Primary Interests and Priorities
- Primary Interests and Priorities
National, International & Global Contexts
Recognize and understand the environmental issues and challenges of our time, including:
- Climate Change: The implications of climate change as an existential environmental crisis, global in scale, and to advocate for and support mitigation, ecosystem restoration, adaptation and risk reduction efforts locally, provincially, nationally, internationally and globally;
- Biodiversity Loss: The implications of biodiversity loss as an existential environmental crisis, global in scale, and to advocate for and support mitigation efforts locally, provincially, nationally, internationally and globally;
- Sustainability: The fundamental importance of sustainability in the use of the earth’s natural capital (or natural resources), as population and wealth continue to grow and consumption demands and impacts increase accordingly; and
- Social Equity: The challenge of achieving social equity in light of the complex inter-play of economic, social, cultural and environmental pressures impacting cross-cutting objectives, policies, priorities and practices.
Provincial Orientation
- Maintain a provincial focus in regard to the Committee’s efforts and energies.
- Monitor environmentally-related issues and opportunities and selectively advocate for and support policies, priorities and actions aimed at the protection and responsible use of Nova Scotia’s natural assets, including land, water and air.
- Support and encourage the timely implementation of EGCCRA (Environmental Goals and Climate Change Reduction Act), and related environmental or land use legislation.
- Advocate for the Government to update FOIPOP (the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act).
- Promote consideration of the enactment of an environmental bill of rights for Nova Scotia.
- Promote comprehensive/integrated land use and environmental planning at the provincial and municipal levels in Nova Scotia.
- Consider engagement in local issues on a selective basis, where there are province-wide policy implications and partnership options warrant and enable participation within the limits of the Committee’s expertise, energy and resources.
- The Environmental Advocacy Committee is a committee of CARP Nova Scotia
CARP Nova Scotia, as a provincial chapter of the Canadian Association of Retired Persons (CARP), subscribes to the mandate of its national counterpart.
‘CARP is a national, non-partisan, non-profit organization committed to a new vision of aging for Canada, promoting social change that will bring financial security, equitable access to health care and freedom from discrimination. CARP’s mission is to promote and protect the interests, rights and quality of life for Canadians as we age’.
To date, the national mandate has focused primarily on social and economic values and benefits perceived as being directly relevant to aging Canadians. The Nova Scotia chapter’s environmental advocacy committee, the first amongst all 27 provincial and local chapters across Canada, recognizes that social and economic well-being ultimately are dependent upon the quality of the environment as the foundational natural asset upon which we all depend, and therefore was formed to advocate for policies and actions that support the natural integrity and health of the environment – locally, provincially, nationally, internationally and, ultimately, globally.
The CARP-NS interest in the environment reflects the age and perspective and of its membership, which includes seniors and others 45 years of age and older. At this stage of life, senior generations have born witness and contributed to the evolution of the current state of our environment and, looking forward, bear responsibility for constructive action toward the legacy that will left to our grandchildren and those who will follow.
The Committee operates essentially autonomously, but within the framework of the CARP-NS organization, by:
- providing updates to the CARP-NS board regarding ongoing activities, and recommending policy direction and/or corresponding action(s) for board approval (when such undertakings are represented as being on behalf of CARP-NS);
- reaching out to the membership of CARP-NS to provide information and updates regarding ongoing activities of the committee and to invite input in identifying or confirming environmental interests, concerns and priorities; and
- promoting and/or encouraging parallel complementary undertakings on the parts of other CARP chapters and/or at the national level.
- What We Do
In practical terms, we take actions as follows:
- Advocate for the responsible stewardship of Nova Scotia’s environment, within the limits of our mandate, understanding, energy and resources as members of a volunteer organization.
- Develop and advance policy positions and recommendations relevant to Nova Scotians and the supporting environment in which we live.
- Coordinate and partner with others – government agencies, corporate and business interests, not-for-profit organizations and individual Nova Scotians – as opportunities or needs are identified to further environmental objectives or to address environmental issues and concerns.
- Add support to emerging or ongoing environmental priorities, through meeting with and letter-writing to responsible government agencies, inputting to stakeholder engagement and public consultation processes, speaking out through op eds and letters to the editor, participating in social media, and attending special events.
- Recognize individual effort, contribution and achievement, through the annual presentation of the ‘Environmental Stewardship Award’.
- We face a real climate crisis conundrum
The Chronicle Herald (Metro) – 15 Jan 2025 – by DALE SMITH
All indications are that we will be too late accepting that human-caused global warming and consequent climate change pose an existential threat, writes Dale Smith.
With 2024 having stumbled to a confusing and uncertain close and 2025 looming menacingly before us, we are not in a good place — we being humanity, all eight billion of us.
As a species, humanity is falling into lock-step with the plight of the proverbial frog that, failing to recognize the danger, lolled about in a pot of gradually warming water only to suffer its inevitable fate as the temperature rose steadily toward the boiling point.
Humanity, despite its collective intellectual prowess, scientific knowledge, technological capability and cultural sophistication, clearly is on a trajectory similar to that of the unfortunate frog.
We occupy a warming planet and, although faced with compounding evidence and increasingly dire warnings, we continue to greedily consume far beyond our essential needs and to recklessly exceed the planet’s limits of sustainability.
All indications are that, just like that frog, we will be too late in realizing and accepting that human-caused global warming and consequent climate change pose an existential threat to our quality of life and, ultimately, our survival.
While it is acknowledged that a wide variety of significant commitments to respond to the threat posed by climate change have been made at all levels — international, national, provincial and local — the disappointing reality is that efforts to date, overall, have been too little too late and that commitments made too often have not been honoured.
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (1994) and subsequent Paris Agreement (2016), endorsed respectively by 198 and 196 nations, committed to the goal of limiting global temperature increase to less than 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the current century.
This monumental commitment notwithstanding, less than a decade later, multiple climate monitoring agencies announced on Jan. 10 that 2024 was the hottest year on record and, some 75 years before the end-of-century timeframe, already had exceeded the 1.5 C standard for the first time.
In the face of the evidence, there is little basis for optimism and, looking forward, every reason for pessimism. In our own country, the federal government, although credited with having adopted a rational (albeit increasingly unpopular) climate policy based on carbon pricing, is on the verge of collapse, with the surging opposition barking out “Axe the tax” without offer of constructive alternatives. Across the border, the U.S. president-elect emerged victorious from the recent American election, in part by trumpeting (pardon the pun) “Drill, baby, drill.”
All the while, fact and truth suffer from a growing plague of misinformation and disinformation.
Although it may be tempting to criticize governments for failing to take decisive and effective action, the political reality within which governments operate is complicated. Government decisions and actions are responsive to pressures from lobbying efforts of business, industry and other special interest groups, the unseen influence of insiders and supporters, and the temptations of opportunism.
And in the public realm, there is strong opposition to policies that can be tied to increased taxes, rising costs of consumer goods and regulations that impose limitations on presumed entitlements embedded in our too-comfortable lifestyles.
How many among us in civil society are willing, voluntarily, to take on the necessary costs, burdens and inconveniences that must be part of any credible effort to tackle the climate crisis in a meaningful way? Clearly, the battle that must be waged is at a scale and level of intensity that equates to, or more likely far exceeds, that of a world war or global pandemic.
So, when bemoaning lack of effective action on the climate front, we need only look in the mirror to see that the image staring back is most likely our own — or possibly that of the hapless frog.
Dale Smith is retired from public service with Nova Scotia’s Natural Resources and Environment departments, and now volunteers with several non-governmental organizations with mandates for environmental protection and land-use policy and planning. He lives in HRM.
