Cascadia Climate Hub

The Cascadia Climate Hub is the flagship initiative of Innovate Bellingham’s Climate & Sustainability focus area, dedicated to accelerating the transition to a more sustainable and resilient bioregion.

Climate change doesn't recognize borders, watersheds don't stop at checkpoints, and the solutions we need require a unified front. By uniting leaders with grassroots public action, we are transforming Bellingham into the vibrant heart of climate innovation for our bioregion.

Our Four-Tier Ecosystem

We believe that effective climate action must be scalable. Our work is designed to deploy targeted sustainability solutions across four distinct geographic levels:

Bellingham: Pioneering municipal-scale solutions like active transportation networks, green building standards, and hyper-local greenhouse gas emissions reductions.
Whatcom County: Scaling up renewable energy production and expanding circular economy networks that bridge our urban centers and rural agricultural landscapes.
The Fraser River Valley: Coordinating transboundary, cross-border initiatives to reduce industrial and agricultural pollution while building shared climate resiliency.
The Salish Sea Bioregion: Anchoring large-scale climate resiliency and cross-border airshed protections across the entire interconnected network of forests, mountains, and watersheds that drain into our shared sea.

What We Do: The Strategy

The Hub operates on a dual model: Top-down leadership orchestration combined with bottom-up grassroots mobilization.

1. Convening the Coalition

We bring together key local and regional leaders who hold the levers for systemic change:

Forward-Thinking Businesses who are building the new green economy
Dynamic Nonprofits coordinating on-the-ground conservation and advocacy
Native American Tribes & First Nations centering Indigenous ecological knowledge and sovereign leadership to protect our shared watersheds, forests, and resources.
Elected Officials aligning cross-border and local policy to accelerate green infrastructure, reduce regional pollution, and fund climate resilience.

2. Engaging the Public

True innovation cannot happen in a vacuum. The Cascadia Climate Hub actively engages the general public to turn high-level solutions into community-backed movements. Through public forums, workshops, and citizen-science initiatives, we build the deep, grassroots support necessary to make our regional solutions stick.

The Cascadia Corridor Advantage

Positioned uniquely between Seattle and Vancouver, two of the world's top cities for climate innovation, Bellingham isn't just watching the future happen. We are synthesizing the best ideas, funding, and talent of the Pacific Northwest to build a resilient, sustainable bioregion.

Get Involved

Whether you are a regional policymaker, a business leader looking to make an impact, or a Bellingham resident ready to take action, there is a place for you at the Hub.