401 Research Projects

Over a four month term, our team conducted an accounting project mandated by McGill Procurement Services focused on the characterization and quantification of McGill’s Scope 3, Category 1 emissions for fiscal year 2023 (FY2023). Our efforts began with an extensive literature review, defining the importance of the need for Scope 3 emissions accounting and analyzing the applied methods of other large institutions. After receiving the itemized purchasing activity from Procurement Services detailing the project-relevant purchased goods and services, we analyzed the availability of supplier data and took guidance from the Greenhouse Gas Protocol’s “Technical Guidance for Calculating Scope 3 Emissions” (2013).

This report investigates waste management and the associated challenges within the Centre Hospitalier de l'Université de Montréal's (CHUM) Ophthalmology department, focusing on waste reduction for the Phaco-IOL surgery. The CHUM faces significant obstacles, including excessive waste production, overconsumption of single-use products and overall inadequate recycling measures even beyond operating rooms (ORs).

This project is focused on providing a holistic interdisciplinary analysis on the management strategies associated with spruce budworm (SBW) outbreaks, as requested by our client, Dr. Robert C. Johns from the Canadian Forest Service. Our objective was to analyse the benefits, risks, and uncertainties of different management options and include the necessary information to inform management decisions.

This report provides a detailed analysis of carbon sequestration capabilities across various land use types in Senneville, Quebec. It highlights the critical role of local ecosystems in mitigating climate change and emphasizes sustainable land management. The combination of a literature review to obtain relevant data, GIS tools, and the application of appropriate mathematical models was used to accurately assess carbon sequestration in each land use type in Senneville. The study discovered that forests in Senneville sequester significant amounts of carbon, with an annual sequestration rate of 1,341.07 tC.

Cycling, an eco-friendly, cost-effective, and active transportation mode, contends for limited urban space compared to motorized vehicles. Despite its numerous benefits, cycling infrastructure encounters significant opposition known as "bikelash," presenting challenges for advocates. Organized opposition often expresses concerns about threats to individualism, mobility, parking, and economic stimulation, to name a few. Collaborating with Magali Bebronne, Program Director at Vélo Québec, this study explores how various messaging techniques and visual graphics influence public acceptance of cycling infrastructure projects in Montreal, while considering age, gender, residential locations, and cycling behavior.

Amidst growing concerns regarding climate change, the Government of Quebec has committed to reducing its emissions by 37.5% by 2030 and becoming carbon neutral by 2050 (Government of Quebec, 2023). Expanding public transport services is an effective way of meeting these targets as the transportation sector is the second largest producer of pollutants in Canada (Government of Canada, 2022). The objective of this study is to thoroughly examine the public transport sector in Montreal, identify gaps, and propose solutions that can improve this sector and contribute to emissions reductions.

The focus of our project was the development of a conservation plan for the Creek 53 watershed located in Hudson, Quebec. As a conservation land trust, Creek 53 has been established in an effort to preserve the biodiversity and ecosystem integrity of an area of ecological importance and natural beauty within the Hudson escarpment and watershed (Creek 53). Under their newly established trust, Creek 53’s board of trustees sought the help of our team to determine which conservation goals they should prioritize over the next five years. Through the use of data collected by Nature Conservancy Canada regarding the unique biodiversity and landscape of the area, we developed recommendations for the Trustees, which culminated in both an internal document for their view, as well as a public facing conservation plan.

This project created a baseline for waste production across McGill’s wet research and teaching labs. By auditing a day’s building-level-wide lab waste, we were able to gather waste data by type and quantity for seven buildings across McGill’s faculties and campuses. In cooperation with Buildings and Grounds, we established a replicable auditing methodology that can be easily re-implemented for future audits. Within McGill’s Zero-Waste initiative, this project laid the foundation for the recommendation and implementation of waste recycling and diverging strategies for labs.

How We Win! investigates the factors and conditions that led to successes for intersectional climate justice campaigns across Turtle Island (North America), along with challenges they faced and how they were overcome. The study is in partnership with the Climate Justice Organizing HUB, contributing towards the HUB’s mission of supporting grassroots climate activism in so-called Canada by analyzing the successes of other campaigns to inform future activism. Fourteen intersectional climate justice campaigns from Mexico, the so-called United States, and so-called Canada were identified based on the achievement of material gains (advancements in physical, financial, legal, or electoral conditions).

