Managing risks to Canada’s boreal zone: transdisciplinary thinking in pursuit of sustainability<sup>1</sup>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The policy landscape is changing as Canada considers its energy future. The Canadian boreal zone has a large amount of natural resources, giving Canada options in terms of its energy future. However, the sustainability of the boreal zone has been deemed at risk because of the cumulative effects of intensifying natural resource activities (forestry, mining, oil and gas, and renewable energy) on ecosystems in the face of the uncertainty associated with climate change. As Canada considers the future of the boreal zone, there will be additional challenges to ensure that we do not further disadvantage marginalized human populations living in the boreal zone who are at high risk of the consequences of climate change. In response to these challenges, the Boreal 2050 project was initiated to understand the risk of failing to achieve the future sustainability of the boreal zone using the ISO 31000 risk management framework. First, we identified the major drivers of the risks to the sustainability of the boreal zone, which include atmospheric change, the demand for provisioning and nonprovisioning ecosystem services, demographics and societal values, industrial innovation and infrastructure, and governance. Second, we analyzed the risk of failing to achieve a sustainable boreal zone using scenario analysis, where we framed four plausible future scenarios around two axes of change: the global economy’s energy and society’s capacity to adapt. Third, we evaluated the risk and determined that present governance systems are driving Canada towards failing to achieve a sustainable boreal zone. To ensure the future sustainability of the boreal, we need to shift from an oil/gas/coal-producing country to a renewable energy leader and shift from using a top-down strategy where Canadians have a low capacity to adapt towards a mixture of top-down and bottom-up participatory strategies where Canadians—particularly Indigenous peoples living in the boreal zone—have a higher capacity to adapt. To facilitate this shift in governance, substantive changes will be required in institutional arrangements designed to protect boreal ecosystems.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".