This article addresses the resuming of our post-confinement activities.
The crisis triggered by the COVID-19 has naturally relegated climate action in second place as the public health crisis taking place globally and fears of a long-term economic recession are apparent. However, the way decision-makers, businesses and individuals respond to today’s public health emergencies, and the resulting successes and failures can provide relevant lessons for responding to other multiform disasters, notably those related to climatic changes.
In our opinion, fighting against climatic changes requires not only a technological, innovative and robust approach and deployment but also radical changes in public policy priorities and application. This calls therefore for a radical modification of consumption Demand[1], individual by individual, which represents an important challenge with more than 8.5 million inhabitants! At the end of the confinement, the use of public spending leverage for economic recovery will be decisive in the direction that climate action will take.
At the end of the confinement, we are working on:
In a concern for continuous improvement and in order to respond to anticipated demand, we have conceptualized a registry of verified carbon credits that will be available soon on our website. Our registry will be linked and harmonized with the one developed by VERRA, which has internally repatriated, in April 2020[2], the entire documentation of more than 1,600 projects certified[3] under the VCS program, including WILL Solutions’ Sustainable Community. Our register will be online by the end of summer 2020 and will include the verification results of our 4th cohort of Sustainable Community.
We are currently working on the renewal of our Sustainable Community project for the period 2020-2029 and updating the additionality analysis of our project. These will include the analysis of emerging practices (as opposed to non-current practices), such as the development and use of RNG[4], which will allow us to qualify the micro-projects of our future Sustainable Community members for the period 2020-2029. We will work to identify sustainable mobility practices that will have a positive impact and that we would like to monetize in order to accelerate their deployment. Such practices will not be limited to behavioural changes (like voluntary teleworking), but will also include the participatory business models of travel, the intermodal transport of goods and the conversion of vehicles operating on fossil fuels to electricity.
We succeeded in gathering a team of scientists from five Canadian universities and two technological partners, namely Absolunet[5] in e-commerce and Alithya[6] in IdO, IA and BlockChain in order to initiate version 6 of our traceability platform. The cloud-based platform will be able to support cohorts 20 times larger, in 12 months, by processing connected Big Data (200,000 documents and digitized supporting documents, only for Quebec).
Lastly, the sanitary confinement has forced us to adapt and consider new virtual methods to undertake carbon footprints and GHG reduction audits, which we have successfully achieved. We expect the next few months to provide opportunities to test and improve the feasibility and rigour of new virtual audit methods for the recruitment of new members in our 5th cohort.