Even in the age of reconciliation, Canada’s approach to consulting Indigenous Nations about extractive projects on their territories, not only fails to address communities’ very real concerns, but blatantly violates Indigenous Rights and Title. Refusing to take no as an answer from communities, the federal and provincial governments push through extractive projects on Indigenous lands by performing weak consultation processes and passing these off as consent (King and Pasternack, 2019, p.20; Le Billon and Middleldorp, 2021 p. 71). While Indigenous people have opposed the extractive developments and the environmental assessment consultation processes,extractive projects continue to be approved with little consultation and without consent. This dynamic is playing out currently in the Uranium boom in North Saskatchewan, as the world seeks greener alternatives to fossil fuels. This uranium boom, and the colonial consultation processes facilitating it, is the focus of this research project and report. There is currently an international push to find new low carbon energies that support the transition away from fossil fuels in light of climate change. What our research shows is that this energy transition is happening at the expense of Indigenous communities and their lands and waters, much like the fossil fuel industry has.

In this project, ENVR 401 students collaborated with two different Indigenous organizations: Indigenous Climate Action (ICA) and Mikana. The group was divided into two smaller groups. One group worked with Breanne Lavallee-Heckert, ICA’s Research Manager to investigate how Nature-based Climate Solutions are played out in Canada and the rest of the Americas. The research was conducted to see how these initiatives might be perpetuating colonial relations, including land theft.

While urban green spaces have been shown to provide a vast number of benefits, they also have the potential to exacerbate socio-environmental issues that disproportionately impact vulnerable communities. In order for the benefits of green spaces to be distributed equitably and to mitigate potential environmental injustices, an Environmental Justice (EJ) lens can be applied to the planning, development, and implementation of green spaces. This research aims to evaluate the City of Montreal’s (COM’s) participatory outreach for their new municipal park, Grand Parc de l’Ouest (GPO). This project also identifies strategies and provides recommendations for furthering EJ in the GPO as the city continues in planning.

*(note: Both projects 3 & 4 have similar intentions, but different situational concerns)

With increasing urbanization, climate change, and ecological degradation, sustainable urban development is becoming increasingly important. The city of Saint-Lazare is a suburb of the Greater Montreal Area with a population of approximately 22,500 people. As part of the Communauté Métropolitaine de Montréal (Montreal Metropolitan Community or CMM), the city is required to increase its housing density from its current average density of 3.4 homes per hectare (h/ha) to an average density of 18 h/ha under the new regulations of the Plan Métropolitain d’Aménagement et de Développement (Metropolitan Land Use and Development Plan or PMAD). This poses certain challenges to the city, which currently has a sprawled development pattern and larger than average biodiversity due to the large amount of forests and wetlands in the city. This project presents the city of Saint-Lazare with specific recommendations for the most sustainable urban development as the city further develops to meet the new PMAD densification requirements.

*(note: Both projects 3 & 4 have similar intentions, but different situational concerns)

The Plan Métropolitain d'Aménagement et de Développement (PMAD) requires new developments in Saint-Lazare to adapt to a standard of 18 homes/ha on average by 2023-2026. Currently, the standard of development for the city is an average of 3.4 homes/ha. The clients, Lorraine Caron (President of the Environment Advisory Committee of Saint-Lazare) and Geneviève Lachance (Mayor of Saint-Lazare) requested consultation on the impacts of the lowest and highest density developments on local biodiversity. Additionally, they requested recommendations on ways to motivate individual homeowners to protect local biodiversity. Our team used a qualitative approach to assess the potential impacts of four different categories of development on local species. Moreover, we performed a literature review to understand the barriers to pro-environmental behaviour and to find case studies on cities that have successfully motivated their citizens to implement various conservation strategies.

