Climate change profoundly affects livelihoods across Canada

Edmonton: For years, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) has been sounding the alarm: climate change is having significant effects on the conditions, characteristics and availability of work.

As wildfires and other extreme weather events are destroying forests and threatening communities, ocean heating is impacting marine habitats and fisheries. Across these and other impacts of climate change, there is an undeniable relationship between the degradation of the environment and the degradation of work. A research project I led with colleagues, Work-Life in Canada, reinforces this truth, revealing how climate change shapes not just what we do for work and under what conditions, but who we are and how we understand ourselves.

Over the last four years, our research team has photographed and interviewed more than 100 people from diverse walks of life across seven provinces. While we focused on the social meanings of their work, we constantly bumped into the ways, both subtle and direct, that changing environmental conditions are unravelling the social and economic fabric of people’s work lives.