Grant: Alliance Grants

Climate change is disproportionately affecting Canada, causing the country to warm two times faster than theglobal average and three times faster in Canada's North. Canada must aim to reverse this trend by meeting itsglobal commitments to protect 30% of land and sea by 2030 (30x30), and reach its target of net-zero emissionsby 2050.Fortunately, as a world-leader in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, Canada is well-positioned tosteer the transformative potential of the new digital and data-driven economy, towards solving the climatechallenge. With this context as background, a partnership between Microsoft and our applicant team wasformed, with the goal to explore the opportunities and challenges of meeting Canada's global environmentalcommitments in a just, equitable, and inclusive manner, through the application of artificial intelligence (AI)and digital tools. This partnership has an explicit objective to explore dimensions of social equity, dataownership, and Indigenous conceptions of nature and of technology, as a foundation for any proposed digitalsolution.Our expected outcome for this partnership is a co-designed, multi-component framework It will be created andthus used by many stakeholders including a) government: to guide decisions on, and monitoring of, public andindustry climate action strategies including extractive activities, b) industry: to guide investments in carbonoffset programs and GHG emission reduction strategies c) Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLC):to enable data ownership, empower land management and preserve knowledge systems and livelihoods.