Climate Justice Saskatoon, Iron & Earth, RealRenewal, and the Saskatchewan Eco-Network all sit within SaskForward’s coalition alongside anti-poverty and health organizations. Their presence side by side is not a coincidence. It reflects a core premise of climate justice: environmental policy and economic fairness are not separate conversations.

Saskatchewan’s economy has long been closely tied to resource extraction, particularly potash, oil, and gas. That relationship has shaped the province’s prosperity in some respects, and its vulnerability in others, particularly as global energy markets shift and the economic and environmental costs of continued reliance on fossil fuel revenue become harder to ignore.

What climate justice means in a resource province

Climate justice starts from the recognition that the costs of environmental change, and the costs of transitioning away from fossil fuel dependence, are not distributed evenly. Low-income households, rural communities, and Indigenous communities often face the most severe effects of climate change itself, from extreme weather to water insecurity, while also facing the greatest economic vulnerability if resource-sector jobs decline without a managed, well-supported transition plan.

A climate justice framework insists that any serious response to climate change in Saskatchewan has to address both halves of that equation simultaneously: reducing emissions and environmental harm, while also ensuring that workers and communities currently dependent on resource extraction are not simply abandoned in the process.

The economic risk of standing still

Saskatchewan’s continued heavy reliance on resource revenue carries its own economic risk, entirely apart from environmental considerations. Commodity prices are volatile, as the province learned directly in the lead-up to its 2017 budget crisis, when falling potash and oil revenues contributed significantly to the deficit that then justified deep cuts to public services.

A provincial economy that remains heavily dependent on a small number of resource sectors is structurally exposed to exactly the kind of revenue shock that produced the 2017 budget crisis. Diversifying toward renewable energy, sustainable agriculture, and other emerging sectors is not simply an environmental goal. It is also a form of economic risk management for a province that has already experienced, directly and painfully, what happens when resource revenue falls short.

What if instead of returning to “normal” and waiting for the next crisis, we dug in as a province and drew on our spirit of caring for one another to reimagine a future?

Workers at the centre of a just transition

Iron & Earth, one of SaskForward’s coalition partners, was founded by tradespeople working in the oil sands who recognized both the urgency of climate action and the very real economic stakes for workers whose livelihoods depend on the current energy system. Their work reflects a “just transition” approach, one that treats retraining, transferable skills, and dignified alternative employment as essential components of any serious climate policy, rather than an afterthought to be addressed once emissions targets are set.

A just transition framework rejects the idea that climate action and worker livelihoods are inherently in conflict. It insists instead that a well-designed transition plan, developed with genuine input from affected workers rather than imposed on them, can reduce emissions while also creating stable, well-paying employment in emerging sectors like renewable energy installation, grid modernization, and sustainable agriculture.

Renewable energy potential in Saskatchewan

Saskatchewan has some of the strongest solar and wind resource potential in Canada, a natural advantage that has historically been underdeveloped relative to the province’s resource extraction sectors. Organizations like RealRenewal have advocated for policies that would allow the province to develop this renewable potential more fully, both to reduce emissions and to build new economic sectors less exposed to the commodity price volatility that has repeatedly destabilized provincial budgets.

Developing renewable energy at scale requires sustained policy support, from grid infrastructure investment to procurement policies that create stable demand for renewable generation. Without that kind of sustained public investment, Saskatchewan’s renewable potential remains a largely unrealized advantage rather than an active economic sector.

Water, land, and community resilience

Beyond energy policy, climate justice work in Saskatchewan also intersects with water security and land stewardship, areas where organizations like the Kisiskatchewan Water Alliance and the Committee for Future Generations have focused significant attention. Water security, in particular, connects directly to agricultural resilience, a critical concern in a province where agriculture remains a major economic sector and where changing precipitation patterns pose a long-term risk to both water supply and crop reliability.

Community-level resilience planning, from local water management to sustainable land use practices, represents another dimension of climate justice work that operates at a more local scale than provincial energy policy, but that is equally essential to Saskatchewan’s long-term capacity to adapt to a changing climate.

Connecting the dots

Climate justice organizations within the SaskForward coalition make a consistent case: Saskatchewan’s environmental policy, economic diversification strategy, and social justice commitments are not three separate files to be handled by three separate departments. They are deeply interconnected, and a provincial budget or policy platform that treats them in isolation from one another will consistently miss opportunities to address multiple challenges at once.

Building a more diversified, climate-resilient Saskatchewan economy, one that supports workers through a genuine transition rather than leaving them behind, remains one of the clearest long-term paths toward the kind of stable, broadly shared prosperity that SaskForward’s founding consultation identified as a shared provincial priority.