The purpose of this report is to give an overview of the work we have conducted in the last three months concerning the distribution of several mangrove species, their respective carbon sequestration capacities, and the impact mangroves have on bird biodiversity in Parita Bay, Panama. Such analyses are critical for the development of just carbon market policies and for the conservation of critically endangered habitats. Despite this importance, there are numerous barriers to obtaining accurate estimations of these variables and their interrelationships at wide scales. As a result, countries holding significant proportions of the world’s mangrove ecosystems such as Panama still lack fine-scale species- or community-level representations of regional mangrove cover and the relative biomass produced by each species, and even less is known about the effects of these factors on birds.

This report was requested by Montreal West and its environmental coordinator Alyssa Wilber to generate an emissions inventory for the town. The inventory is required in order to satisfy Partners for Climate Protection (PCP) Milestone 2 and receive future funding. To address the lack of community emissions, we developed a survey to quantify household emissions associated with water and waste management, electricity, gas and transportation use for the year 2021.

This project provides an analysis of the current state of green space in Pointe-Claire and supplies recommendations to increase its coverage and connectivity. These recommendations aim to alleviate the impacts of urban heat island (UHI) and increase the quality of life for residents. This is especially important because Pointe-Claire has an aging population that is highly vulnerable to extreme and prolonged heat events. Location-specific recommendations supported by scientific research, such as green roofs, community gardens, and restoration of shorelines are proposed to mitigate the UHI effect.

Across the world, many cities are choosing to implement low- and zero-emission zones (LEZ/ZEZ) with the goal of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from vehicles, improving resident health, and facilitating more efficient transportation modes. The goal of this report is to determine whether it would be possible to design a ZEZ within one or multiple areas of Montréal’s highest density, downtown urban environment. The study investigated the environmental and socioeconomic outcomes that a ZEZ would impose. The main goal is to advise the City of Montréal’s Transport, Energy and Building Division of the Office of Ecological Transition and Resilience (“the City”) on ways to implement a ZEZ within the Old Port neighborhood in a relatively short time frame, and with minimal consequences to traffic flows, economic activity and social equity.

Urban green spaces play an essential role in supporting ecological and social systems within cities. In particular, they confer social benefits to certain demographics such as children, seniors, and low-income families, while contributing to Urban Heat Island (UHI) mitigation. This study aimed to determine where to implement high-quality urban greenspace to enhance accessibility to low-income, children and senior populations, and to ameliorate the Urban Heat Island Effect in the Peter-McGill District of Montréal.

The research question driving this research project is “what factors are limiting or motivating participation of West-Montrealers in the tree planting program?”. We hypothesized that the reluctance of West-Montrealers was due to a lack of knowledge and engagement in the program. We also predicted that support of the program is a result of both the environmental and personal benefits of trees. This research is important as it can be applied on more than a local scale and used to further tree planting programs globally and not just within Montreal West. The main objectives of this research project are to gain more insight on the causes of residents reluctance and acceptance in regards to our clients tree planting program, to educate the community on the role of urban greenspaces and trees, to assist with the introduction of our clients ecosystem benefits map, and to provide the municipality with potential locations to plant more trees.

The Autorité régionale de transport métropolitain (ARTM) hopes to better understand the potential negative impacts of large-scale transit development projects with a particular concern surrounding gentrification. To address their concerns, we formulated three research questions: 1) What are the potential impacts of large-scale transit infrastructure projects?; 2) Which areas of Montreal are currently underserved by public transit and which areas are susceptible to gentrification?; and, 3a) how can the benefits and losses caused by mass transit infrastructure projects be equitably distributed? 3b) what factors should be considered when making transit policies in Montreal?

Cycling is one of the most sustainable and healthy methods of transportation which cities around the world, including Montreal, are working to support. The purpose of this study is to identify which factors significantly affect cycling rates and crashes in Montreal and what policies can potentially help solve problems and make cycling more appealing. Our research specifically looked at the effect of weather conditions, seasonality, bike lane infrastructure, and existing city policies.

Nitrogen is a key nutrient in the production of agricultural cropping systems. Over time, Canadian farmers have become increasingly reliant on the application of synthetic industrial fertilizer for optimizing crop yields. In order to help in the improvement of the Canadian nitrogen footprint model designed by McCourt and Macdonald (2021), our study focused on two main objectives: improving data coverage and quality. Specifically this study aimed at: determining the influence of trade on the production of major field crops across Canada as a function of nitrogen flow in kilograms; determining the changes in nitrogen inputs from fertilizer application for selected crops by province from 1980-2021; and making policy recommendations based on a review of historical agricultural policy and its correlations with nitrogen use and a qualitative analysis of current agricultural policy.

