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The article is titled “Climate change is profoundly affecting livelihoods across Canada.” It was originally published on August 21, 2025 and is authored by Sara Dorow, Professor of Sociology, University of Alberta.

For years, the International Labour Organization (ILO) has been sounding the alarm: climate change is having significant effects on the conditions, characteristics and availability of work.
As wildfires and other extreme weather events are destroying forests and threatening communities, ocean heating is impacting marine habitats and fisheries. Across these and other impacts of climate change, there is an undeniable relationship between the degradation of the environment and the degradation of work.
A research project I led with colleagues, Work-Life in Canada, reinforces this truth, revealing how climate change shapes not just what we do for work and under what conditions, but who we are and how we understand ourselves.
Over the last four years, our research team has photographed and interviewed more than 100 people from diverse walks of life across seven provinces. While we focused on the social meanings of their work, we constantly bumped into the ways, both subtle and direct, that changing environmental conditions are unravelling the social and economic fabric of people’s work lives.
We draw on two of our project sites to illustrate how climate change is impacting livelihoods — Lac La Ronge in northern Saskatchewan and Grand Manan Island in New Brunswick. The stories of participants, gathered by me, gender and women’s studies professor Angele Alook and sociology professor Karen Foster, are paired with the evocative documentary photography of our project collaborator, Martin Weinhold.
Together, words and images convey both the beauty of, and threats to, work-nature relations.
Wildfire
Cathy Clinton-Ratt and Julia Clinton are a Cree mother and daughter from the Lac La Ronge Indian Band who participated in the Work-Life in Canada project. Both held strong connections to Robertson Trading.
For nearly 60 years, Robertson Trading sustained the livelihoods of Indigenous people in the region through fur trade and buying their craft work.
Even after it closed in December 2023 (six months after our team visited the community), it still operated as a town bank and, importantly, housed hundreds of unique Indigenous artworks and traditional craft items collected since its inception.
Cathy’s moose hides and beadwork were sold and displayed at Robertson Trading for decades, and back in the day, she worked out of the craft co-operative just down the street.
Julia learned traditional hide making and beading skills from her mother and also worked at Robertson Trading for many years.
On June 4, 2025, Robertson Trading burned down in one of the many wildfires that tore through the area.
Wildfires are a natural occurrence in the boreal forest, but their frequency and spread in recent decades has been unprecedented.
Indigenous communities are especially affected. In June, La Ronge and nearby communities received a mandatory evacuation notice.
The fire destroyed the store’s entire collection of handcrafted items, including some of Cathy’s work.
“The building was just a building, but the loss of the remaining contents — hundreds of pieces of Indigenous art and historical artefacts — is catastrophic … the beaded moosehide jackets and moccasins, the birch bark baskets, the antler carvings, the original paintings, etc., represent thousands of hours of handwork done by talented Indigenous artists and craftspeople, and are absolutely irreplaceable.”
That these items cannot simply be remade tells us that work is more than effort exchanged for a paycheque. It carries tradition, memory, identity and meaning — the stuff that social life is made of.
The loss of Roberston Trading highlights how meaningful work is enmeshed in a web of social-natural relations threatened by climate change.
Warming oceans
Grand Manan Island in New Brunswick, another of our project sites, further illustrates the threat to this web of work-life. Weir fishing — a sustainable practice of guiding fish into trap nets — has been practised for hundreds of years in Atlantic Canada.
While it declined significantly by the 1980s, some could still make a go of it.
Jeff Foster, a participant in our project, was one of those people. He knew everything about herring — not just as a resource to make a living on, but as a species with unique traits and behaviours.
When Martin Weinhold first photographed him in 2016, his weir fishing business was in full swing. A couple years later, Jeff turned over the fishery to his sons, happy to see a tradition continued.
But in 2023, Jeff’s sons reluctantly told him there were neither herring nor mackerel in their nets. A combination of warming waters and overfishing, especially by larger purse seiner operations, had greatly depleted the stocks.
For a while, Jeff’s sons had been able to keep the family weir going by working side jobs. But by 2024, when the Work-Life team visited Jeff, he was heartbroken.
His sons had switched to seasonal work with the lobster industry, which itself had only become an option as lobsters moved further north due to warming waters. What’s more, the weirs Jeff had built for a larger fish operation were being sold off to a lobster outfit.
Since then, the family has made the difficult decision to take down the family weir at the end of this year’s season. It will be the last time that they work together as a family at sea, and it spells the end of a specific story of who the Fosters are and where they belong.
‘Good’ work
In a 2018 paper, the ILO asserted that “a good future for work requires a stable and healthy environment.” The question is what “good” means.
Government policy tends to focus on things that can be easily quantified, like wages and hours of work. Our research reinforces that people and communities are attached to work in deeper ways, and that economic and social viability are enmeshed in the inevitable connections to nature that all forms of work depend on.
Primary research shows that climate and employment policies often remain mutually blind to each other. However, when we view work as “the fundamental interface between society and nature,” we understand how essential this relationship is to building an equitable future where people are able to do decent work.
This means ensuring that the policies and principles of a just energy transition are applied to all forms of work, not just green jobs, and that the stories of working people serve as important evidence in this endeavour.

Climate change is profoundly affecting livelihoods across Canada

August 21, 2025 • My Project Name

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