🌏 The Toronto Climate Observatory (TCO) is an interdisciplinary research initiative housed at the University of Toronto that brings together diverse communities of inquiry and practice to support just, plural, and place-based climate action in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). We are a growing network of researchers, students, practitioners, and community partners committed to transforming how we understand, respond to, and shape the future of a changing climate.

💡At the heart of our work is the belief that responding to climate change demands inclusive, grounded approaches that reflect the lived realities of diverse communities and local geographies. Climate change is global, but its impacts and drivers are deeply shaped by local contexts. 

In Toronto, these dynamics are tied to the legacies and ongoing processes of settler colonialism, resource extraction, industrialization, and urbanization in the Great Lakes region. The impacts of climate change that communities in Toronto face today are inseparable from these legacies – and these, together with the uneven social and ecological geographies of modern cities like Toronto, shape the unique vulnerabilities, lived experiences, and distribution of these impacts. Simultaneously, these impacts and experiences intersect with issues of housing affordability, food security, labour and migrant justice, Indigenous rights, and others, producing the specific conditions that characterize life and work in Toronto. It is at these intersections that our work investigates varied imaginaries of climate justice, equity-aware public infrastructures, and relational paradigms, in response to the conditions of climate change as they take place in and are enabled by the Toronto urban metropolis.

 🎯 We conceptualize climate change as a deeply local, lived experience shaped by inequality, infrastructure, and history – which means that the data, tools, and methodologies that we leverage to build climate solutions must be grounded in the local contexts that characterise the GTA. 

However, as they stand today, traditional climate data, models, and planning tools remain disconnected from the lived realities faced by communities in the region – particularly those already marginalized by systems of environmental and social injustice – and fail to capture the full scope of local climate impacts such as housing precarity, energy insecurity, or mobility injustice.

The TCO was founded to help address this disconnect: to develop new forms of climate knowledge and communication that are responsive to specific places, sensitive to diverse ways of knowing, and oriented toward collective action. Our mission is to identify and fill critical gaps in existing climate information and urban data infrastructures to support effective adaptation, equitable planning, and long-term resilience in the GTA and beyond.

 At TCO, we combine tools and insights from the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, and human-centered design to create new ways of seeing and responding to climate change. Our approach is rooted in interdisciplinary collaboration and grounded in the specific needs of communities across the GTA.

Our work eschews a conventional top-down approach, and instead prioritises a model of cooperative action research that encapsulates and investigates the systemic intersectional considerations of class, gender, race, and ethnicity that mould the experience of climate impacts for communities within Toronto. The GTA is not a monolith – and our work aims to unpack the myriad experiences of peoples and communities across different neighbourhoods and geographies.

Whether it’s flood data equity, urban heat informatics, equity in climate retrofits, or risk communication for vulnerable communities – we work across sectors and issues to identify the gaps between available climate data and the data communities, governments, and other local stakeholders actually need, and in which forms, for equitable resilience planning. Our research blends technical analysis and climate modeling with participatory and creative practices like oral history, citizen science, Indigenous scholarship, and art/science collaboration. By integrating physical and social science approaches, we make climate knowledge more meaningful and usable at the local level, especially in contexts of rapid change and systemic inequity. Our work centers on the development of frameworks and infrastructure that prioritize knowledge co-production with communities, ethical data governance, and the co-design of tools for planning and adaptation.

 Though our primary focus is on the GTA, our work is informed by insights from other geographies, and we seek to bring those lessons home through shared research and learning. As climate change continues to reshape urban life, the need for local, equitable, and interdisciplinary climate action is urgent. Together, we aim to help meet that need by building new infrastructures and forms of knowledge that are more inclusive, place-based, and just.

As we continue to grow, we invite collaboration with others working at the intersection of climate science, data, policy, community, and culture. Whether you are a researcher, a city official, a grassroots organizer, an artist, or a community member, we welcome your participation. Together, we can build new ways of seeing, sensing, and shaping climate futures – starting right here in Toronto.