Jeanette Hill, CPA, CMA, MSc Candidate

Deforestation, when forests are eliminated for non-forest purposes such as agriculture, accounts for 11% of global emissions (Forest Stewardship Council, 2024). Halting deforestation was identified as the lowest cost option to reduce climate risks (Stern, 2007). This resulted in the development of projects to reduce deforestation, such as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) and REDD+ (plus Conservation and forest management) (United Nations (UN), no date).
GHG emissions are an externality of colonially driven economic systems, meaning they are a byproduct of commercial activity unaccounted for in costs of doing business (Cambridge Dictionary, no date). Neoliberal ideology created carbon markets as a cost-effective way to internalize these externalities. Forestry offset projects (FOP) like REDD+ are funded by selling deforestation avoidance carbon credits on voluntary carbon markets (VCM) (Morita and Matsumoto, 2023). VCMs differ from compliance markets which operate under regulatory requirements to cap or reduce emissions (Montel, 2024).
However, these market-based solution face challenges. Imbalanced power relationships have prioritized colonial knowledge systems in institutional governance and decision making, resulting in little effectiveness in carbon reduction through reducing deforestation and reinforced inequities in benefit distribution (Romm, Lezak and Alshamsi, 2025). To address these challenges, we examine an alternative approach to preventing deforestation through conservation led by local peoples, elevating Indigenous and local knowledge (ILK) referred to from here as community-led conservation (CLC) (Charnley and Poe, 2007).

The Chinese government wants to reduce corruption by increasing trustworthy behaviour in society (Woo, 2025). The government believes this can be achieved through technology, using data to penalize bad and reward good behaviours (Yang, 2022).
China’s social credit system (SCS) is an ambitious technological attempt to unify financial, legal and other information from corporations and social organizations to provide a full picture of creditworthiness, the goal of which is to instill ‘trustworthiness’ in society, to achieve social change required to reduce corruption (Daum, n.d., Koty & Huld, 2023).
Although technology can bring substantial benefits, it is important to recognize the influence of power relations on technological outcomes and to understand that data is not inherently objective (the assumption that it is, is referred to as the ‘allure of objectivity’ (Benjamin, 2015)).
With this problematization, this essay will answer the question: How might power structures between local and national government, as well as the assumed objectivity in data, impact the ability of the SCS to achieve social change and reduce corruption?

This research examines to what extent Indigenous education policy frameworks (IEPFs) in three Canadian provinces meaningfully address educational equity in the K-12 public school system for Indigenous students. Despite an effort to increase equity for Indigenous students, significant gaps remain. This research draws on literature to define educational equity and proceeds to a thematic analysis to identify how policies could be enhanced. The findings indicate that the provinces selected contain measures of achieve Indigenous equity in education, however a lack of details in increasing teacher competence is a gap that left unaddressed may allow for inequities to continue.

This brief discusses the acute global health consequences of plastic, particularly because of the immense pollution from single use plastic (SUP). Given the integration of plastic in Canadian lifestyles, consequences of our consumption actions echo overseas through waste shipments, which end up in the environment and circle back through bioaccumulation in the food system (Ferronato and Torretta, 2019). Although Canada recognizes the urgent need to curb plastic waste, policies have focused on reduced usage and recycling. A viable non-toxic and fully compostable (leaving behind no microplastics) alternative, polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) exists, however, challenges such as manufacturing cost and economic importance of the petrochemical industry in Canada have slowed diffusion (Mukherjee and Koller, 2023; Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), 2025) .