January 14, 2026 | Rees Kassen, Academic Director for McGill's new Sustainability Park and the director of TISPP. His article traces today’s tension around the post‑WWII “social contract” for publicly funded basic research (shaped by Vannevar Bush’s Science: The Endless Frontier). He argues the contract is straining as governments demand faster, more visible returns, even though long-run payoffs (like mRNA vaccines) show why basic research matters.

A Solvathon at the Bieler School of Environment, McGill University

Keynote speakers: Kim Stanley Robinson and Annalee Newitz

October 12-13, 2023

A national survey of close to 1000 adults in Greenland (where approximately 90% of the population is Indigenous) conducted by a McGill University-led research team has found that a surprisingly large majority – 3 out of 4 Greenlanders – support extracting and exporting sand left by the melting ice sheet. A significant proportion want Greenland’s leadership to assess the impact of sand extraction and exports on both the environment and economy. Furthermore, when it comes to who mines the sand, the majority prefer local involvement to foreign collaboration.

To stop biodiversity loss, Canada recently committed to protecting 30% of its land and sea by 2030. But making conservation decisions about where to locate new protected areas is complicated. It depends on data both about biodiversity and about a range of benefits (e.g. freshwater, climate regulation, recreation) that people get from nature. Surprisingly, despite the size of the country, new mapping suggests that less than 1% of Canada’s land (0.6% of total area or approximately 56,000 km2) is a hotspot, providing all these benefits in one place.

Over the past 40,000 years, ice sheets thousands of kilometres apart have influenced one another through sea level changes, according to research published today in Nature. New modelling of ice sheet changes during the most recent glacial cycle by a McGill-led team offers a clearer idea of the mechanisms that drive change than had previously existed and explains newly available geological records.

While the COVID-19 pandemic continues to overshadow most other topics in 2020, Canadian activists are joining demonstrators around the world to bring climate change back into the conversation. Protests, walkouts, and sit-ins are expected to take place in several Canadian cities, including Vancouver, Ottawa, Montreal, and Halifax, on Friday and Saturday to mark the return of the global Fridays for Future movement led by Swedish activist Greta Thunberg.

Activists protesting against environmental injustices around the world suffer from high rates of criminalization, physical violence and murder, according to a study published this week in Global Environmental Change. Indeed, despite the fact that they primarily use nonviolent forms of protest, activists are victims of violence in 18% of environmental conflicts, and of murder in 13% of these conflicts. When Indigenous Peoples are involved, violence is especially frequent.