Can Toronto become a global climate hub - and put Canada on the map?

Becky Park-Romanovsky is a global leader in sustainability and climate action, with a track record of launching and scaling climate-focused initiatives across multiple continents. She founded Toronto Climate Week, co-founded Climate North, is a lecturer on Social Entrepreneurship at IE University in Madrid, and previously developed carbon offset projects across the Americas, Africa, Middle East, and Eastern Europe.

TOCW is a decentralized platform - part convener, part infrastructure layer for Canada's climate ecosystem. Their October kickoff was planned as a single day with 20 events. Instead, it drew 100 events, 5,000 attendees, and representation from 30 countries - with zero international outreach. The full week runs June 1–7 with 200+ events across 16 tracks.

We get into:

• Toronto's potential as a climate hub - where it's strong and who still needs to come to the table
• Why corporate climate action isn't slowing down even as public commitments disappear
• The strategy behind radical inclusion - arts, sports, culture
• Building the infrastructure to turn a week of conversations into measurable outcomes
• What Canada's climate ecosystem looks like if Toronto gets this right

We're happy to be supporting TOCW in their inaugural year as a media partner.

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The battery storage market is growing - and the supply chain feeding it runs largely through overseas cell manufacturers. At the same time, the first wave of EV batteries is aging out of vehicles, with nowhere obvious to go.

Moment Energy is building the infrastructure to address both problems at once, repurposing retired EV battery packs for commercial energy storage. Their platform takes battery cells that still hold around 80% of their original capacity and redeploys them as stationary battery energy storage. Unlike competitors sourcing cells from overseas, Moment's feedstock is already here: in EVs across Canada and the US.

Sumreen Rattan is co-founder and COO of Moment Energy. The company closed a US$15M Series A from Amazon's Climate Pledge Fund and Voyager Ventures, secured a $20.3M DOE grant for a Texas gigafactory, and holds supply agreements with Nissan North America and Mercedes-Benz.

What we cover:

• Moment’s second-life thesis - why a battery with 80% capacity remaining is too valuable to recycle

• Putting together supply partnerships with Nissan and Mercedes-Benz

• Data centres as a new customer category

• The domestic supply chain advantage as FEOC rules reshape North American procurement

• What's slowing energy storage deployment in Canada

• Building at gigafactory scale and solving the talent gap

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Canada's carbon removal sector punches well above its weight. We're home to leaders in direct air capture, mineral and ocean pathways and international companies are moving projects to Canada. The question is whether Canada will move ambitiously enough to capitalize before the window closes.

Na'im Merchant is the Executive Director of Carbon Removal Canada, the country's leading CDR advocacy non-profit. In March 2026, his organization helped anchor the Advance Carbon Removal Coalition - a $100M commitment from the federal government, RBC, BMO, and Shopify to back Canadian projects by 2030.

Carbon Removal Canada is the connective tissue the sector needed: a technology-agnostic, independent organization that coordinates policy, organizes the ecosystem, and builds the demand signals that help projects get financed. Their economic modelling shows CDR starts saving Canada money by 2035, cutting the marginal cost of reaching net zero by over 50% by 2050.

What we cover:

• Why Na'im left global health for carbon removal
• What $100M actually unlocks - and why a government buyer matters
• The economic argument: how CDR saves Canada money on the path to net zero
• Industrial integration: mining, steel, and forestry as CDR opportunities
• Trough of disillusionment or normal maturation?
• The US pullback: genuine competitive opening for Canada, or missed opportunity?
• What policy and capital levers need to be pulled to realize this gigatonne-scale potential

Links:

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→ Full show notes and resources

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→ Feedback or guest ideas: hello@climatetechcanada.ca