Nitrogen is a complex element that not only composes the majority of the earth’s atmosphere (N2), but is also the fourth most abundant element found in biomass (Stein & Klotz, 2016). Over half of reactive nitrogen in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems today can be attributed to human activity; the primary culprits for this excess nitrogen being wastewater, agricultural practices, and fossil fuel burning (Fowler et al., 2013). While this can be beneficial to organisms in nitrogen poor environments (increasing productivity), it is harmful in excess amounts as a driver of eutrophication, smog, greenhouse gas emissions and other ecosystem impacts (Dixon & Khan, 2004; Fowler et al., 2013; Erisman et al., 2008). In the aim of providing better data to inform policy makers, our team worked with PhD candidate Sibeal McCourt to improve the accuracy for the wastewater section of her model of the Canadian Nitrogen footprint.

Our team was tasked with assessing various scenarios for managing organic waste generated by McGill’s downtown cafeterias. In the context of McGill’s Climate and Sustainability Strategy, it is important that the university determines ways of optimizing organic waste management to reduce emissions and be more sustainable. As such, we evaluated the option of installing organic waste dehydrators in the cafeterias and selling the output of this process, dehydrated organic matter, to third parties. Ideally, this would reduce the costs and emissions associated with McGill’s current organic waste management, which consists of sending the organic waste to our partner Compost Montreal, where the waste is then composted.

Humanity is facing a series of critical challenges related to environmental and climate change. Major polluting industries such as concrete production are playing significant roles as large emitters of CO2—a greenhouse gas that has been at the center of the global environmental debate. At the same time, this concern deserves no less attention at the local and regional scale, which is why this semester-long research project focused on assessing the current situation of the concrete manufacturing industry and determining possible approaches to lower its environmental footprint in Quebec

The Fairy Creek Blockade is a key environmental activist movement seated in Fairy Creek, an old growth forest in Southern Vancouver. The movement aims to stop old growth logging within Fairy Creek and ultimately old growth logging as an industry. This paper explores the social media presence of the Fairy Creek Blockade and the support it garners from such presence using both quantitative and qualitative methods to round the engagement, tactics, and rhetoric seen within the environmental activism sphere, the broader media coverage, and the resulting legal decisions. Of this case study, we ask why Fairy Creek is so popular, how can we accurately quantify the movement’s growth and engagement on social media, what tactics are used to garner engagement and build the movement, what tactics are used to respond to the protest’s opposition, and what is the effect of social media on the outcome of the Fairy Creek environmental activist movement?

The Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect presents a growing threat to the well-being of communities around the world. In Montreal, current climate projections suggest that an increase in global temperatures will amplify the UHI effect, disproportionately impacting vulnerable populations such as the elderly and residents of public housing (Fan & Sengupta, 2021; Maller & Strengers, 2011; Roberge & Sushama, 2018; Voelkel et al., 2018). This study aims to answer the following questions: What heat-related coping mechanisms do residents of public housing in East Montreal use? What factors prevent people from engaging in coping mechanisms? What policies can be implemented to improve a person’s ability to cope?

A vulnerability assessment of the Macdonald Campus Farm (henceforth referred to as ‘the farm’ or ‘the Mac Farm’) to climate change was conducted to identify the impacts of climate change on the farm, with an emphasis on the most vulnerable aspects and potential adaptation options that could help prevent or alleviate the most pressing challenges. This research was prompted by the McGill Office of Sustainability’s need for a climate vulnerability assessment of the Mac Farm, which had not previously been carried out. We employed a framework that includes both top-down and bottom-up components in order to adequately deliver a second-order vulnerability assessment of the farm.

