Sustainability Glossary

Geoengineering -
geoengineers believe that since humans are doing such a good job messing up the planet, surely they can also find ways to fix it on the massive scale required to reverse the damage.






A “grand plan” -an environmental program or scheme cooked up by politicians and subsidized by the taxpayers.The recent boom and bust of the biofuels movement – in particular ethanol – is an example of a “grand plan”

C40 -a group of cities determined to tackle climate change. Toronto is one of them. For the list, visit website: http://www.c40cities.org/cities/

COP15 - COP stands for "Conference of the Parties" which is the name given to all nations that have ratified the Kyoto Protocol. They are "parties to" the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). "15" is the number of such annual conferences on climate change that have been held since the first one in Berlin in 1995. COP15 is the official name of the climate summit. Its goal is "to establish an ambitious global climate agreement for the period from 2012."

Ecological Goods and Services = non-monetary environmental values provided by nature. Ministry of Natural Resources is using this value to translate ecological values into the language of economy, to inform decision making processes.New understanding of ecosystem goods and services at a local and global scale are influencing forest makers, for example.