UN’s SDG 13 Climate Action purpose is to "take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts."
"As it gets hotter, we are getting a lot of climate refugees," said Coral Evans, Flagstaff’s mayor, in the Guardian article. "We don’t mind people moving to Flagstaff at all. But about 25% of our housing is now second homes. The cost of living is our number one issue. We don’t talk much about what climate change means for social justice. But where are lowincome people going to live? How can they afford to stay in this city?"
But is the language used in these reports really helping increase awareness – and action – to climate change? A week after the IPCC report came out, a journalist in the Canadian National Post questioned "the UN climate-change panel that cried wolf too often," saying "You can't set multiple deadlines for Doomsday. It’s a kind of one-off by nature. Do it too often and people cease to take notice or even care?"
"As part of our outreach strategy, CREW is mapping resilience at the neighbourhood level. We are piloting this work in Toronto’s new Ward 4 where we have identified a suite of indicators that we’ve used to build a resilience index for seven neighbourhoods in the city. The index and scores will be used to create dialogue and inform community members about the importance of planning for extreme weather events," says CREW’s Sheila Murray.
Sources: CNN, CREW, National Post, The Guardian, UN
This article was originally included in iuventum's November 2018 newsletter.