Kristen Villebrun and Wendy Bush hoped they wouldn't have to pray for Chedoke Creek, but four years after they first raised alarm about the water's condition, they were part of an Indigenous full moon ceremony to do just that. About 50 people showed up near Princess Point on the dark and frigid Monday evening for the monthly ceremony, which was particularly special as it focused on Chedoke Creek. The body of water that runs into Cootes Paradise had about 24 billion litres of sewage and storm water runoff leak into it due to a gate being left open.
"We can regulate building on stilts for example…the water can come in and go out without any impact on the property itself or human life that inhabits that property." "Water features or green features, trees, grass are considered nature based solutions that help us adapt to climate change and at the same time they work as carbon sinks," she says.
In 1908, locals in Cape Cod, Mass., built an earthen dike across the Herring River to curtail its flow into the surrounding wetlands. Their goal was to clamp down on the number of mosquitoes. The dike destroyed the original salt marsh, replacing it with woodland, shrub, and impounded wetlands. But the community’s efforts over a century ago did far more than dry out the landscape. According to a new study, impounded wetlands can undergo an important change, shifting from carbon sinks into methane sources. The transformation turns these landscapes from ones that help mitigate climate change into ones that exacerbate it.
