Dispatch from Coastal Zone Canada 2025
The FishPeoplePlace Lab has just returned from Coastal Zone Canada 2025, abuzz with new insights from a wide variety of interesting talks, workshops, and building new relationships across the coastal sector. This three day conference occurs every other year, and this time we were lucky to be nearby and within driving distance to the host university of University of Prince Edward Island in Charlottetown, PEI.
The conference was, in a word, busybusybusy. With sometimes up to eight concurrent sessions, the hardest part of organizing our time was deciding between the many interesting talks. Even with such a wide variety of speakers, topics, organizations, and projects, I noticed a few key themes that seemed to emerge across the conference proceedings.
1) the value of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary partnerships;
2) the power of centering relationships and values at the forefront of environment projects, governance, etc.
3) an urgent need and call for action and change with respect to how we are planning for, and adapting to, climate change impacts on Canadian (and other) coastlines
4) the importance and prioritization of engaging multiple ways of knowing into effective partnerships
5) the desperate need for transformative change, but many hurdles persist
6) sometimes shocking discrepancies between sectors or regions in how they are coping with coastline climate impacts
Many of these rang true for me and echoed recent conversations we’ve been having within our lab community about how to conduct research, particularly for early career students and researchers. The need for transformative change and action stood also felt like a close-to-home reflection, and echoed some of the more recent conferences I’ve attended where practitioners and community groups are asking (pleading, sometimes) for change, yet feel bound up in complex governance, slow processes, and scientific uncertainty crowding out local knowledge.
Perhaps the highlight of the conference for the FPP community was co-hosting an interdisciplinary coastal access workshop through the leadership of Patricia Manuel, professor emeritus from Dalhousie. The 2-part workshop brought together community examples of coastal access activism through the formation of the PEI Island Walk, an overview of coastal access law, GIS inventory and mapping of coastlines, and rich storytelling on coastal access conflicts through audio and visual mediums. It was exciting and highly interesting to hear the perspectives of attendees and watch people connect with coastal access challenges and opportunities they’ve experienced in their own lives. Next steps will be a plain-language summary report of the workshop, and survey-based study that will aim to set out a research, activism, and action agenda on coastal access to guide future efforts. Stay tuned for that initiative!
FPP Lab community and more! From left: Sian Borden, Anthea Fleming, Samuel Eisner, Nicolas Winkler, Hannah Harrison, Mike Kohfal, and Taylor Reidlinger visiting Cavendish National Park in PEI.
Of course, neither the workshop nor our otherwise fabulous time at CZC20205 would have been possible without the efforts and generosity of others. Special thanks to Mike Kohfal at East Coast Environmental Law, recently called lawyer and FPP project alum Samuel Eisner, Nicolas Winkler from Ecology Action Centre, and Bryson Guptil with PEI's Island Walk initiative for all taking part and sharing your coastal access expertise and insights with the workshop crowd.
There are also some celebrations to be had for the FPP student community! Congratulations to Taylor Reidlinger for sharing her MSc thesis work on B.C.'s kelp aquaculture industry, to incoming FPP PhD student Sian Clarke Borden for sharing her current work, and shout out to current Marine Affairs Program (MAP) student Anthea Fleming for her first coastal access conference! We look forward to the next CZC2027 in Waterloo, Ontario.