A global conference on Prince Edward Island next week will dig into the unique issues and opportunities facing islands—from counties to full-fledged countries—as they grapple with the impacts of climate change and how to finance and improve local energy systems.
The Global Sustainable Islands Summit, which hit maximum registration more than three weeks ago, will bring 250 participants to a facility about 35 kilometres northeast of Charlottetown—which on central PEI is roughly the distance from the southern to the northern coast. James Ellsmoor, CEO of the Island Innovation Network, said that kind of geography defines a cluster of small communities that face a common set of challenges, whatever type of jurisdictional authority they can bring to bear.
“There are core issues that affect all islands globally, and energy is always in the top three,” he said in an interview leading up to the conference. “But also waste management, the dependence on the double-edged sword that is tourism, food security and agriculture, sea level rise, climate change, transportation, and the links between transportation and energy, transportation and tourism.”
But while all islands face those issues, they have different tools at their disposal to deal with them. “Sometimes an island might be a county in a local jurisdiction, but they have a larger population than some of the small island states that have seats at the United Nations,” like Barbados, Jamaica, or Fiji. “They don’t always have mechanisms to interact and collaborate with each other. So we try to engage with all different islands and create opportunities for them to learn about how they’re each approaching those key issues.”
The conference also aims for “a mixture of political representation and community representation,” he added, recognizing that island governments can’t solve big problems unassisted. “You need the utility, the local private sector, the civil society and community groups all to be aligned. So we try to position ourselves to bring together those different stakeholders.”
This year’s conference program includes panels on integrating climate action and energy solutions, improving island energy systems, financing renewable energy development, greening university campuses, climate adaptation, Arctic sustainability, and more. Ellsmoor said the three-day event is an opportunity for PEI to “showcase some of the approaches they’re taking on energy” while learning from other jurisdictions that are leading in other areas.
“No island is ever going to solve all of these problems,” he told The Energy Mix. “Instead of working in a vacuum and in a silo, you can find out that an island in the Caribbean has solved some other issue. Clearly, PEI is in a different context, but how do we adapt the way they’ve dealt with it and see how that challenge might be solved in a local context?”
Some of that local context was on display at last year’s Sustainable Communities Conference, hosted by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, where a keynote presentation on energy innovation on Samsø Island, Denmark, somewhat playful positioned PEI at the centre of the energy transition universe. In the first of a series of four slides, Søren Hermansen, CEO and director of the Samsø Energy Academy, showed his home community of Samsø Island at the centre of all that matters in Denmark. The next two slides zoomed out to show Samsø, with a population of roughly 4,000, at the geographic centre of the European Union, then the centre of the world.
The final slide in the series extended that lofty positioning to Prince Edward Island, where Hermansen had visited just two days before.
“There’s an interest on PEI to create a green lab for innovation,” Hermansen told The Mix after his session. “But it has two sides to it. One is that they’re very keen on inviting industry to come and develop on PEI, so that’s about money and power. But they’re smart enough to realize that they can’t get away with that if there aren’t some local projects, as well.”
At the time, PEI Environment, Energy and Climate Action Minister Steven Myers, who Ellsmoor credited with successfully pitching his province to host the conference, listed a series of initiatives that may make PEI the first Canadian province or territory to hit a net-zero emissions target. “Part of the reason we’re having such great success is that we reduced the barriers,” he said. “It’s not a ‘wait till they come to us’ program. It’s going out and saying we’ll do everything to make this happen.”
Ellsmoor said the opportunity for islands to share their perspectives and experience so widely is relatively new. “It really shows how the Internet has affected islands over the last decade or 20 years, that you can have a global community based on remoteness, or ‘islandness’,” he said.
That becomes particularly important, he added, given some of the uniquely tough trade-offs islands face.
The Caribbean is more heavily reliant on tourism than any other part of the world, and “it’s a vicious circle,” he explained. “They have limited options to power their economy, but like everyone else, they’re forced to make challenging choices.”
Small island states top the list of the countries most vulnerable to sea level rise, and “no one wants to depend on tourism,” he added. “Especially when the pandemic happened, it was very scary and set a lot of island economies back. But when it comes to other opportunities to develop the economy, often energy is one of the biggest limiting factors.” When fuel and electricity cost three to six times more in most island states than in Canada, “how do you hope to be competitive when it comes to manufacturing, or anything else that requires energy?”
That reality “stops you from diversifying, which has a knock-on effect on things like food security and transportation.”
