Contribution short abstract

Reimagining southern Alberta as a “cold desert,” this paper examines how arid imaginaries shape water–energy governance and justice in Canada’s energy transition.

Contribution long abstract

Southern Alberta is increasingly defined by aridity, glacier loss, hydrological volatility, and intensifying wildfire regimes. This paper reframes the prairie–foothills region as a “cold desert” whose ecologies and communities are governed through imaginaries of emptiness, extractability, and infrastructural availability. Drawing on my Summit to Steppe project (a multi-scalar investigation of climate resilience and water–energy relations across the Oldman River watershed) I examine how current energy transition initiatives mobilize land and water through narratives of aridity to justify new infrastructures, including hydrogen production, pumped-hydro storage, solar development, and transmission expansion.

Building on political ecology scholarship that critiques deserts as socially produced spaces for resource capture, I argue that Canadian energy transitions risk reproducing familiar settler-colonial techniques: treating land as vacant, water as endlessly mobilizable, and rural and Indigenous territories as logistically open for renewable energy development. Yet emergent alternatives (e.g., community-based solar projects and watershed-scale approaches to climate resilience) offer more relational visions for socio-ecologically just energy futures.

Through fieldwork, visual documentation, and landscape analysis, this paper situates the Canadian Prairies within global desert imaginaries and highlights the need for governance models that centre water equity, Indigenous authority, and more-than-human wellbeing. In dialogue with the panel’s comparative focus, it contributes a “cold desert” story that expands how socio-ecological justice is conceptualized across diverse arid landscapes.