Concordia’s John Molson School researcher awarded seed funding to create ‘carbon governance living lab’

Adriane MacDonald, associate professor of management and Canada Research Chair in Governance and Sustainability at the John Molson School of Business, has received seed grant funding from Volt-Age at Concordia University under the Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF) program.

Her project is titled “Towards a Carbon Governance Living Lab: Designing and Testing Local Decarbonization Governance Experiments.”

The idea is to create what’s called a ‘carbon governance living lab’ — a place where research and action come together — to test and evaluate different strategies to decrease greenhouse gas emissions in Canadian towns and cities. The hope is that this project will identify effective and viable ways for cities to decrease their carbon footprint.

"In many cities and towns across Canada, there are an increasing number of new initiatives aimed at curbing locally produced greenhouse gas emissions, but there's still a significant gap in our understanding of which approaches are most effective and viable,” explains MacDonald.

"A ‘living lab’ has the potential to addresses this challenge by facilitating a collaborative research environment where sustainability leaders, policymakers and researchers will work together to study decarbonization initiatives from the start, so we can better understand what really makes a difference."

MacDonald’s partners on this project are Future Earth, Front commun pour la transition énergétique, Conseil régional de l’environnement de Montréal, Vivre en ville and Alliance des corporations d’habitations abordables du territoire du Grand Montréal (ACHAT). Her co-investigators are Concordia researchers Alexandra Lesnikowski, Raymond Paquin and Damon Matthews.

The Volt-age funding is meant to jump-start large scale projects that will bridge the gap between academia and industry to develop green energy and foster sustainable communities.

Learn more about Volt-age and sustainability at the John Molson School of Business.