CIFAL Victoria is part of a global network but it's through a local network of First Nations, academics and emergency preparedness experts that's it's aiming its latest efforts at producing impactful solutions that transcend boundaries.
Crystal Tremblay (centre) with staff during a mapping exercise as part of an SDG workshop held at the Division of Continuing Studies in November 2024.
One of just two United Nations-accredited training and research centres in Canada, CIFAL Victoria is working with the other, CIFAL York (Ontario), and collaborating with Huu-ay-aht and T'Sou-ke First Nations plus First Nations Emergency Services Society to co-create disaster and emergency management training for First Nations.
The project is in its early stages but the plan is to build a customized curriculum that incorporates valuable Indigenous science and historic knowledge, then implement the training modules first through a pilot project, says Crystal Tremblay, director of CIFAL Victoria as well as an associate professor with the University of Victoria, which hosts the centre. In the long term, the goal is to have Indigenous leaders deliver the training both to their own communities and, further adapted with local knowledge, other First Nations communities such as those in the B.C. Interior.
This training program, the brainchild of CIFAL York director Ali Asgary, will enhance community resiliency by increasing the capacity of communities to identify risks, and prepare for, respond to and mitigate against the destructive impacts of climate change. Participants will learn about risk mapping; emergency preparedness, contingency and evacuation planning; infrastructure considerations; disaster response; and post-disaster recovery.
This is just one of the local projects CIFAL Victoria is pursuing that follows the well-worn environmental axiom "Think globally, act locally," but also gives it a twist, allowing it to bring home learning from the UN Institute for Training and Research's Global Network of International Training Centres for Authorities and Leaders while sharing the knowledge it develops with beneficiaries around the world.
Sharing knowledge at international gathering
Tremblay and UVic president Kevin Hall shared information on CIFAL Victoria's projects and experiences in December when they took part in the global network's annual steering committee meeting.
"It's an important time for us to come together and learn what's happening across the network and how we can be more innovative in our networking, our sharing of resources and our training," says Tremblay, who's also co-chair of the Map Shop in UVic's Department of Geography. "But also, there's so much potential for the network to be collaborating on global initiatives and research specifically."
"We need to be thinking much more creatively, much more collaboratively if we really want to be tackling these big issues, which are regional and local," she adds. "But also, we're globally connected on climate, on disaster emergency planning."
UVic has a role to play internationally to promote the SDGs and sustainability in general. Not only do we have the researchers and the knowledge, we have the ability to share that knowledge."
President and Vice-Chancellor Kevin Hall
"My recent travels to the 21st Annual Steering Committee Meeting of the CIFAL Global Network was eye-opening. It reinforced the need for us all to cooperate better to meet our global challenges, grow an SDG mindset, and find solutions through working together."
CIFAL Victoria is a part of UNITAR-UNESCO'S LEAP-FAST, or Leaders in Higher Education Alliance and Programme For Accelerating Sustainability Transformations "an ambitious global alliance aiming to position higher education institutions as vital agents of sustainable transformation." The alliance came out of a side event of the UN Summit of the Future in September that Hall attended.
A joint statement from that event called higher education institutions "living laboratories for the future of society," saying, "They inform policies through research. They create community partnerships to enable inclusion and representation. They educate and prepare future leaders to champion equality and sustainability, and cooperate across borders to build peace and solidarity."
Side by side: Indigenous and university knowledge
Tommy Happynook, a Huu-ay-aht First Nations hereditary chief as well as an assistant professor of anthropology at UVic, says he welcomed the collaboration with CIFAL "because a lot of the work that they were doing and the programs and support that they're working on building is all stuff my nation is thinking about."
"There are a number of sort of natural disasters that are starting to happen that we're really thinking about and how are we going to respond to climate change in terms of emergency planning?" he says, referencing flooding, wildfires and tsunamis.
He also welcomes the potential opportunity for the Huu-ay-aht to be on the ground floor of the program's creation so the results can provide the framework to also help other Indigenous communities.
Noting that "The depths of knowledge about our specific territories doesn't sit in the university," Happynook says.
The value in everyone bringing their knowledge set to the table and then working together is really important each group understanding Indigenous and university knowledges, and how those can come together."
Tommy Happynook
The Nation's emergency program coordinator, Sean Flickinger, points out the importance of "sharing Huu-ay-aht knowledge and culture related to emergency preparedness because Nuu-chah-nulth people have had a long history with emergency preparedness," and recounts that he recently attended a community event at which a generations-old song about preparing for tsunamis was performed.
"My hopes for us would be to recognize this as an opportunity for Huu-ay-aht government staff and community members and leadership to learn about how disaster mitigation work can be used to develop a safe and sustainable community," Flickinger says. "To understand the hazards and what can be done to prevent them, and what has been done in the past by Huu-ay-aht people and other Indigenous communities to approach the hazards."
And Happynook says the CIFAL team has gone about this work the right way, building relationships with the Nations.
"They didn't come in and say, Here's a program we want to run,'" he says. "They came in and said, We have a program in mind. How can we develop it together so that it can meet the community's needs?' From my end, it's been a really great partnership and relationship."
Opening reception and launch of CIFAL Victoria, First Peoples House, in March 2022. Credit: Photo Services
Building on Indigenous science and knowledge
In addition to the collaboration with Huu-ay-aht and T'Sou-ke First Nations, at the recent global meeting, Tremblay was also able to share information about more local projects.
For instance, several UVic undergrad courses are accredited through CIFAL Victoria, including one called Community-based Participatory Research: Local Action for the Sustainable Development Goals, created through the Salish Sea Hub, an initiative of the UNESCO Knowledge 4 Change Global Consortium. One example of a project in that course is a partnership with What's the RUSH? That involves university students training high school students and challenging them to map a thousand rain gardens in the Capital Regional District to get them to think about ways to reduce flooding in light of more extreme weather events related to climate change.
CIFAL Victoria and the Indigenous Leadership Initiative (ILI) are collaborating to develop accreditation for Indigenous-led conservation and guardianship training programs in 2025. ILI, a national Indigenous-led conservation organization dedicated to strengthening Indigenous cultural responsibilities to their territories, is working closely with CIFAL Victoria to provide UN accreditation of Guardian training programs.
"The vision," Tremblay says, "is to provide more opportunities to build capacity in our local region that are working to localize and advance the Sustainable Development Goals."
And just as CIFAL Victoria is connecting UVic to universities around the world, it is bringing back to Victoria examples of tools or programs it can deliver in training to local students and faculty.
CIFAL Victoria has built connections and carved out a niche internationally by providing training to senior educators and officials in other universities in places like Thailand and the Philippines. Among its efforts are multi-day courses that explore how these institutions can weave sustainable development into everything they do, Tremblay says. That includes incorporating sustainability into their purchasing choices and their class curricula, and even into their hiring and tenure practices to reward academics who are doing research and having broad social impacts, particularly addressing the SDGs.
There's a lot of potential for universities to be filling a bigger gap in terms of informing policies, responding to local needs connected to the Sustainable Development Goals, whether that's climate adaptation or gender equality or promoting peace all of these aspects of good health and well-being."
Crystal Tremblay
"I think UVic is in a really exciting space both in being able to share what we're doing but also to learn from other universities and institutions doing this work as well," she says, adding, "Universities are so competitive by nature, and the Sustainable Development Goals give us an opportunity to be more collaborative."
