Why this student offers tours of climate solutions hidden throughout Vancouver

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Hi, it’s Bridget! As soon as I came across Urban Future Walks, I knew I wanted to write about it. I attended the last in-person walking tour of this year, and learned new things about buildings and infrastructure that I pass all the time in downtown Vancouver.

UBC PhD student Yunfei Li, right, leads a two-hour guided walking tour of downtown Vancouver where she teaches participants about green infrastructure around the city. (Paul Joseph/UBC)Yunfei Li stands in the centre of Robson Square, a pedestrian plaza in the heart of downtown Vancouver, and one of the most widely used public spaces in the city.

At lunchtime, the plaza is full of food trucks and local artists. It’s also the starting point for many marches and protests.

But Li explains to the walking group she’s leading that this wasn’t always the case.

It was a temporary decision during the 2010 Winter Olympics to turn the road into a pedestrian plaza. Then, the city worked to keep it that way.

She explains that this is a bigger shift away from car-dominated urban design toward communities where people can move freely and sustainably.

That was the first stop of a two-hour guided walking tour through Vancouver where Li has taught hundreds of participants about green infrastructure, from climate-adapted architecture to green transit systems.

The goal is to turn all the doom and gloom surrounding climate discussions into something positive and interactive that would spark conversation instead of anxiety.

Li leads these in-person and virtual tours as part of her PhD research at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability.

Urban Future Walks is something she designed alongside her supervisor, climate scientist Simon Donner. The participants fill out surveys before and after the tours, and the goal is to see how their emotions and attitudes toward climate change shift — and whether in-person experiences affect that.

While she included tourists in her research, locals also reported gaining a deeper understanding of the city that they live in and the buildings they pass every day.

UBC PhD student Yunfei Li has taken hundreds of locals and tourists of all ages on walking tours of Vancouver this year. (Paul Joseph/UBC)One stop included some bricks in the pavement on Richards Street. Li showed how the water goes through the permeable bricks and drains into an underground rainwater trench system that diverts around 11 million litres of rainwater a year. Participant Alex Guanzon said it was something he didn't know about before.

Li explained how it’s specifically engineered to be functional, esthetically pleasing and unintrusive to pedestrians.

Yunfei Li on Richards Street, explaining to a tour group how the rainwater infrastructure system works to protect the bike lane and divert water into an underground trench system. (Bridget Stringer-Holden/CBC)Halle Phoenix from the Vancouver Airport Authority is the one who planned the walk for Guanzon and others on her team as part of the company’s goal to achieve net-zero emissions by 2030.

"It's cool to see the different ways the city comes together to make us head towards a sustainable future," she said. "It shifts you from being a bit afraid of climate change to more excited."

"Some people feel very powerless because they don't know what we could do or they don't see any [positive] change that is happening," said Li.

"If you only tell people how dire the consequences are, how severe the problem is, it will actually increase people’s level of anxiety."

Instead, she wanted to show participants that climate action was already underway and sometimes hidden in plain sight. She wanted to give them a reason to continue to hope and fight for change.

Yunfei Li has noticed that even participants who live downtown discover new information about the construction behind the buildings they pass every day. (Paul Joseph/UBC)On the walk, Li also talked about political systems, and the importance of looking at the big picture.

"Everyone's behaviour is shaped by how the system is designed," she said. 

"The first message we’re conveying to people is that individual actions count, they're important. But if you look at a bigger picture, we need to consider system-level transitions to really make our low-carbon future come true."

Li will spend the fall compiling survey data, and plans to restart the tours next summer.

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The Big Picture: Wildfire smoke deforms moths (Rosa Alicia Castillo Salazar)This is a forest tent caterpillar moth that was exposed to wildfire smoke as a caterpillar and has deformed wings. In fact, a new study from Concordia University biology professor Emma Despland and her team found that about 30 per cent of forest tent caterpillar and spruce budworm moths exposed to wildfire smoke as caterpillars developed folded or crumpled wings as moths — a rate two to three times higher than those that weren't exposed.

The researchers suggest this shows the need to research the impacts of wildfire smoke — and not just the wildfires themselves — on ecosystems.

"On the one hand, what are the effects of wildfires on biodiversity away from the actual flames?" Despland said. "And on the other, given that insect outbreaks and fires are the two main natural disturbances in boreal forests, what do these findings mean for the dynamic between them? We just don’t know."