Increasing climate change trends over the past century have begun to show signs of destruction. In order to deal with current and future impacts, having an accurate local forecast of what they entail allows for maximum efficiency in implementing solutions. How does climate change in Barbados affect the Bellairs Research Institute and what potential adaptation options can be implemented? The research is aimed to identify potential climate change threats over multiple time scales for the Bellairs Research Institute located in Holetown, Barbados, for our client Divya Sharma, Climate Officer for The McGill Office of Sustainability. The Bellairs Research Institute, a satellite research facility for McGill University, is vital for obtaining unique research unobtainable within McGill University’s geographic setting of its main campus.

Our project aims to develop a research question that studies the social dimensions of extreme weather events using archival materials and the Data Rescue: Archives and Weather (DRAW) platform. Through careful preservation of the documents, archival sources can provide rich and alternative perspectives on climatic histories from various socio-cultural angles.

Historical climate data are crucial for efforts to investigate climate variability. Understanding climate trends of the past is necessary to understand, detect, predict, and respond to local and regional climate change both in the present and the future. This in turn is contingent upon digitized historical weather and climate observations. However, such records are highly fragmented, which is in part due to the widespread presence of orphan historical climate data, which are data that are lacking important contextual information, or metadata. This issue can thus be addressed through metadata rescue, which situates orphan data in its context and makes it usable in research. This theme of metadata rescue underlies our research question: How can metadata be rescued to improve the usability of orphan historical climate data?

This research project addresses the intersections between green space accessibility, persons with disabilities, and well-being in Montreal, Quebec. We focus on mobility disabilities impacting urban green space access and enjoyment in the Plateau-Mont-Royal borough. Thus, we developed the following research questions to guide our analysis of green space accessibility: Given that green spaces enhance the physical and mental well-being of their users, how does the design of urban green spaces address equitable access for persons with disabilities? How can green space accessibility be more accurately and effectively measured? How can accessibility features be more easily identified and improved?

The rise of user-centered online social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, has led to the emergence of ‘Web 2.0’, a framework designated for online interaction. As such, the role of social media is becoming an increasingly important tool for the campaigns and protests of today’s activists. Past research on the #NoDAPL social media campaign shows that social media presence enabled Indigeneous protesters to spread their message, reach wide audiences, gather support, dominate the narrative and the truths about their resistance, and gain very real successes over time. We therefore used a combination of Critical Discourse Analysis and Frequency Analysis to investigate how the use social media activism of Indigenous communities disrupts or enables the hegemony of fossil fuel extraction by pipeline projects. The choice of two in-depth case studies, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) and the Wet’suwet’en Nation resistance to Coastal Gas Link (CGL), created a starting point for our own primary research into discourse analysis of tweets by actors in the different pipeline protests.

This paper is an analysis of social media activism as a means to encourage divestment by publicly traded firms and institutions. In this project, we focus on the extent to which Canadian financial institutions (Royal Bank of Canada/European Investment Bank) and higher education institutions (University of British Columbia/McGill University) are involved in the movement, and also analyze the role of interested actors in using social media to engage in and organize fossil fuel divestment actions. The research questions guiding this project were: What is the impact of social media activism on publicly traded firms and institution’s divestment strategies? and, Which tactics used by activists in divestment campaigns work effectively?

Human activities have greatly disrupted the nitrogen cycle and in turn, reactive nitrogen is threatening human health and ecosystems. Institutions like McGill are responsible for their part; food products, food waste, transportation, and agricultural activities on campus are all sectors within McGill’s control that contribute to their institutional nitrogen footprint. Using data about McGill’s nitrogen emissions complemented by a literature review, this report shines a light on specific actions that can be implemented in each of the aforementioned sectors to reduce McGill’s impact. The report offers a realistic approach by examining the data in several non-mutually exclusive scenarios: business as usual, low, moderate, and high nitrogen reduction.

The Panama Canal is a crucial component of Panama’s society. It provides drinking water, food, hydropower, and a source of income to Panamanians while also providing a key transportation hub for vessels travelling between the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean. However, changes in land use and climate have put pressure on the canal’s water supply, therefore it is vital that new infrastructure is implemented to increase water flow to the Canal. The two solutions examined were a dam to increase the number of reservoirs that supply water to the Canal and a reforestation project that would utilize the sponge-effect to retain runoff water during the wet season and release it in the dry season to the Canal, when supply is low.

