Devyani Singh

Climate action has been the center of my whole career. As a Senior Researcher at Stand.earth, I've been exposing the impacts of data center infrastructure and its footprint. I've exposed banks and helped stop billions of dollars in funding for oil and gas extraction in the Amazon. I've exposed the cutting of old-growth forests turned into pellets and burned in coal plants in the UK. I've worked on climate policy nationally, and written climate justice plans for multiple cities — real, funded plans, not just targets on a press release.
I've been a climate activist for years, working alongside many other NGOs and organizations in the climate movement. We can only win this fight together. In Vancouver, I've written climate justice motions that passed across party lines.
That's the thread running through all of it: research, activism, policy. Climate action falls apart the moment we treat it as separate from affordability and equity. The people paying the highest price for this crisis are not the ones who caused it. Every piece of work I've done has been about closing that gap, and exposing the role of big money in politics.

Gas hookups in new buildings should be banned — full stop. Buildings are one of the biggest sources of emissions in this city, so this is central to whether we actually meet our climate targets.
Vancouver already had this, but Ken Sim's council rolled it back, framing it as an affordability issue. That is wrong. Heat pumps cost less to run than gas, and they double as air conditioning during heat waves — which saves lives.
This isn't just something I'm saying as policy — it's what I research and advocate for in my day job, too. I've spent my career exposing exactly this move: an industry using an affordability argument to protect its profit margin while residents and the climate absorb the real cost.
As a councillor, I'd fight to reinstate the ban. New construction is the cheapest place to get this right — there's no version of climate-serious policy that keeps building in gas.

Climate resilience shouldn't be a line item — it should be the standard every city decision gets held to. The Sustainability Office is how we actually build that future, and it needs to play an active role, not a passive one.
Ken Sim's council cut this office by 14% and eliminated 400 jobs city-wide — gutting the exact team meant to prepare us for what's coming. I'd restore full funding - Because the alternative isn't neutral. It's a city caught flat-footed by a crisis it saw coming and chose not to plan for.

I support a moratorium — and COPE is the only party that's actually put a name and a petition behind saying so. At Stand.earth, I research the energy and water demands of data center infrastructure. Vancouver's two proposed centres alone would use power equal to over 85,000 homes and 30 million litres of water, in a city that already faces yearly water restrictions and a shrinking snowpack.
And the questions go beyond power and water. The technology is changing so fast that we don't have a real handle on the e-waste it'll generate, or what the noise and heat mean for the neighbourhoods living next to it.
We rallied at the W Georgia site this September, and we held a townhall — because people don't want their utility bills subsidizing someone else's infrastructure. A moratorium isn't anti-innovation. It's refusing to approve something this resource-intensive before we actually understand what it costs the people living here.

As a climate scientist and as someone who wants genuinely affordable housing built in this city, I don't see the Villages Plan's rejection as a rejection of growth or climate action — it was a rejection of doing both badly.
That plan would have blanket upzoned 1000’s of parcels putting hundreds of tenants at real risk of displacement without strong renter protections in place. That's not climate adaptation. If growth pushes people out of their neighbourhoods and into car-reliant areas further from transit, we haven't adapted — we've just relocated the harm.
Real climate-resilient growth protects current affordable housing and builds density around it: anti-displacement policy with teeth, protecting naturally occurring affordable housing from redevelopment, and tying density to the transit and amenities that make it livable.
It also means genuine community-led planning — residents at the table from the start, not informed after the rezoning's already drawn up. The Villages Plan didn't fail because Vancouver needs less growth. It failed because a rushed rezoning, with no protection for tenants already there, delivers displacement with a climate label on it. We can do both — density and protection — but only if we build it that way from the start.

Climate safeguards can't stop at people who have a door to close. Unhoused Vancouverites are among the most exposed to heat domes, wildfire smoke, and flooding, with the least ability to escape any of it — and any climate plan that doesn't start there isn't actually a safety plan.
Cooling spaces need to be genuinely accessible during extreme heat because outdoor workers and unhoused residents are the most at risk during climate extremes.
I will fight to expand deeply affordable and supportive housing, because the actual safeguard against climate extremes is a stable climate resilient home in the first place — not a cooling center you have to find out about and get to on your own during a crisis.
For the broader population, that means retrofitting existing housing so it doesn't become dangerous in a heat wave, restoring the sustainability department this council gutted, and building genuine climate adaptation — living shorelines, expanded tree canopy, and cooling infrastructure — into every neighbourhood, not just the ones that already have it.
Climate safety has to include everyone, or it isn't really safety. It's just protection for people who can already afford it