Climate Momentum celebrates three years of ‘rebirth’

Meeting his second grandchild in the fall of 2018 made Bill James-Abra want to take action.

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As he gazed at the infant while an older grandchild stood on his knee, he began wondering about the world they would grow up in.

“I found myself thinking, ‘what kind of world are these kids going to inherit, and what do I want to do about that?’ And that led to me then thinking that there was a gap in Stratford to start an environmental group,” James-Abra said.

A few months later, he connected with former Stratford resident Anne Carbert to form Climate Momentum, a local volunteer group that advocates for climate action. With an unavoidable slowdown during the COVID-19 pandemic, this month marks the third anniversary of what James-Abra calls Climate Momentum’s second birthday.

Although the group started off small – self-described as the “two people and a website” era – Climate Momentum quickly grew from a few networking social events, or “Climate Mixers,” to hosting its first major event, the Fridays for Future march and rally, on Sept. 20, 2019. That march saw the fledgling group partner with the Stratford District secondary school eco-club for a protest that saw 250 people hike from the school to Market Square in solidarity with Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg.

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Carbert joined the group because she realized that not much was happening government to address climate change, despite agreements like the Kyoto Protocol, and the problem was just getting worse.

“My concern was that we were kind of letting a problem of global proportions continue unchecked, and that this was going to affect ecosystems and people everywhere. We were becoming more aware of what the kind of crisis situations might be, in terms of extreme weather and displacement of communities and loss of forest and animal life and that kind of thing,” Carbert said.

Canada officially withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol in December 2012 and, despite signing the 2016 Paris Agreement, which aims to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5 C above preindustrial levels, national carbon emissions have only dropped slightly, excluding the impacts of the pandemic shutdowns, from 731 megatons that year to 702 megatons in 2023.

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Because she did not see the federal or provincial governments taking nearly enough action, Carbert said she saw the opportunity to focus her efforts on the community level.

“We wanted people to see local solutions and local actions that were happening and kind of feel that momentum and build on it,” she said.

Beyond that 2019 march, the group enjoyed a lot of other successes in that first year, including a letter-writing campaign leading up to Stratford city council’s declaration of a climate emergency in February 2020. Although the group went virtual during the COVID-10 pandemic , its members still managed to find a way to fight for the environment, including holding a Fridays for Future shoe strike that September. With the COVID-related gathering restrictions still in place, supporters were asked to leave a pair of shoes at city hall for a few hours to show their support for the cause.

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When it was able again, Climate Momentum met together in December 2021 at the home of one its members for a “rebirth,” James-Abra said.

Since then, the grassroots group has seen a rapid upward resurgence, moving meetings to downtown’s revel coffeehouse and, once it outgrew that space, to Avondale United Church. It now boasts 15 to 18 regular members, sends out a newsletter twice a month, and its follower count is nearly 600 on Instagram and just more than 500 on Facebook. The group has also recently launched its monthly Climate Conversation, which takes a deep dive into different issues related to climate change each month.

Climate Momentum, James-Abra said, has four main areas of focus: the urban canopy and tree cover, building codes, power generation and public transit.

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However, James-Abra would still like to see more involvement from the community.

“As the guy who’s trying to organize it, I’d always like to see things move faster and see more engagement. . . . And the focus on these projects will, I hope, give more opportunity for people in the community to see where they can plug in and join and be part of the action,” he said.

Youth involvement

Although Climate Momentum is not a youth-led organization, concerned students have been involved almost from the beginning. This includes Sammie Orr, who helped organize the 2019 Fridays for Future marches, as well as the shoe strike, as well as Rachael Stephan and Emily Adam, who presented to council on the night it declared a climate emergency.

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Everything that happened at that first march were things the then-youth organizers had called for, Carbert said.

“Those who were eager to take a leadership role did so since there’s so much at stake for them. We were learning from each other, working together and planning things and learning about the issues,” she added.

The current youth involved in Climate Momentum include Stratford District graduate Ava Cappie, who has become the group’s social media manager, and current student Ewan Mann, the group’s youth representative. They each spend about one to two hours a week in their work with the group.

Mann explained he is pretty much a normal member of Climate Momentum, except he’s “40 years younger than everyone else.”

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Despite still being young, Mann got involved with the group because he wanted others to have an opportunity to be young.

“If nothing happens now, nothing’s going to happen later and then nothing will happen ever,” he said.

Mann’s work with Climate Momentum and the school’s eco-club have helped him decide on a career in environmental engineering.

While Stratford may not yet be greatly impacted by climate change, we can still see the effects close to home, Cappie said. She noted the torrential rainstorm that drenched Toronto this past summer, when roughly 100 millimeters of rain over the span of about 3.5 hours caused more than an estimated $1 billion in damage.

“Even though we’re not seeing it directly in Stratford every single day, it’s still happening. And if you compare 10 years ago to now kind-of weather trends, we’re having more intense swings,” she said.

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Cappie added she does not want to leave climate action solely up to climate scientists since it’s an issue that has a profound impact on everyone.

“They’re experts, and they know what they’re doing, but we also need to acknowledge that, if things are going the way that they’re going right now, the future is not very bright,” she said.

Stratford Climate Action Plan

Perhaps the biggest moment for the climate change conversation in Stratford came when the city adopted its Climate Action Plan in August this year. That plan followed previous commitments from the city to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 30 per cent from 2017 levels by 2030 and achieve net–zero emissions by 2050.

While James-Abra said he was encouraged by the plan shortly after it was endorsed, he acknowledged he “has a general impatience with the situation we find ourselves in” when it comes to climate change and that “we will have our hands full hitting that 30 per cent mark.”

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While Mann also liked the plan, the results still seem very far away. He said he thinks those targets should have been set sooner so that was quicker action.

“If I’m given a school project and it’s due at the end of the semester, I’m going to do it five weeks before the end of the semester, so I feel like it might be procrastinated a bit,” he said.

Cappie agreed, but said the plan still represented a great first step for the city.

“I think setting up structures for these changes is great, and it’s a step in the right direction, but it’s nice to kind of have some, like, little things currently happening,” she said.

In the coming weeks and years for the advocacy group, James-Abra said he would like to see Climate Momentum focus on two or three projects that work in parallel with the city’s climate action plan.

“It gives us the opportunity to just be talking about climate change and practical solutions with more and more people in the community. It’s a question of always trying to gather in more people for meaningful work on goals that are realizable here in the community,” he said.

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