In the context of a changing climate and an increasingly urbanized global population, much effort has been devoted to understanding the causes and repercussions of the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect — the higher atmospheric temperatures of urban areas as compared to surrounding rural areas, as a result of differences in land cover and population size. While the effect is mostly studied at city or zip code scales, we examined its presence at the micro-scale of McGill University’s Downtown campus, hoping to pinpoint the way it affects the energy consumption of the university’s buildings (in chilled water used for general cooling) and the way it is compounded by the university’s urban landscape (in features such as the sky-view factor, land use, canopy cover, and elevation).

The overarching goal of this project is to evaluate social and environmental impacts in the supply chains of McGill’s top suppliers. This goal encompasses our four main objectives: evaluate the performance of McGill’s top suppliers; assess the suppliers’ efforts to mitigate environmental and social impacts; identify key risks and barriers in addressing these impacts; and finally, recommend strategies to mitigate these risks and impacts. To meet these objectives, we focused on two issues: conflict minerals in the scientific instruments sector and sustainable seafood in the food sector.

This research project addresses the mandate given to us by our client, Vélo Québec. We were tasked with evaluating the long-term impacts of Vélo Québec’s cycling education program, Cycliste Averti. Since 2015, Vélo Québec has been running this program to teach children in grades 5 and 6 about cycling road safety.

The first goal of our project was to identify areas of concern along the shoreline to determine which areas are in most need of intervention. We then aimed to develop adaptive management and restoration recommendations for the areas of highest concern. Lastly, we sought to develop methodology and framework for shoreline restoration that could be applied to similar projects.

Our final research project enlisted the main objective of raising awareness and educating the wider McGill community about event-based carbon emissions, and offering a tangible and realistic method to partake in combating such emissions.

The increasing frequency and intensity of heat waves due to climate change obliges cities to update and develop their mitigation measures. In Montreal, the current map of mitigation measures for heat emergencies is improved through the creation of both a new static and interactive map.

This study aimed to examine the spatial distribution of contamination across the city, to identify the distribution of soil contamination and the communities that are most impacted by its potential adverse effects. The purpose of this research was to identify if the distribution of contamination is equally distributed across all ethnic and income groups, or if there is presence of environmental injustice, potentially due to biased government planning and management.

This proposal has the objective of protecting the watershed from the rapid encroachment of urban settlements sprawling from Panama City, in order to protect the functionality of the Canal and reduce deforestation.

In this study, we developed a method to detect and classify winter storm events from historical weather records in Montreal, allowing comparisons between winter weather in historic and modern time periods.

This study examines the relationship between construction on McGill University’s downtown campus and the health of the surrounding trees.

McGill University is in the process of reevaluating current construction and demolition waste (CDW) management practices in the larger context of its commitment to sustainability. Through a semi-structured interview process with a variety of McGill stakeholders and external contractors, we researched how McGill’s CDW could be better managed.

To increase the percentage of trips done by bicylce, Vélo Québec has employed multiple initiatives, one of which is to request this research team to investigate how cycling can be increased in Montreal.

This research fills this knowledge gap by estimating the current tree canopy cover of Panama City, contextualizing the city’s urban tree cover in comparison to that of other cities, and evaluating the effect of urban tree cover on city features.

VIA Rail’s effort to reduce the carbon footprint generated by its operations begins partly with minimizing waste – an aspect of onboard food and beverage services focused on in this study. We examine material, procedural, and social barriers to the implementation of waste reduction strategies as perceived by VIA Rail employees primarily through a survey and a focus group discussion.

We investigated VIA’s usage of coffee cups and tried to determine ways that VIA could reduce the environmental impact associated with this product.

As a part of McGill’s 2040 climate action plan, the university is working towards the implementation of policies which encourage the construction and renovation of buildings with lower carbon footprints. Thus, the new laboratory at Gault Nature Reserve is designed to be built in compliance with two rigorous green building certifications.

How can we design a sustainable landscape and justify the investment?

Our research project presents in-depth analyses, as well as the methodologies implemented to construct procurement questionnaires for environmentally sustainable and humanely sourced beef and poultry. The questionnaire aims to help our client, McGill’s Student Housing and Hospitality Services (SHHS), offer more sustainable meat products on campus.

