Also not an April 1 joke: The Toronto Climate Week events calendar is growing! With 30 events already live — from bootcamps and book clubs to upcycled craft nights and wind turbine tours — start exploring today and sign up for what excites you the most.
Spots fill up fast, and new events are being added every week. Want to stay in the loop? Subscribe to TOCW on Luma to be the first to know!
In this edition:
Events Roundup: Newly added featured & flagship events
Changemaker Chat: Q&A with Deirdre Campbell, President at Tartanbond Communications, on sustainable and regenerative tourism
Dates to Note: Event submission & next general information webinar
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TOCW’s newsletter is a free publication
Marketing, Comms & Media — Changing the Narrative from Cost to Opportunity | June 4 Hosted by Orchestra Marketing — an interactive experience of candid panels, workshops, and honest dialogue exploring how to move the climate narrative from cost to opportunity, closing with a networking happy hour.
(Registration is open)TOCW’s Official Celebration: The Afterglow | June 5
This is the night where the climate sector’s most impactful brands and organizations, leaders, founders, thinkers, creatives, and champions gather under one roof to exhale, let loose and celebrate. And yes, there will be dancing.
(Registration will open in April)
Plus, registration is now open — secure your spot at this year's Flagship Events:
This week we sat down with Deirdre Campbell, President at Tartanbond Communications, to learn about sustainable and regenerative tourism. Deirdre is also a board member with the Adventure Travel Conservation Fund, a co-founder of the IMPACT Sustainable Travel and Tourism Summit held annually in Victoria, BC, and a proud Canadian.
Q: What is sustainable tourism?
A: One in 10 people work in tourism globally, yet it’s often overlooked as an industry for sustainable impact. Sustainable tourism involves the environmental side—using sustainable building materials, solar energy for an accommodation in the middle of a very remote area, water solutions, electrification opportunities. Many early adopters of these practices in the tourism industry were forced to sustainability because they were located outside of city centres and didn’t have a big urban grid to tap into.
Social and cultural initiatives are another big part. Tourism is typically seen as this wonderful thing, but we definitely want to make sure we leave a destination better off after visiting. This is what leads from sustainable to regenerative tourism. People will visit a beautiful area and then realize they want to give back to it, leaving it better than it was before they visited, because the experience gave them something.
Q: What’s an example of tourism giving back in a positive way?
A: We worked with the country of Jordan to help promote their Meaningful Travel Map. A lot of tourism happens in urban centres, which was the case in Jordan, and they wanted to bring tourism to rural areas where people could really benefit from having visitors. So they designed experiences organized along a trail: farms where you can eat a traditional lunch or learn to pick olives, overnight camping spots, opportunities to meet textile makers and artisans. We helped promote the map with Tourism Cares, so that visitors have a guide that helps them connect with locals and educates them on the best ways to be a responsible visitor.
Tourism Cares has brought the Meaningful Map Model to destinations around the world and is hosting their conference in Asheville, North Carolina this year, which experienced severe flooding in Fall 2024. The message is the same: the most supportive thing visitors can do is to invest back in the local community.
Q: What brought you to sustainable tourism?
A: My a-ha moment happened while I was doing an MBA at Royal Roads University here in Victoria. They were probably one of the first to bring sustainability into their business school courses. I had seen the impact of positive tourism experiences but it was not described as sustainable tourism, yet other industries were bringing the concepts of sustainability into their business models. So I reached out to the tourism community in British Columbia and offered to explore how we could ensure the tourism industry could become more sustainable across our province and throughout Canada.
I discovered through networking that people focused on sustainable tourism were often lone wolves, pioneers working on their own trying do what’s best for the tourism industry. We started the Impact Sustainability Tourism Conference here in Victoria 10 years ago, now called the Impact Summit, to bring people together to continue the dialogue, share best practices, and build community.
Q: What draws you to support Toronto Climate Week?
A: We have a team across Canada, and I’m always asking them to go out into the community and find ways we can support values-aligned projects. And when they brought Toronto Climate Week to me, I was so thrilled because it’s such a great fit. We’re always learning and sharing, and a gathering of people who are passionate and doing really good work, is a powerful way for us to connect our clients to new knowledge and expertise.
In Canada, when it comes to sustainability and good work, we’re very collaborative, very open. I see this with clients in tourism all the time. It’s a competitiveness, but in the sense that as one succeeds, we all succeed.
We tend to be humble, but now is the time for us to really celebrate what we’re doing in Canada and share that. Bringing communities together to have these discussions gives me hope. Sometimes they’re tough discussions, but we’re only going to solve them if we do it together.
Q: Why do you love what you do?
A: Every couple of years, I present Tartanbond to Destination Canada as one of their core agencies. They always ask “Why are you the right team for us?” and I always cry. I get so emotional, because as someone who travels the world, I know what we do here in Canada, and I know what we do well. Working with Destination Canada I get to meet interesting, passionate people every day in my work and celebrate them, and I also get to celebrate Canada in so many different ways. I feel very thankful I’m Canadian.
Toronto Climate Week is thrilled to partner with Tartanbond as our official Agency of Record for PR and Influencer relations. Thank you for supporting our 2026 mission!
Next General Information Webinar — April 14, 2026 register on Luma
Deadline to have events live on Luma with details finalized — May 15, 2026
With gratitude,
The TOCW Team
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