OP-ED: Fighting global warming with joy

This month, more than 1,000 people from across Canada are coming to Toronto to talk about climate adaptation.

The timing is good. Toronto has just come through another summer of heat, flooding, and wildfire smoke. The previous summer brought 29 days under heat warnings — nearly twice as many as the year before. Toronto’s own climate risk assessment identifies extreme heat and flooding from heavy rainfall among the city’s most urgent climate hazards.

And Torontonians head to the polls on October 26 to elect a mayor and city council whose terms will take us to 2030.

Toronto is already doing a lot. The City has identified more than 80 climate adaptation actions underway, from heat relief and wildfire smoke response to green streets, ravines and flood protection. City staff also acknowledge that there are gaps, that responsibilities and resources need to be clearer, and that the work needs to be better coordinated. A city-wide Climate Change Adaptation Action Plan is now being developed for 2027.

People are working hard across the city, often within their own organizations, sectors and mandates. We are still not moving at the scale and speed the problem demands. We need to start doing some things differently, together. One place to start is with something we rarely think of as climate infrastructure: joy.

Joy and social connection can sound light or unserious beside flood protection, cooling centres, housing retrofits, and emergency plans. Relationships matter in an emergency too. The Government of Canada’s emergency preparedness guidance says it plainly: “communities that are more connected are more resilient.” Its advice includes getting to know your neighbours, holding community events, sharing skills and tools, and knowing who may need help during an emergency.

Canadian public health researchers have similarly argued that social connection should itself be understood as an adaptation to extreme heat. During a heat wave, knowing who lives alone, who has air conditioning, who can offer a ride, or who hasn’t been seen for a few days can be a very practical form of protection.

We have known this for a long time. Research following the deadly 1995 Chicago heat wave found that people living alone had more than twice the risk of heat-related death, while having friends nearby and participating in group activities were protective. Social isolation was itself a risk factor. A 2024 review of 24 studies found something similar across disasters more broadly: social ties support information-sharing, preparedness, learning and collective action. Those relationships do not spring into existence when the smoke rolls in or the basement floods. We build them beforehand, mostly through much more ordinary things.

A neighbour is a noun. Neighbouring is a verb.

Neighbouring means noticing the older person who hasn’t come outside during a heat wave. Sharing information, tools, or a cool place to sit. Caring about the tree canopy or ravine down the street because it protects people we may never meet. Knowing enough people nearby that, when something happens, there is someone to call and some way to organize. It also means having some practice at doing things together before we really need to.

Park People has seen this in Toronto’s parks. In 2024, its Sparking Change program supported more than 50 community groups to organize 110 days of programming reaching more than 3,300 people. Those events were everyday gatherings in parks. People met. They learned one another’s names. They spent time together. Some went on to organize other things. Ninety-eight per cent of participants reported stronger community connections and 84 per cent reported a sense of belonging to their community.

There is another kind of sustainability we don’t talk about nearly enough. Most climate conversations focus on ecological sustainability and economic sustainability. There is also human and psychological sustainability: can we actually keep this up?

Climate adaptation will not be finished in five years or ten. Residents, community organizers, public servants and elected officials will be dealing with harder conditions, more often, for the foreseeable future. When the work feels like emergency, sacrifice, conflict, and bad news all the time, people burn out or tune out. That is a design problem. Joy is part of how we make long-term collective effort livable.

Research on collective climate action points in the same direction. A 2025 review of research on positivity and collective climate action found that hope and a sense that action can make a difference were repeatedly linked to people’s willingness to participate. People need some experience of being useful. Of getting somewhere. Of doing something with other people that works.

And there is a political problem here too. How do you build a constituency for investing in something most people would rather not think about? You make it part of ordinary civic life.

You give people reasons to encounter adaptation before there is a crisis. You help them see what it looks like on their own street, in their park, around their school or apartment building. You create ways to participate that do not begin with a 90-page report or a public meeting at City Hall. You make it social, tangible and, sometimes, fun.

That is where the parties come in.

A good public gathering does a lot of useful work almost by accident. Strangers end up in the same place. People talk without having signed up for a consultation. Residents meet the people who work inside institutions, and staff meet residents in a different context. People trade information. Children run around. Someone brings food. Things get explained. Connections get made. The next time we ask people to do something harder together, they have some relationships to work with.

So what could this look like? Annual reports on climate adaptation could become annual climate street festivals. Every City division involved in adaptation could have a booth where staff show Torontonians what they are doing, what has changed, and what still needs doing. Residents could meet the people responsible for flood protection, shade, emergency preparedness, ravines, housing, and public health. The Mayor could host a friendly competition for the most creative or useful booth.

We could create small neighbourhood climate funds for block parties, park gatherings, and other resident-led events. Give people a few hundred or a few thousand dollars to bring neighbours together. While they are there, they might map the closest cool spaces, meet the person who knows how to grow food, figure out who might need help during an outage, learn about basement flooding, care for a street tree, or organize around a local climate risk. This could look like a radically expanded version of existing City grants, or something new.

Preparedness starts to look like something neighbours know how to do. The Infrastructure and Environment Committee could meet outside City Hall at least once a year — in a park, ravine, or neighbourhood already experiencing climate impacts. Committee members, City staff, and residents could share food, walk the landscape, and spend some time in the places they are making decisions about.

And we could build on this year’s Kids Vote Weekend, where children will elect Toronto’s 2027 Tree of the Year, by making municipal climate decision-making more genuinely intergenerational. Babies, children, teenagers, parents, and elders all have a stake in decisions whose consequences stretch decades into the future. An intergenerational climate assembly would be messy, literally and figuratively. Good. Public life is messy. Climate adaptation certainly will be.

We still need pipes, flood protection, cooling, housing retrofits, tree canopy, emergency planning, and serious public investment. The economic case for that investment is already strong: the City notes that every public dollar invested in climate adaptation today can save governments as much as $15 in future costs. Whether people support those investments will depend partly on whether adaptation feels distant and bureaucratic or visible, understandable, and connected to everyday life.

Urbanist Jay Pitter’s work on public joy is helpful here. Her Public Joy Framework describes public joy as a form of civic, cultural, and spatial infrastructure — part of what makes life together possible. Climate adaptation is going to ask a great deal of us for a very long time.

There will be no morning when we wake up and declare Toronto successfully adapted. We will keep rebuilding, preparing, learning, caring, arguing, and adjusting. We will need infrastructure that can withstand the weather. We will also need people who can keep showing up for one another.

So plant the trees. Fix the culverts. Retrofit the buildings. Fund the work.

And throw the party.

Dr. Kate Mulligan is founder of the Department of Neighbouring and an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health. Her work explores social connection, civic life and the conditions that help communities thrive.

Natalie Brown is Senior Director at Park People, a national nonprofit that supports community leadership and shifts park systems to help connect people and nature in our cities.

Photo courtesy of Park People.