Delivering the Right Message: Toronto Climate Week 2026

At one time, climate change was something we talked about as a far-off consequence of environmental destruction. We said that if we didn't stop burning fossil fuels, then one day, the seas would rise, temperatures would climb, and the world would slowly burn and starve, beginning with the most vulnerable people of the Global South.

As it turns out, one day wasn't as far away as we thought. All those things are happening today, and while there are plenty of ongoing global crises to keep us distracted, climate change has evolved from a potential outcome to an everyday reality for billions of people around the world.

Despite that, climate change is not a priority for everyone, not even in the communities most likely to suffer its impact. Conflicting priorities and economic realities mean that for many people, mitigating the impact of climate change can't compete with the pressure to focus on paying bills and managing busy family lives.

Part 1 of this two-part series on the kickoff to Toronto Climate Week on June 1, 2026, looked at topics like community engagement, the importance of looking at nature as infrastructure, and how sustainability can be a byproduct of efficiency. Part 2 examines how talking about climate change, especially with those most likely to suffer its immediate impacts, will require more than just facts, figures, and fearmongering, but will instead rely on delivering a message that puts climate change at the foundation of other practical and economic concerns.

Bottom-Up or Top-Down: Engagement and Leadership

Conversations about strategies for fighting climate change often implicate high-level actors like federal governments or global industries as the most important agents of power. While it's true that those actors often bring the greatest economic muscle, mayors at the municipal level can play critical roles in harnessing the resources that communities under threat are most likely to need.

​Kate Johnson, regional director for North America at C40 Cities, said that mayors are taking a leading role in tackling climate change.

“It's not just because they care about addressing the climate crisis,” noted Johnson. “It's because they also know that climate action delivers more affordable, more livable, and better cities, and that's a mayor's primary responsibility. They can provide a level of continuity despite political instability at other levels.”

Johnson pointed to New York City's Congestion Relief Zone toll program as an example of a city-level initiative that can reduce pollution while enhancing efficiency.

“The conversation on congestion pricing started in the 1950s,” said Johnson. “It took a very long time, but the benefits were instantaneous. Cities around the world look to those examples, and they gather political courage from that.”

Ralph Torrie, director of research at Corporate Knights, discussed an initiative in which mayors from across North America and Europe formed a small group to explore how municipalities could fight climate change. The group eventually adopted a program for local climate action, and it is now a global covenant with more than 14,000 members made up of mayors focused on climate and energy.

Torrie relayed an anecdote of a Conference of the Parties (COP) meeting in Berlin in 1995 in which the anxiety and pessimism of the big global powers was a stark contrast to the excitement and enthusiasm of the local mayors who were taking action in their communities.

“For them [mayors], climate action was not a burden,” said Torrie. “It was helping them achieve other aspirations, like cleaner air, better transit, safer streets, more efficient housing, and stronger local economies. While the national governments were arguing over abstract targets and burden sharing, cities were discovering that when you embed climate action in the practical work of city building, it feels like an opportunity, not an obligation.”

John Robinson, professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, began his panel with a pessimistic message about the failure of most climate initiatives, even those at the municipal level, to meet their goals.

“Of the 283 cities around the world that have signed up to net-zero targets, basically all of them are failing,” he said. “This is an important message. Toronto is also failing. We're not going to reach our current targets with the trajectory we're on right now.”

Robinson asserted that the primary reason for such failures is that local governments don't have citizens' support for the climate agendas, and that citizens might not even be aware of the existence of such agendas. Robinson said this is the result of a fundamental error of understanding and communication between a government and its communities.

“The reason for this failure is that, like almost all environmental education around the planet, cities and other levels of government have bought into a view that you can educate people into changing their behavior, despite the fact that we have 60 or 70 years of evidence in about five different areas showing that information does not change behavior,” he said.

Robinson believes that overcoming this information deficit requires engaging residents in a way that makes them want to be part of the conversation, which is particularly important in communities that are facing practical struggles like income disparity and evictions, some of which are often made worse by the impact of climate change.

Emily Smit, a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto, outlined a research project taking place in a marginalized community in Toronto to better understand the aspirations of the community and how to get there in a way that supports both economic growth and sustainability.

“We did a backcasting process,” said Smit. “Backcasting articulates a desired neighborhood future and then develops pathways backwards to the present state to figure out how to achieve the desired future.”

By speaking to communities and understanding their economic and lifestyle goals, Smit and her team of researchers developed a better understanding of how those goals can complement the sustainability agenda. Their conclusion was that positive climate change outcomes need to be byproducts, not the focus, of urban development.

Robinson, who is part of Smit's project, noted that the research highlights that cities need to understand those community priorities if they want to get citizen engagement on achieving their climate goals.

“Make climate the co-benefit,” said Robinson. “The benefit is better lives and better communities. In other words, sustainability and climate are a co-benefit of that. If we do the right things, we will also be achieving our climate goals.”

Torrie pushed back at the idea of engagement, however, asserting that intense community engagement is not necessary to make significant improvements at the levels of infrastructure required to combat climate change.

“This job in physical space isn't that complicated,” said Torrie. “We have to electrify all our vehicles, we have to transform our building stock, and we've got to build an awful lot of wind turbines somewhere. It doesn't strike me as being that much more difficult than developing the tar sands or the nuclear power program … which proceeded fairly quickly with intense capital investment and didn't require everybody on the street to get engaged in it.” If you make the solutions really attractive to people, Torrie said, the engagement might simply take care of itself.

Words Matter: Talking About Climate Change

Despite the conference being a full day of discussions about climate change, attendees noted that most people outside that conference don't think about it at all.

“Nobody's waking up in the morning thinking about climate change,” said Sarah Roberton, senior vice president of corporate and public affairs at Environics Research. “They're thinking about the bills they have to pay, their jobs, and their families. If we want people to change their behavior and their habits, that happens when the solution is easier, cheaper, healthier, safer, and more fun to use.”

Jason Agar, founder of Pomelo Studio Inc., said that communicating ways to improve the climate must be connected to something that improves the lives of consumers without simply presenting them with scientific facts they don't understand.

“If you just say, 'Oh, we've saved this many credits,' you're asking too much of people to say they understand,” said Agar. “They can't make those two connections. You have to tie it into what you've done to improve their lives.”

Roberton noted that events like Climate Week can, in fact, be detrimental to helping climate activists learn how to engage with communities and get support, saying that speaking too frequently with people who already agree with the premise of fighting climate change can create an insular and exclusive language.

“We need to think about the people who aren't in the room today and how to have conversations with them,” said Roberton. “Organizations of every kind need to grow and to broaden the conversation they're having with people with different value sets. They need to have these challenging conversations.”

Nelson Switzer from Climate Innovation Capital emphasized that such conversations are important, even in a time when political polarization has made them exceptionally difficult. He noted that political support for environmental causes can often be a contributing factor to that polarization.

“I call it the Al Gore effect,” said Switzer. “Al Gore came out with An Inconvenient Truth and gave it a political face. That gave it a political face and led to where we are … spending so much time in this polarizing position when we should be inviting people in and sharing opportunities.”