This project provides comprehensive research and a toolkit in order to support Student Housing and Hospitality Services (SHHS)’ efforts to procure local produce from farms with sustainable practices that will provide in the dining halls at McGill.

The goal of this solid landfill waste emission research project was to calculate an emissions factor in CO2 equivalence for the McGill downtown campus.

Data Rescue: Archives and Weather (DRAW) is a project with the aim to rescue tens of thousands of pages of historical weather records from Montreal. Our objective was to determine how fit for use the rescue data in the DRAW archive is.

This project aims to improve McGill’s procurement profile by offering more sustainable product options at the McGill Bookstore.

McGill University’s policy for used and end-of-life IT assets currently includes management of administrative IT assets, however, it does not include IT assets purchased by researchers, known as Principal Investigators (PIs). In the hopes of including research-funded IT assets within the McGill IT Asset Management Regulation, our client Stephanie Leclerc gave our team the task to understand the concerns, policy objectives, perspectives, and motivations from various actors and stakeholders involved in IT asset management at McGill.

Our research project is concerned with the conservation of endangered aquatic species in situations where anthropogenic activities and ecological systems overlap. Working with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO), our interest was to explore the available methods for assessing the ecological risks of development projects on endangered species.

This project investigates the status of the Panama Bay mangrove ecosystem by using ArcGIS and ENVI software to determine how the distribution of mangroves along the coast of Panama City has changed from 1987 to present. Additionally, the research explores the driving factors of this shifting distribution by employing a generalized additive model to evaluate the significance of a variety of biological and sociopolitical factors.

The Data Rescue: Archives and Weather (DRAW) project presents an opportunity to preserve historical climate data but research was needed to determine the validity of an oft-cited claim – that citizen scientists’ capabilities are nearly equal to professionals’. 

This project was commissioned to examine what attributes should be used when describing a McGill University green space. These attributes were used to form a definition and operationalizable green space survey to create an attributional database characterizing the green space present on both the downtown and Macdonald campuses of McGill University.

The objective of our project was to develop an analysis of how to best fulfill LEED O+M criteria for the Faculty of Law at McGill University; specifically, Old Chancellor Day Hall, New Chancellor Day Hall, and Gelber Library.

 Our research aims to decrease the risk and severity of flooding following extreme precipitation events and to answer the question: what is the effectiveness of low impact, alternatives to conventional flood mitigation strategies?

Our team’s task was to study various carbon offsetting strategies that currently exist and to determine the best strategies that McGill could take on in order to help achieve its goal of carbon neutrality.

This paper, with a focus on McGill University in Montreal, Canada, seeks to find solutions to reduce and/or offset GHG emissions among faculty members, administrative staffs and students through air travel. <

McGill University has made a pledge to become carbon neutral by the year 2040, but this excluded most scope 3 emissions including those from procurement, which have been found to account for 38% to 80% of a university’s total carbon footprint (Doyle, 2012). Our investigation poses the following question: How can McGill quantify the scope 3 emissions associated with the purchase of IT products, specifically administrative desktops, laptops, and academic tablets?

This report was commissioned to inventory the greenhouse gas emissions of Montreal West for administrative buildings (Legion Memorial Rink, Town Hall, Public Works, Davis Park Chalet, and the Community Centre) in hydroelectricity and natural gas; municipal owned fleet (42 total vehicles and machinery) for fuel consumed; municipality-wide garbage, recycling, and compost disposal and collection; municipality-wide treatment of potable water and sewage.

ECOLE seeks to enrich our project by reaching out to students in the McGill School of Environment course ENVR 401 Environmental Research in order to help us to document and institutionalize best practices for fulfilling our mandate, and to help us create tools to share the outcomes of the ECOLE project to students, faculty, staff, community members, and other student-run sustainability projects worldwide.

The Chiefs of Ontario, a First Nations organization advocating for the interests of the 133 First Nation communities in that province, invite ENVR 401 student research on this evolving context. Of particular interest and concern are questions regarding the extent to which this new climate plan engages Indigenous communities, produces impacts felt by Indigenous communities, and offers opportunities for Indigenous solutions to climate change.

