A Canadian in Iceland: The country's first lady on how her adopted home is tackling climate change
CBC
Our planet is changing. So is our journalism. This story is part of a CBC News initiative entitled Our Changing Planet to show and explain the effects of climate change and what is being done about it.
Through the window of her home at Iceland's presidential residence, Canadian Eliza Reid is in the unique position of being able to gaze out at some of the country's most outstanding natural wonders — from volcanoes to spectacular vistas.
"There have been people living here [in this location] since the time of settlement, over a thousand years ago," Reid, who is married to Iceland's president, said in an interview with CBC News.
Icelanders have proven exceptionally skilled throughout history at adapting to all sorts of environmental challenges, she said, including the latest one: a warming climate.
A patio at the residence overlooks a dramatic ocean bay with a skyscape of the capital city of Reykjavik and a silhouette of the still-smouldering volcano, Mount Fagradalsfjall, in the distance.
But it's the wetlands and bird sanctuary, just a few metres away on the presidential estate, to which Reid and her husband, President Guðni Jóhannesson, draw the attention of a visiting CBC News crew.
"We had ditches there," Jóhannesson said, pointing to a grassy area close to the shoreline. "They were dug in the 1930s to cultivate the land. Now, we are filling up those ditches [with water]. It's a case of wetland reclamation."
With the United Nations climate change conference poised to begin Sunday in Glasgow, the couple's conversation with CBC News focused mainly on Iceland's efforts to hit COP26's target of net-zero emissions by mid-century.
The Conference of Parties (COP), as it's known, meets every year and is the global decision-making body set up to implement the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, adopted in the early 1990s, and subsequent climate agreements.
WATCH | Eliza Reid on her adopted country's solutions for climate change:
Iceland's environmental agency estimates that roughly one-third of the tiny country's greenhouse gas emissions come from the agriculture sector.
It has become a national priority to return tens of thousands of kilometres of dry ditches back to their original watery state to better absorb those emissions, putting the island one step closer to hitting net zero.
"I absolutely see a changing environment," Reid said, noting that a glacier that once almost touched Reykjavik's city limits has receded by five kilometres since she moved here in 2003.
"But there's also wonderfully optimistic examples of work that we're doing to try to improve this."
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