Like many foodies, Jodie Johnson likes to cook with cast-iron cookware on her gas stove — the open flame gets her pans from a little bit warm to piping hot in a matter of seconds.

However, her stove’s environmental impact hasn’t sat well with her for years. Johnson, who lives in a circa-1920s home in Vancouver, has slowly been swapping her polluting appliances for cleaner alternatives

Yuill Herbert is an emission reduction adviser to some of Canada’s largest cities, but he does most of his work from Tatamagouche — a tiny village on the eastern edge of Nova Scotia.

Despite his love of country life, Herbert sees potential and beauty in cities and puts his energy into ensuring they are well-designed and adapted for a changing climate.

A Christmas holiday in 2011 saw days without power in Halton Hills, Ont., caused by brutal ice storms. Jane Fogal, one of the town’s city councillors, marks that time as a turning point. Extreme weather events have become more common in the town ever since.

Nunavut’s capital city would seem a less than auspicious place for solar power, given that on Dec. 21 — the shortest day of the year — there is only three and a half hours of daylight.

But in the summer of 2020, installers attached 12 solar panels to Iqaluit lawyer Paul Crowley’s 1,800-square-foot house. Then, in November, his renewable energy system came online, and he connected to the Nunavut power grid.

On the evening of Feb. 6, 2018, Mike Auge, then manager of sustainability and solid waste for the City of Yellowknife, walked onto the conference room stage at the Westin Hotel in Ottawa.

He was there to collect an award from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM), honouring the city’s latest environmental innovation: a biomass boiler that would burn sustainably sourced wood pellets instead of oil to heat five separate municipal buildings.

In the months leading up to the pandemic, Adam Vajda, 29, and Daniel Vickers, 30, had similar morning routines.

After several clicks of the snooze button, they woke up and spent 15 minutes eating and drinking coffee before rushing out the door to their jobs in downtown Vancouver. When it came to their commutes, however, the similarities ended.

Flanked by grey apartment towers and a busy multi-lane highway, the Burnhamthorpe Collegiate Institute high school in Etobicoke isn’t the first place that you’d expect to find rows of crops.

It’s the location for one of Toronto’s new urban farms, which provide food to communities without access to fresh produce and reduce carbon emissions.

Every autumn, the Canada warbler, a songbird with black stripes around its lemon yellow throat, begins a 5,000-kilometre journey from its breeding ground in the boreal forest to its winter home in South America.

Migrating songbirds need a connected corridor of green space to find adequate food and shelter.

Kyle Elliott, ornithologist at McGill University’s Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences

Due to urbanization, the trek has become precarious. The shrub lands where it feeds on insects were once abundant but are now paved over for suburbs.

The guilt hit Lorrie Rand in her 20th year of designing upscale renovations and sprawling oceanfront homes.

The Halifax architectural designer thought about every concrete foundation, every steel beam, that each of these materials was finite, and she was taking, taking, taking.

“That started to feel icky for me,” said Rand. “I love my job and making houses and beautiful things for people, but I don’t want to be doing bad things for the world because we have very little time.”

In the spring and fall of 2019, the streets of Sackville, N.B., were inundated with hundreds of students skipping school, channelling their collective delinquency into a march and a message. Young people, ranging from elementary school to university age, were sending the message that Sackville wasn’t doing enough to address climate change. The town leaders agreed.

Newfoundland and Labrador has less installed wind generation capacity than any other Canadian province, a grand total of 54 megawatts across two wind farms. By comparison, neighbouring Nova Scotia, which has less wind to work with, has in excess of 600 megawatts of installed wind capacity.

The tiny city of Summerside, P.E.I., is known for charming waterfronts and hosting the only Walmart on the west end of the Island. It is less renowned as a champion of renewable power.

As a species, we are facing an unprecedented crisis. I’ve spent the last 20 years tackling climate change within Chicago and Vancouver city governments and I know change is already upon us. To reduce global warming, cities have become leaders in curbing greenhouse gas emissions. They are on the front lines dealing with floods, heat waves, extreme storms and rising seas, and must be ready for the changes that are coming. The lives of their residents rely on it.