Supporting sustainable communities through climate innovation
SFU Climate Innovation is a platform supporting climate action and innovation research-for-impact. By building supports and services to elevate interdisciplinary research and leverage high-impact partnerships, SFU Climate Innovation is changing how climate change and sustainability researchers interact with each other, and with communities.
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What We Do
SFU Climate Innovation overcomes disciplinary silos and knowledge fragmentation within and between adaptation, mitigation, and sustainability research and in community planning. We do this in three main ways.
handshake CatalyzING Interdisciplinary Collaboration
We support researchers to overcome disciplinary silos within and between adaptation, mitigation, and sustainability research areas. We remove barriers to collaboration by convening researchers, distributing seed funds, and enabling and incentivizing collaborative research clusters.
partner_exchange Co-CreatING with Community Partners
We link researchers with community partners to advance co-creation research approaches. We include partners in research design, building shared learning and accountability throughout the research process, and evaluating community-centred outcomes and innovations.
public MOBILIZING KNOWLEDGE AND SCALING CLIMATE INNOVATION
We bridge the gap between communities, decision-makers, and researchers. We mobilize knowledge, best practice, and innovation for others to learn from, with the goal of accelerating climate action and innovation that can be tailored for other communities.
Who We Are
SFU Climate Innovation is a collaboration among units from across SFU dedicated to providing services in support of effective and impactful community-centred climate action and innovation.
Co-creators include:
- SFU Sustainability
- ACT - Action on Climate Team
- SFU Partnerships Hub
- Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue
- Community-Engaged Research Initiative
- Research Intelligence Office
- SFU Knowledge Mobilization Hub
- Institutional Strategic Awards
- SFU International
By aligning existing capacities and supports, SFU Climate Innovation is reaching across the University to overcome silos. The community-centred climate innovation research priority provides a focus and direction to align efforts and deliver the services needed to ensure the success of this priority.
Together these units will convene researchers, advance co-creation methods between researchers community partners, use diverse knowledge mobilization channels, and support with the iterative evaluation of impact of the platform and its outcomes in the shift toward low carbon, resilient and sustainable communities.
Our Vision
SFU Climate Innovation is orienting SFU's capacities as a research University and its world-leading researchers toward accelerating high-impact community-centred climate action and innovation as a crucial response to the global climate change challenge.
Our Goal
SFU Climate Innovation aims to drive research-for-impact. We work with researchers and community partners to catalyze, co-create, and mobilize solutions that advance low carbon, resilient, and sustainable communities locally and globally. We do this by using approaches that bridge with Indigenous knowledges and rights, that advance justice and equity, and that aim to scale climate actions and innovations that:
support, buffer, and protect communities against real and projected climate impacts,
reduce emissions and decarbonize communities to achieve net zero emissions goals, and
multi-solve across other community priorities, providing additional sustainability benefits such as increased biodiversity, avoided costs, clean economic development, etc.
We recognize that each of these approaches, taken together, are crucial elements of systemic and impactful solutions-building at community and regional scales.
Our Team
Alison Shaw
Executive Director, SFU Climate Innovation
As both a scholar and practitioner, Dr. Alison Shaw brings over two decades of experience in pioneering climate and sustainability action and innovation across diverse sectors and scales.
As the first authorized researcher to study science-policy interactions in the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s Third Assessment Report (2001), she saw firsthand the complexity of communicating science to policy and policy to science. Since, she has worked to develop pioneering approaches and models to encourage exchange and learning across diverse sectors and communities to co-create knowledge-for-action.
Alison spent a decade in academia, co-designing and managing three large-scale interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary research projects aimed at accelerating climate change and sustainability action in communities. These projects applied different research approaches and tools for action - using evidence-based data visualization to express climate risk in the Local Climate Change Visioning Project (2006-2009), linking with municipal and First Nations policy objectives and priorities in the Meeting the Climate Change Challenge Project (2011-2013), and embedding risk, emissions, and co-benefits data into municipal and First Nations planning and decision processes in the Integrated Climate Action for BC Communities Initiative (2018-2021).
In 2012, Alison founded FlipSide Sustainability, and for a decade co-created leading research-to-practice approaches with both public and private sector clients at international, national, and local scales. From 2018-2021, she worked as Research Lead at ACT – Action on Climate Team, SFU, co-creating leading low carbon resilience approaches with and for BC communities, and in 2022 became Executive Director of ACT, with a focus on implementing and refining low carbon resilience approaches and nature-based solutions. She brings a wealth of experience in interdisciplinary collaboration, cross-sector partnership-building, and operationalizing sustainability transitions research, policy and practice.
As the inaugural Executive Director of SFU Climate Innovation, through this platform Dr. Shaw is excited to operationalize SFU’s #1 research priority - community-centred climate innovation. Positioned in SFU’s Office of the Vice-President, Research and Innovation, SFU Climate Innovation’s goal is to leverage SFU’s capacities and reputation as a leading research university to create effective and impactful climate action & innovation research with, and for, communities across Canada and beyond.
James Raymond
Director, SFU Climate Innovation
As a data analyst, strategist & innovator, James Raymond brings over two decades experience in strategic planning, partnership development, and mobilizing high-impact funding.
After graduating from one of Europe’s Top 10 Business Schools, James has gained unique experiences working in public, private and non-profit sectors for leading-edge organizations around the world such as Innovate BC, the Vancouver Economic Commission, the New South Wales Government and Dunnhumby.
Before joining SFU Climate Innovation, James worked as the Director of Data & Policy at Innovate BC where he was responsible for directing the research, data & policy work of this provincial Crown Corporation. Prior to this, he worked for 13 years at the Vancouver Economic Commission, the city’s economic development agency, heading up their research efforts which were geared towards making Vancouver the most sustainable and prosperous economy in North America. In this time, Vancouver became the fastest growing economy in Canada, doubled its numbers of green jobs, and successfully decoupled its greenhouse gas emissions from its economic growth. Other career highlights include producing the Vancouver Economic Commission’s ‘Beyond GDP Economic Framework’ which has been recognized as global best practice for cities by C40 for centering sustainability, indigenous knowledge and equity within a traditional economic framework. James also led the regional Metro Vancouver bid for the Amazon HQ2 project, with the proposal directly resulting in an additional 3,000 high paying jobs for the region. While at Dunnhumby, an early pioneer of the concept of ‘big data’, James managed the largest targeted marketing campaign in Europe, distributing over 100 million coupons each year, generating over $125m in revenue for the company.
At SFU Climate Innovation, working closely with Dr. Alison Shaw - the Executive Director - James will be responsible for advancing the strategic plan for this enabling platform set up to connect high impact climate solutions with communities in Canada, and beyond. He’ll also be responsible for developing new internal and external relationships, including funding & research opportunities, as well as overseeing the platform’s brand & marketing efforts.
Skye Vallance
Program Coordinator
Skye (she/her) brings a decade of non-profit communications and community engagement experience to the SFU Climate Innovation team. Since completing her BAH in Health Studies at Queen’s University, she has contributed to campaigns advancing sustainable agriculture, Indigenous-led conservation and youth-led climate action across Canada and globally. Skye enjoys connecting with neighbours through volunteer work and sits as Community Outreach Director for her local community garden.
Skye brings a spirit of collaboration to support SFU’s community-centred climate innovation network through communications, sustainability research and project coordination. She enjoys spending time with Nature by cheering salmon upstream, studying natural textile dyes or canoe tripping.