Accessible Housing is a non-profit organisation and registered charity, which helps open doors to homes that are both accessible and affordable for people with limited mobility, a growing population with unmet needs in the province of Alberta. Recognising a need in the community for increased mobility-restricted and cost-effective housing, the Accessible Housing Society undertook the development a 45-suite home known as Inclusio. Through the initial design, development and operation of Inclusio, Accessible Housing gained a great deal of knowledge about not only construction design and development but also additionally, how the services provided integrate in the most useful way for residents within the building design. Through a generous grant provided by the Alberta Real Estate Foundation, Accessible Housing has been able to gather this learned information and share the story of Inclusio with many stakeholders.

The primary goal of this guide is to provide design recommendations – derived from evidence-based scientific literature – that may enhance mentalwellbeing. This guide hopes to be a benchmark to allow affordable housing stakeholders to consider the psychological impact of certain design elements. This is achieved by considering a balance between the cost efficiency of the design elements, and the benefit as supported by peer-reviewed psychological studies.

The forested areas on lands are often overlooked for their values by many, but these forests and other treed areas often extremely valuable, holding values both in their ability to be sold as a product, and through natural functions that trees can provide while living. This document seeks to introduce you to major values and to help realise the potential that is in these areas.

Fish Creek Provincial Park is one of the largest urban parks in North America with more than 1,300 hectares of natural habitat, rich biodiversity and loads of hiking, walking and biking trails to explore.

Updated February 2020

This report examines the important contribution that municipalities can make to biodiversity conservation in Alberta where amendments to the Municipal Government Act empower, and indeed require, Alberta’s municipalities to enhance their environmental protection efforts. An examination of these changes, assessed using the principles of subsidiarity, environmental governance, and biocultural diversity, reveals that municipalities, both large and small, urban and rural, can innovate with novel legal initiatives to improve their biodiversity related conservation actions. Concurrently, while municipal innovation is possible, improving local biodiversity conservation action also requires innovations in funding, citizen engagement, and regional environmental governance. Municipalities are already recognized contributors to biodiversity conservation and great strides have been made at the municipal level to increase habitat connectivity. Current municipal conservation efforts need to be augmented to harness new statutory powers, capitalize on local knowledge and initiative, and enhance citizen education and engagement.

Canada contains many radon gas-generating regions and, because we have constructed population centres across all of them, radon is the primary cause of lung cancer in 10,000- 40,000 Canadians per decade. We have conducted detailed radon gas analysis of 11,000+ homes spread across Alberta and Saskatchewan, finding that 1 in 6 contain hazardous amounts of radon with newer homes in many regions (but not all) having much higher total radon. We have revealed an unknown “X factor” within environmental design practice across regions that is a major contributor to radon exposure, and our goal now is to understand this and develop solutions to protect the population. We aim to (i) identify modifiable behaviors and environmental design practices influencing chronic radon exposure in our changing world and (ii) define engineering and community intervention solutions applicable within the Canadian context to eliminate radon as a source of cancer in the future.

With support from the Alberta Real Estate Foundation, the Pembina Institute has published the Landowner’s primer: what you need to know about unreclaimed oil and gas wells to help those who are most impacted. Designed as a complementary follow up to our 2016 publication, the Landowners’ Guide to Oil and Gas Development , this primer addresses questions and examines problems landowners face when dealing with operators who are under financial strain and still have unreclaimed oil and gas infrastructure on landowners’ property.

Farmers and ranchers can play a pivotal role in building the low-carbon economy of the future. Especially in Alberta, home to one-third of Canada’s agricultural land and two important carbon sinks—grasslands and the boreal forest. The wildrose province also has some of the best solar and wind power resources in Canada.

Climate solutions are often viewed as being an inconvenience to our everyday lives. But farm solutions are climate solutions and many of them have multiple concrete benefits that go beyond stopping climate change: improving soil fertility; creating new economic opportunities; protecting biodiversity; energy independence and building resiliency against droughts and floods. It is a win-win strategy.

The Biosphere Institute, in collaboration with the Alberta Real Estate Foundation, local REALTORS^® and the Town of Canmore, created this booklet to help new residents of the Bow Valley take part in meeting the goals of Town of Canmore’s Climate Action Plan. Learn more about the Climate Action Plan goals here.

WellWiki.org is a groundbreaking solution to the problem of information access and transparency related to data on oil and gas development. While in many cases some data on wells is publicly available, interested parties face an arcane and obscure process for accessing it which deters many from pursing the information they need. WellWiki.org solves this problem, providing access to information in an easy to use format available to all and has been successful across North America.

The Alberta Narratives Project Report I and Report II are intended to provide practical guidance for climate and energy communicators about what language works well and – crucially – what language might pose an obstacle for communicating with any specific group.

Report I, Communicating Climate Change and Energy in Alberta is concerned with finding the language that works best across Albertan society by helping to find common ground across very different positions. This generates a core narrative that can be applied for general public engagement.

Report II, Communicating Climate Change and Energy with Different Audiences in Alberta offers tailored language that can be the basis of effective communications with each of the following groups: oil sands workers, conservatives, environmentalists, rural Albertans, business leaders, youth, new Canadians and people of faith.

These are guidebooks, not rulebooks. Skilled communications should always listen to their audiences, and experiment with new and fresh ways of speaking.