The ecological imperative of the project Hotel Dieu Communauté as well as its proximity to McGill University provides the opportunity for MSE students to elaborate an assessment of the ecological footprint of the property and provide ideas to increase the sustainability of its new land uses. Indeed, as a central goal of the project is to reduce the ecological impact of the communal space, the 401 project could serve as a first quantitative baseline to inform the Coalition of the current state of the ecological footprint of its land use as well as directives in order to reduce it.

The overarching aim of the project is to identify policies and/or programs that will increase the rate of composting in the town of Montreal West. Two potential questions are: 1. What are the determinants of composting behavior in the town of Montreal West? 2. What policies and/or programs would encourage composting? How can the costs and benefits be understood?

The small town of Richford, Vermont lies just off the western slopes of the several hundred- million-year-old Green Mountains, on the banks of the even-older Missisquoi River that cuts right through them. One previous ENVR 401 group studied how to reduce the toll taken by roads on mountain wildlife in the area (Bernstein et al. 2015), and a second group researched how to lessen the harm done by farms to river ecology there (Gould et al. 2015). Both groups came to focus on re-connecting fragmented forest ecosystems: one via culverts under roads, and the other via buffers along the river. This year's group will build on these two projects, and explore ways in which our client, the Richford Conservation Commission, can foster both kinds of improvement.

This 401 group will explore possible explanations for this behavior. We will build upon and update previous research by our client – the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) – on financial ties between members of Canadian university boards and various corporations. And we will conduct a paired comparison of ties between board members and fossil fuel companies – as well as governance in general – at universities elsewhere who have at least partly divested from fossil fuel, vs. otherwise similar universities who have not divested. As a template for comparison, as well for specific recommendations of change at Canadian universities, we will apply the CAUT's policy statement on university governance (CAUT 2014).

This partnership will explore the potential for spawning disruption as a population suppression technique in the GLB, which will ultimately provide guidance on the ecological tradeoffs involved for a range of eradication options (e.g., adult suppression via harvesting, flow manipulation in spawning tributaries, chemical or genetic techniques). The range of eradication techniques and their potential tradeoffs can be used in a decision making framework to understand the benefits and consequences of spawning disruption as part of a broader aquatic invasive species management program.

The project would consist of a comprehensive analysis of rainwater retention strategies and potential uses for this water, should it be repurposed. The strategies should evaluate the life-cycle cost and maintenance of each system, as well as their overall environmental impact. Each strategy should be tailored to the specific context of McGill’s downtown campus and have the flexibility to be implemented in phases.

The purpose of the project would be to analyse the primary vegetation types, greenfield areas, threatened or endangered species, unique habitat, and invasive plant species on both of McGill's campuses. The analysis would then inform the development of a planning strategy to integrate rewilding, xeriscaping and permaculture into the landscape on both campuses in order to restore natural habitat, reduce maintenance costs, increase biodiversity and help manage rainwater. Equally important would be the development of a strategy to address the safety concerns posed by dense vegetation on campus. Additionally, the project could include the development of tools or training resources to be used by the Grounds team to ensure continuity in the application of the new landscaping standards and best practices.

Students will collaborate directly with the client to improve the process of citizen scientist engagement in the project. The client currently is interested in people’s interest in citizen science and testing the project site. This will likely entail  recruitment of community groups on the West Island interested in learning about citizen science and historical data transcription,  development of a primer on citizen science that can be used to introduce community members to the project,  design of focus groups and other methods to assess community group members’ satisfaction with transcribing data,  conducting of those focus groups, and  analysis and presentation of results. Students are expected to take on the role of experts in the fields of citizen science and usability to deliver recommendations to their client based on their review of the scientific literature as well as their findings over the course of the testing process.

The objective of this 401 project would be a comparison of the MSC’s data offer with other leading meteorological centers in the world, for example the National Weather Service (NWS) in the US, the UK Met Office, the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts and Météo-France. Students would report on what information the other centers provide that we don’t, and compare their methods of data access (tools) to ours. Students also could highlight the difficulties, which prevent users from effectively accessing some of our data due to our lack or difficulty of access tools. Finally, students could highlight where, in the data and in the tools, our limited offering might not meet the requirements of ECCC’s strategic policy on Open Data.