There's a push to get rid of cars at school drop-off and pickupChildren play in a School Street zone free of cars outside St. Leo Catholic Elementary School in Edmonton in June. (Nicole Roach/Green Communities Canada)As Lily Dejnicki prepares to get back to the classroom, she hopes to see fewer cars during the morning and afternoon rush hours outside her school.

The 13-year-old would like to see the return of a pilot project to get cars out of the regular drop-off zone at her school, Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic Elementary in Mississauga, Ont.

As part of the School Streets project promoted by a non-profit environmental association, volunteers directed cars away during drop-off and pickup times by using barricades and signs. Kids and parents were encouraged to cycle and walk to and from school, as opposed to driving.

"It was lots of fun," said Lily, who is going into Grade 8.

"Kids … wouldn't rush home," she said. "Instead, they would … take a couple minutes to play and stuff outside."

Anita Dejnicki, Lily’s mom, sits on the school’s parental advisory council and said more parents were talking to each other and more kids were active and playing compared to before — a lively community atmosphere that disappeared when the pilot ended.

Lily Dejnicki, 13, is about to start Grade 8 at Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic Elementary in Mississauga, Ont. She says she hopes the School Street at her school will return. (Anita Dejnicki)As the school year starts, environmental association Green Communities Canada is continuing its efforts to implement School Streets across the country.

The pilot at Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic Elementary, which ran for a month, is part of a bigger push led by the organization called the National Active School Streets Initiative. It received $3 million in funding from the Public Health Agency of Canada in 2024.

At least 20 School Streets are planned for the 2026-2027 academic year. Over the past few years, they have been piloted in six provinces: British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia.

Nicole Roach, sustainable mobility director at Green Communities Canada, said School Streets usually take the form of a temporary barrier installed on both ends of one street next to a school.

The street is typically one that is not on a major thoroughfare or one that is going to cause issues for buses or students with disabilities, she said.

For those who need to drive, one alternative is to leave their car in a nearby parking area and walk together the rest of the way, Roach said.

Volunteers help enforce a School Street project at Corliss Public School in Mississauga, Ont., in 2025. (8 80 Cities/City of Mississauga)Bumpy road

School Streets began in Italy in the 1990s and has spread to other countries.

Although it's estimated that at least 36 schools across Canada have tested School Streets, just two permanent, year-round School Streets exist, and at least one pilot ground to a halt after pushback.

Last year, a School Street project at Corliss Public School in Mississauga was cancelled after a parent started a petition, raising concerns about safety and disruption.

"Every day, children and parents are forced to navigate confusing road closures and restricted areas, which not only causes delays but also increases the risk of accidents," the petition, which collected nearly 200 signatures, said.

"The setup leads to congestion in nearby areas, forcing parents to opt for potentially unsafe detours or parking in locations that are less supervised." 

Kerstyn Lutz, who studied four School Street pilots in the Greater Toronto Area in 2022, recalls witnessing disruption first-hand.

"At least at the beginning, [it] felt like chaos. You have cars driving up to these barriers, they don't know what to do," said Lutz, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto at the time of her research. "We have to have vehicle diversion plans…. The reality is not everyone is going to walk."

A street outside Condorcet Elementary School in Lyon, France, is permanently reserved for pedestrians. Some experts doubt that permanent School Streets are feasible in Canada, particularly in suburban areas. (Antoine Boureau/Hans Lucas/AFP/Getty Images)Raktim Mitra, an urban planning professor at Toronto Metropolitan University who studies sustainable transportation behaviour, collected data on travel patterns close to two School Streets pilots in Mississauga and found no evidence that they pushed congestion onto nearby roads or led to more unsafe driving.

Meanwhile, Mitra and Lutz noted that more kids cycled or walked to school. Air pollution was reduced in the immediate area, Lutz said.

But resources to run School Streets pose another challenge.

In 2023, a year-round program at Lord Roberts Elementary School in Vancouver ended because there weren’t enough volunteers to set up, supervise and dismantle the barriers.

Lucy Maloney, a Vancouver city councillor who was president of the parental advisory committee at Lord Roberts at the time, said retractable bollards or camera enforcement could reduce reliance on volunteers.

Mitra said in Canada, about half of elementary school children live within 0.8 kilometres or a 10- to 12-minute walk to school, and the program could help them shift from car or bus to walking or biking. 

Lily, for one, sees many positives. When School Streets is running, her friends don't have to rush into a waiting car, and she looks forward to being able to talk and play with them after school "rather than just, like, going straight home."

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