Projection on a concrete building

Climate Action

Climate Justice through Creative Practice

OCAD University acknowledges the ancestral territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Haudenosaunee, the Anishinaabeg and the Huron-Wendat, who are the original owners and custodians of the land on which we live, work and create.

Who we are

The Global Centre for Climate Action (GCCA) is a research centre at OCAD University that draws on creative vision, sustainable design, and artistic practice to imagine new approaches to sustainability, climate justice, and decolonization. 

We are a vibrant community of artists, designers, and scholars building cultural communities, creating arts projects, curating exhibitions, supporting creative action and research, and cultivating a global network for creative climate justice.

Our work is committed to fostering regenerative relationships between people and land and to Indigenous knowledge on sustainability. We are committed to a decolonial, social justice framework that highlights both the origins of ecological crisis and the disproportionate impacts on Indigenous and marginalized communities.

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What we do

We urgently need interventions that are not simply technical but that are also cultural, social and creative. We are working to create: 

  • A global network for research and creative practice
  • Research, exhibition and programming projects
  • A virtual resource for creative climate action
  • A community gathering and education space

This ecosystem of physical and virtual spaces, programs, and activities will cultivate the profound cultural shifts, resilience, and creative design solutions that we urgently need to respond to the climate crisis and to amplify calls for cultural transformation. 

News and Updates

Past Events

Flax and Furious

26 March 2026
 


The Global Centre for Climate Action welcomes NSCAD professor Jennifer Green and OCAD U professor Shannon Gerard as they discuss their current research and creative practices. Drawing on years of hands-on fieldwork with Nova Scotia farmers and craftspeople, NSCAD professor Jennifer Green will discuss how design research can bridge sustainable agriculture, textile production, and climate action. Joining Prof. Green will be OCAD U professor Shannon Gerard who will share her research. Plant Parenthood – a farm, a publishing house, and a classroom with an emphasis on radical seed saving, cooperative programming, regional adaptation of diasporic food and social justice.

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Circularity by Design

1 April 2026
 


The Global Centre for Climate Action welcomes Peter Jones, Head of Sustainability, IKEA Canada, one of the world’s leading retailers, with OCAD U professor Ranee Lee, an academic innovator and OCAD U student Rebecca Wakefield, an early career researcher, as they grapple with the very real challenges and opportunities that define a truly circular economy.

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Playing Masquerade

5 June 2026
 


The Global Centre for Climate Action presents Playing Masquerade, a climate gathering exploring how creative practice, collective expression, and play can inspire new forms of climate engagement. Featuring OCAD University’s Michael Lee Poy, NSCAD University’s Leesa Hamilton, and Toronto Metropolitan University’s Monica Polo, the speakers explore participatory design, community building, and creative approaches to climate action through their respective practices. Drawing on practices ranging from Moko Jumbie and Carnival arts to community-based textile programming and sustainable living, the presentations consider how art, design, and collective making can create new ways of imagining and participating in climate action.
 

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BMO Sustainable Futures Faculty Fellows

We’re excited to introduce the 2026-27 cohort of BMO Sustainable Futures Faculty Fellows, whose work embodies the critical role art and design plays in addressing the climate crisis. These fellows are advancing sustainability research across interconnected themes: Materials & Materiality, Cultural Impact, Indigenous Knowledge & Land Based Practice, and Inclusive Design & Climate Justice. Their projects demonstrate how interdisciplinary approaches that span multiple forms of knowledge and practice, can drive meaningful change. The fellowship supports faculty in developing innovative, community-based research that leverages OCAD U’s unique strengths in creative practice, cultural insight, and material innovation to tackle the root causes and cultural dimensions of environmental challenges.

Ilene Sova

Ilene Sova

Faculty of Art

 

Ilene Sova is a Toronto-based artist, curator, educator, and Associate Professor in OCAD University’s Faculty of Art. Her educational projects and artwork have been featured internationally and locally in the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, CBC Arts, and CTV. Her interdisciplinary practice connects painting, installation, socially engaged art, curatorial research, community arts education, and sustainable studio pedagogy. She founded the Feminist Art Collective and Blank Canvases and co-founded Armova Curatorial. Through these initiatives, Sova builds partnerships among artists, students, schools, community organizations, and cultural institutions, with a focus on equity, access, collective learning, and social change. Sustainability is central to her creative and pedagogical research. Her 2026 Nuit Blanche project Ascension transforms discarded and donated textiles into a large-scale installation based on hope in the age of a backlash against gender equity. Her forthcoming book, Land, Art and Ancestral Memory, which focuses on decolonial art in the Americas, was written while Sova was a Visiting Scholar at Massey College this year. Lived Places Publishing will release the collection in December 2026.

Material Re/Routes is a city-to-campus research project connecting OCAD University with Toronto businesses and industries that generate reusable surplus materials. Paper, wood, fabric, plastics, printing offcuts, display components, and other resources are often discarded or recycled, even though they hold strong potential for artmaking. The project will build reciprocal partnerships to redirect these materials into studio art education, where this beautiful 'waste' can support student learning, innovative experimentation, and more affordable access to supplies. Student research assistants will help identify material sources, coordinate collections, document what is diverted, and record how students transform the materials through their work. The research will examine what systems are needed to make this model safe, reliable, sustainable, and adaptable across OCAD U programs. An exhibition, digital archive, and research talks will showcase the resulting artwork and demonstrate how material reuse can stimulate innovation, strengthen community relationships, reduce waste, and contribute to lasting cultural change in the way we make decisions in art-making practices.
 

