied research to that assessment, including newly analyzed projections of extreme heat hazards; they also drafted the provincial climate overview annex and chaired the assessment's Climate Change Advisory Group. At the regional scale, PCIC produced high-resolution (approximately 800 m) climate projections for the Capital Regional District in 2024, covering temperature, precipitation and indices of extremes for the 2050s and beyond, explicitly to give the region's decision makers a shared evidence base for hazard, infrastructure and community safety planning. PCIC has produced comparable assessments for other BC regional districts, and its library of regional climate assessments is publicly available.
UVic researchers also work directly with local emergency management authorities to build new hazard-monitoring tools. On 27 February 2025, the Advanced Control and Intelligent Systems lab in UVic's Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science, working with Cowichan Tribes Emergency Services and InDro Robotics, flight-tested an autonomous drone payload that generates millimetre-resolution three-dimensional maps of terrain, buildings and infrastructure to support risk identification and mitigation for flood and wildfire. Cowichan Tribes Emergency Services is a partner in design as well as testing, with the stated aim of ensuring the system is usable by small and remote communities that lack on-site technical specialists.
UVic collaborates with NGOs on climate adaptation
Non-governmental organizations are standing partners in UVic’s climate adaptation work. One example of this is the Coastal Climate Solutions Leaders (CCSL) program, an NSERC CREATE-funded graduate training initiative directed by UVic biologist Julia Baum. CCSL maintains a network of more than 35 climate solutions partners drawn from government, industry, and the non-profit sector, including a distinct tier of environmental NGO collaborators: Oceans North, Nature United, Ecojustice, West Coast Environmental Law, the Pembina Institute, the Canadian Climate Institute, the Transition Accelerator, Project Drawdown, the European Climate Foundation, and Ocean Visions. Trainees complete required internships and team design challenges with these partners, so the relationship carries UVic's climate science, impacts, and adaptation training directly into NGO practice. As of 2025 the program had supported 57 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows and awarded more than $580,000 in traineeship funding.
UVic also co-produces adaptation-relevant science with NGOs through funded research partnerships. Blue Carbon Canada, led from UVic by Baum, is building Canada's first national assessment of coastal blue carbon ecosystems, with an explicit aim of identifying how these ecosystems can protect coastal communities from rising seas and flooding. The project is co-funded through an NSERC Alliance grant with the environmental NGO Oceans North, and its partner group includes Nature Trust and the Kelp Rescue Initiative alongside federal and provincial agencies. Project outputs in 2025 included a national blueprint for assessing kelp forests as blue carbon, published in npj Ocean Sustainability, and a FACETS paper on seabed sediment carbon in Canada's marine protected area network, the latter co-authored with Oceans North scientists. In a parallel line of work running through 2024 and 2025, UVic and the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre are testing methods for restoring kelp forests lost to marine heatwaves, working with the Pacific Salmon Foundation, the Hakai Institute, the Western Canadian Universities Marine Sciences Society, Genome BC, and Huu-ay-aht and other coastal First Nations.
Adaptation collaboration also runs through UVic's law and policy centres. The Environmental Law Centre, an independently funded non-profit society operating Canada's largest public interest environmental law clinic in partnership with UVic's Faculty of Law, provides pro bono legal services to conservation groups, community organizations, and First Nations on environmental and climate matters. The POLIS Water Sustainability Project at UVic's Centre for Global Studies works with NGO partners on freshwater resilience under a changing climate, including a September 2025 conference on building Canada's water resilience in an age of extremes, convened with the Forum for Leadership on Water and Massey College.
UVic’s commitment to carbon neutrality
The University of Victoria has been carbon neutral since 2010, measuring, reporting, and offsetting its operational greenhouse gas emissions every year under British Columbia's Climate Change Accountability Act and Carbon Neutral Government Regulation, with results published annually in a public Climate Change Accountability Report. That legislated baseline is paired with a voluntary, science-based commitment: UVic's Climate and Sustainability Action Plan 2030 sets a target of reducing campus operational emissions 50% below the 2010 baseline by 2030, reaching net zero operational emissions by 2040, and becoming a climate-positive campus by 2050. UVic is also a public signatory to the UN Race to Zero campaign for universities and colleges.