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Adapting to Climate Change across Canada
- As global GHG mitigation efforts continue to fail, adaptation efforts to deal with potential harms of a warming climate may be coming into fashion. This is overdue, particularly for Canada: Canada’s contribution to global greenhouse-gas emissions is less than 2%, suggesting even dramatic emission reductions at home will do little to effect global emissions trends or future climate conditions.
- While Canada cannot meaningfully influence the nature or pace of global climate change, Canadians can take adaptive actions to minimize and manage its likely impacts within Canada. This study looks at what adaptation may look like through examples in Canadian provinces that have dealt with climate-change-like extreme weather events in the past.
- Calgary, Alberta: Since the 2013 flood, over $150 million has been invested in flood mitigation and resilience projects throughout Calgary. Mitigation work that is already complete or is underway has reduced Calgary’s flood risk by 50% and flood damages by $80 million per year.
- Montreal, Quebec: To adapt to increased Urban Heat Island effect (expected to increase with climate warming), Montréal, in 2004 instituted a standing Heat Action Plan, creating cooling centres, increasing outreach to vulnerable groups, instituting health-sector heat-wave response protocols and targeting urban-heat-island interventions in hotter districts. Researchers at Quebec’s universities estimated that over the entire population, the Heat Action Plan reduced mortality during hot days by 2.52 deaths per day.
- Winnipeg, Manitoba: Started in 2014, the Red River Floodway Expansion Project was constructed to improve flood protection for the residents of Winnipeg, West St. Paul, and East St. Paul. The floodway diverts a portion of the Red River floodwaters around Winnipeg through the floodway channel immediately south of Winnipeg back to the Red River near Lockport, with a capacity of 4,000 cubic metres. With other side-projects, by spring 2009, the system achieved its 1-in-700 year flood-risk objective (from 1-in-90 year).
- Two other case-studies, Manitoba’s Growing Outcomes in Watersheds (GROW) program, and Saskatchewan’s Forage Rainfall Insurance Program (FRIP) leverage public-private partnerships to implement adaptation programs for watershed/wetland area drought/flood harm reduction.
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