Development of an Online Climate Action Community of Practice to Inform Extended Reality Pedagogy of Change

Dr. Michelle Hamilton-Page was awarded Mitacs Postdoctoral funding to build widespread engagement with a diverse group of climate action leaders through an online community of practice.

The impacts of climate change are already being felt in communities and regions across Canada, resulting in billions of dollars of economic losses due to extreme weather events (TD Economics 2014), increasing costs for the maintenance and adaptation of infrastructure and buildings (Canada National Round Table on the Environment and Economy Canada, 2011), costs related to the short and long term mental and physical health impacts of climate change (Burke et al, 2018; van Susteren, 2018, Cunsolo & Ellis, 2018), and other costs related to the impacts of climate change on public safety, culture, and biodiversity (Greaves, 2021). Preparing for and adapting to these impacts has been identified as a priority at national, regional and local levels (Canada National Round Table on the Environment and Economy Canada, 2011). This includes new federal policy initiatives (e.g., National Adaptation Strategy) that highlight the need for transformation (Charbonnier-Voirin et al., 2010) that will result in a qualitatively different society (Bradbury et al., 2019; Linner and Wibeck, 2019); and a whole-of-society approach to climate action that brings together both state- and non-state actors including all levels of governments, businesses, communities, and ordinary citizens (Keunkel, 2019). This transformation will require widespread engagement and leadership which in turn will require new approaches to climate communication and capacity building that inspire climate action, and ultimately encourage widely distributed climate action leadership. Given the complexity and urgency of the challenge, effective climate action requires a focus on collaboration and collective action and leadership models and processes that are more horizontally and vertically distributed across systems, sectors, and actors (Meijerink and Stiller, 2013; Scholten et al, 2014 ). Existing leadership models and approaches are fundamentally linked to the creation of the problem (Benulic et al., 2022). Similarly, efforts to date to inspire widespread engagement with climate action have failed to produce the necessary and urgently needed upwelling of such action (Willis, 2020). This research project aims to build widespread engagement with a diverse group of climate action leaders through an online community of practice (Wenger et al, 2012) utilizing emerging tools for online community development, and social science (Young, 2013) in collaboration with climate action leadership centering queer folks, women, and Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC community) to bridge climate leadership and emergent technology.