Alia Weston

Alia Weston

Faculty of Arts and Science
 

Dr Alia Fortune Weston is an interdisciplinary scholar employing sustainable practice to create more just outcomes across art, design, business and economics. Alia creates botanical dyes, and ancestral land-art materials, practicing reciprocity with the land. Her aim is to honour sustainable production, where needs are met without degradation of natural resources and ecosystems on which production depends. Her work includes Reconstructing Resilience conference/exhibition with Vicki Clough (2016); Nguva ye Vanhu Kadzi designing sustainable menstrual hygiene products with HECT Aunties and Sarah Tranum in Zimbabwe (2021-23); Troubled Critters & Healing Spells land-art project/exhibition, with Hibernaculum Collective at Thames Art Gallery (2024); and co-chairing OCAD U’s Sustainability Committee with Dr Ian Clarke (2017-20).

Alia is collaborating with community partner Dani Hagel and Eramosa Herbals farm (Guelph, Ontario) to explore how art, design, business and economic praxis can be transformed through land-based collaboration. Their objective is to critically examine historical and contemporary production and relationships to land and people - while growing and tending to plants. They will ‘seed and grow’ eco-ethical business practices and principles that support sustainable ecological justice, while creating reciprocal benefit for, and with, the land. Dani and Alia are stewarding flax to examine the economic and labour practices of linen production and exploring circular economy business models using herbal dyes. An interdisciplinary artist and herbalist, Dani has tended to the one-acre farm for over 6 years, as a site for ecological inquiry, artistic experimentation, community education, and land-based programming. Since 2025-26, Dani and Alia have been co-learning with the farm, stewarding a dye garden through the Goldenrod Artist Residency, teaching botanical dyes, and raising funds for Palestinian farm workers. Eramosa offers a living space to examine shared commitments to respectful, land-based, sustainable art, design and economic praxis.

Annie Tung

Annie Tung

Faculty of Design
 

Annie Tung is an artist, designer, and educator whose interdisciplinary practice spans jewellery and metalsmithing, craft, material research, and CAD/CAM technologies. She is an Assistant Professor in Material Art & Design (Jewellery) at OCAD University and a 2026-27 BMO Sustainable Futures Faculty Fellow. Her research examines how Canadian studio jewellery is valued, exhibited, and written about. Her SSHRC-funded project, Forged Identities: Canadian Jewellery and Metalsmithing Today, maps gaps in scholarship filled by magazines and community publications. Her paper "Forging Value: Craft, Body, and the Limits of Automation" will be presented at UAAC 2026. Annie's sustainability research questions why certain materials and protections feel permanent. Jewellery and memorials, made to endure and signal worth, are ideal sites for this inquiry. Her fellowship project applies a framework she calls fragile resilience, exploring how impermanent materials can hold care and grief.

Can we mourn what a species has lost before it is gone? A wedding ring or headstone is designed to last forever. I ask whether objects made to decay or burn can carry as much meaning. In 2025, Ontario replaced its Endangered Species Act with the Species Conservation Act, removing provincial protection or recognition for more than 100 at-risk species. No public ritual marked this loss. Guided by Ontario conservation organizations, I will develop memorial objects for one or two species from paper, bioplastics, and reclaimed metal. The use of paper draws on Chinese traditions of burning offerings for the dead; the bioplastics biodegrade. The objects will be displayed at OCAD U, where visitors can name a loss of their own. A hands-on workshop for the OCAD community will share how bioplastics are made. Together, these offer a public ritual of loss that legislation did not.
 

Research Associates

Faculty members actively engaged in climate-relevant research regardless of funding source, who demonstrate sustained commitment to the Centre's interdisciplinary approach and participate fully in governance and programming decisions.

Fellows

Faculty members who have successfully received funding administered by the Centre, including competitive internal seed grants, external grants with the Centre or industry partnerships facilitated through GCCA networks.

Affiliates

Internal and external faculty members seeking collaboration opportunities who participate in seminars, networking events, and have access to information about funding opportunities, creating a pathway to higher membership levels.

Current Partners

Trans Europe Halles, an international, social incubator based in Sweden that has created a European network of grassroots arts and cultural centres created from preserved and restored abandoned buildings https://teh.net. 

ERA Architects, specialists in adaptive reuse and urban cultural planning https://www.eraarch.ca/profile/ 

Local Environmental Organization (TBD) 

Heritage Building Construction 

On-going exploration of Indigenous community partners 

Anticipated External Revenue

City of Toronto
The City of Toronto has committed approximately $10 million in external funds to renovate the structure and surrounding plaza. The City’s agreement to, on completion of the renovations, provide a 5-year lease to OCAD U at a nominal fee also represents a significant contribution that helps to ensure the financial health of the Centre 

Contact: climateaction@ocadu.ca 

The GCCA will be going through a strategic review in the Fall 2025, to support a revitalization focusing on:

  1. Governance Renewal
  2. Research Intensification
  3. Public Engagement
  4. Equity and Accountability  

Our sites

The primary sites for the Centre are the main OCAD U campus and the Bathurst Quay Silos, originally the Canada Malting Silos.

Precipitated by a partnership with the City of Toronto, which owns the site and is leading its ongoing renovation, the Silos will eventually form a symbolic hub and physical site for the Global Centre for Climate Action. The plan is for the Centre to animate the North Silo with interior exhibitions and exterior access for public art programming and projections.

As our first major creative project, we will be activating the Silos with a series of three exhibitions in spring, summer and fall 2024. Each series will celebrate intergenerational and interdisciplinary practices that highlight climate action through art, design and research in a way that invites public engagement.

Projection on a concrete building
The Waterfront BIA and The Bentway The Essentials Project, featuring artist Erika DeFreitas at former Canada Malting Silos (GCCA new physical site).