The annual forum for the environmental think tank, the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions, took place last week, Wednesday Oct 12, at SFU downtown. This is the yearly event where the “Big Five” research themes present their findings, solutions and challenges. (The Big Five are Forest Carbon Management, BC Natural Gas Development, Low Carbon Pathways to 2060, Transportation, and Energy Efficiency in BC’s Built Environment). I am in the Built Environment project.

Generally, lots of interesting research presented, but it all seemed to have a component of “we need to engage people in the public with these initiatives” as a kind of hanger-on, unanswered challenge. No one seemed to really be focusing on solutions with the exception of some of the policy work of people like Mark Jaccard.  Perhaps it’s my engineering bent, but I could wish that we saw some mix of pragmatic attempts at interventions that shed some light on possible paths. The 2060 project to me presented the most compelling and provocative ideas. The Forest project was presented by Dr. Werner Kurz, who is arguably the country’s top forest scientist, and it was just plain scary….