On July 24, 2026, Toronto Star reporter Allan Woods profiled Canadian development expert and former senior CIDA analyst, Dr. Rémy-Claude Beaulieu, and his proposal for a global mobile “Green Helmets” force to take emergency action to “keep the peace with Mother Nature,” as Woods puts it. Dr. Beaulieu’s vision of the initiative includes an international network of centres served by Green Helmet troops with specialized expertise in the natural disasters and climate events most common in each region, such as fires and floods in Canada and California, the Americas, hurricanes and volcanic eruptions in the Americas and Caribbean, drought in Africa, and tsunamis in the Pacific.
Two factors have changed that make the Green Helmets initiative more compelling: First, climate change and extreme weather events have accelerated and deepened their destructive impacts worldwide. Second, while many countries, including Canada, have ramped up their military spending, some defence-related budgets, like that of NATO, include humanitarian relief and disaster response as bona fide defence expenditures, and thus a potential source of robust funding of the Green Helmets force. Dr. Beaulieu argues that Canada’s Prime Minister, Mark Carney, working with like-minded nations within and outside NATO, is well-positioned to catalyze the Green Helmets Initiative.
More details on the GHI are provided in a technical note available below: