Search AC2020

Presenters: Jessica Shoubridge (moderator), Graham Watt, Paul Kovacs and Ujala Qadir

In a world that is changing at an unprecedented rate, how are new financial arrangements being made and new funding mechanisms being deployed to meet the demands of the rapid transition to a low-carbon, resilient world? This interactive session will explore the resilience funding and finance landscape from the local to the global, featuring contributors from the public, private and not-for-profit sectors. Get inspired by those who are innovating in this space and be a part of the growing momentum in green and sustainable finance!

This session will utilize interactive polling, Ignite-style talks and other interactive methods to ensure that the audience is included as active participants. The input from the session will also inform the next iteration of the Understanding Risk (UR+) Symposium to be held in the spring (2020) in Vancouver. The session is moderated by Jessica Shoubridge, a planner with 10 years’ experience working to build resilience in Southwestern BC.

Moderator: Jim Vanderwal

TOONIKTOYOK: Inuit-led Research on Climate Change Risks and Hunting Costs

Presenters: Angus Naylor, David Fawcett and Adam Kuptana

The goal of the TOONIKTOYOK project is to develop a dynamic understanding of how changing climatic conditions are affecting subsistence hunting and adaptation options among Inuit in Ulukhaktok, NT. Using a novel participatory-GIS methodology, the project equips 10 active Inuit hunters with GPS units, which are carried throughout the course of the year to record real-time land use data. This data is supplemented through the cohort’s participation in bi-weekly semi-structured group interviews, convened by a local Inuit project-coordinator, and with questions informed by project objectives, which capture additional information on stressors affecting subsistence practices and challenges to adaptive capacity. This oral presentation will highlight the importance of community-led monitoring initiatives to combat and better understand the effects of climate change, discuss the application of participatory-GIS methods for climate change adaptation, and describe the ways through which Inuit are affected by and respond to climate change.

Hamlet of Tuktoyaktuk – the Acceleration of Coastal Change

Presenters: Thomas James and Shawn Stuckey

Over the last few decades, the rate of coastal change in some parts of the Arctic — in particular the Beaufort Sea — has accelerated due to declining sea ice, warming temperatures, increased wave action and storm surges. No other community is more vulnerable to the acceleration of climate-driven change than the community of Tuktoyakuk (pop. 950). The residents of the coastal community of Tuktoyaktuk, located within the Inuvialuit Settlement Region, are all too aware of this rapid erosion, coastal flooding and land subsidence from permafrost thaw.  Erosion rates have increased by 27% in the past two decades, and it is clear that current shore protection measures are not working and able to withstand the increased climate-forcing events that continue to plague the community during the open water season. The rapidly increasing burden of coastal erosion facing this community necessitates urgent mitigation.

Moderator: Bob Purdy

Co-producing Solutions to the Impacts of Climate Change on Canada’s Undersea Forests

Presenter: Danielle Denley

Climate change is threatening food security for coastal communities world-wide. On the central coast of BC, First Nations communities rely heavily on kelp forests for commercial, food, social and ceremonial purposes. This talk highlights how co-production of research can facilitate relevant solutions that are directly available for local decision-makers to integrate into regional management plans, first by summarizing previous results revealing strong temperature effects on kelp recovery post-harvest on the Central Coast, and second by introducing recent research co-produced with the Central Coast Indigenous Resource Alliance to determine whether adaptive management of traditional community-based kelp harvest can minimize the negative impact of temperature-induced bryozoan outbreaks on kelp.

Both examples use co-developed methodologies based on traditional kelp harvest and related fisheries, increasing the likelihood that First Nations communities will continue to adaptively manage kelp forests to increase the resilience of both kelp forest ecosystems and coastal communities to climate change.

SmartICE: Supporting Sustainable Winter Fisheries for Nunavut Communities under Changing Climate

Presenters: Trevor Bell

Across Nunavut, community-based fisheries are improving food security, providing employment and increasing the socio-economic well-being of Nunavummiut. The Government of Nunavut has a long-term goal to establish a self-supporting, inshore fishery, and to this end, several industry groups have invested in the development of a winter fishing industry in Baffin Island communities.

Climate change and its impacts on sea-ice conditions, however, represent increasing risk to fisher safety, industry investment in the winter fishery and the realization of the Government of Nunavut’s economic development goals. Our partnership between the hamlets of Pangnirtung and Qikiqtarjuaq, SmartICE (smartice.org) and Nunavut Fisheries Association is supporting a climate-adapted fishery by providing important information on landfast sea-ice thickness and travel hazards in near real-time. We are working closely with fishers to identify and address their specific ice information needs and develop technology solutions to complement their Inuit knowledge.

Moderator: Patrick Breuer 

Climate Risk Assessments for Transportation Assets: Lessons Learned and Recommended Practices

Presenter: Donavan Jacobsen

Transport Canada’s five-year Transportation Assets Risk Assessment (TARA) initiative funds the assessment of climate risk for federal transportation assets. Since launch of the initiative in 2017, $6M in project funding has been approved for climate risk assessment and instrumentation projects for airports, highways, bridges and ferry terminals, as well as research projects that seek to identify and address gaps and barriers to assessing climate risk.

Through TARA initiative implementation, Transport Canada has delivered and advised on numerous climate risk assessment contracts, climate data and impact analyses, and climate risk assessment workshops, resulting in an early list of lessons learned relating to climate risk assessments for transportation assets. These lessons focus on how to select the appropriate tool for the assessment, what decisions need to be made at the outset of a project, and how to structure your work to get a product that can be used for decision-making.

Integrating Climate Risk Knowledge into Practice at the Maryland Department of Transportation

Presenter: Susan Asam and Cassandra Bhat

This presentation will focus on a suite of practical strategies that the Maryland Department of Transportation State Highway Administration (MDOT SHA) is taking to ensure that individuals across the organization are taking account of potential climate change risks in their decision-making. For example, MDOT SHA is developing and distributing a centralized online viewer to share asset risk data; conducting trainings with internal and external partners on how to access, interpret and use the data; integrating future flood frequencies into pavement performance modelling; screening for climate risks in project planning and design processes; and more. The presentation will focus on lessons learned and best practices emerging from this experience, such as how to structure and present risk assessment results to facilitate uptake, engaging a wide variety of staff, and achieving organizational change.

Moderator: Michael Stanyer

Engagement and Games: Serious Gaming for Climate Adaptation

Presenters: Heather Murdock and Dr. Evalyna Bogdan

Flood adaptation is a significant challenge in Canada and around the world. Local communities aiming to build greater resilience to flooding often grapple with balancing competing interests and deciding which trade-offs are tolerable. It has been shown that “serious games” can be an effective tool to facilitate learning and collective decision-making. These tools involve gamification methods applied to serious topics. A growing body of research shows that the gamification of complex socio-environmental problems can create safe spaces for stakeholders to explore diverse views and interests in a low-pressure environment.

This presentation will showcase how a flood adaptation practitioner and a researcher teamed up to develop a serious game for flood governance in Canada – the Flood Resilience Challenge. An evaluation of the pilot test and the implication of these findings will be presented for the application of the Flood Resilience Challenge in communities across Canada.

Enhancing Public Awareness through the Arts in Sustainable Development Goals and Climate Adaptation

Presenter: Sylvia Borda

In considering the conditions required for a resilient and sustainable future we need to repurpose, reinvent, remake and rethink how our human-impacted planet can better work with the environment and function synergistically with it.
 
In this talk on what's next in civic and rural development, artist Sylvia Grace Borda illustrates how the arts sector can help align us more closely with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). While Canada was one of 193 nations that pledged to adopt the SDGs in 2015, it has been slow in developing a strategy for implementing the goals nationally. This interactive presentation highlights how we can champion SDG targets by demonstrating ways in which the arts can support tackling climate change.   In particular the talk provides actionable insights of how our civic spaces can become examples of climate adaptive and eco-cultural spaces for public awareness and custodianship.

Sylvia's presentation is relevant to those whose daily work impacts Nature, including architects, engineers, landscape architects, planners and policy makers, by demonstrating how the arts can help us build and achieve a more sustainable world.

Communicating about Climate Change in the Canadian Provincial North: Insights into Promoting Community Engagement

Presenter: Maya Gislason

Communities in the Canadian Provincial North (CPN) are particularly vulnerable to climate change. However, limited research addresses the unique challenges, impacts and possibilities around effectively communicating climate change in these regions. Further, climate change communication research focuses primarily on urban realities, and when applied to the CPN, these best practices may alienate, isolate or even polarize local climate change research and community engagement efforts led by local champions. In this presentation, we share findings from in-depth interviews with local changemakers across Northern British Columbia and Ontario, and a survey of two urban communities in the CPN. With a focus on place, local vulnerabilities and the role of industry as a major economic driver, this presentation considers the nature of rural and remote communities, and how living at the epicenter of struggles between environmental and economic sustainability contours the challenges of communicating about climate change in these regions.

Presenters: Ericha Moores (moderator), Kyla Milne, Sara Holzman and Rebekka Schnitter

Climate change has disproportionate and differential impact on the most vulnerable. Understanding the social contexts and roots causes of vulnerability are integral components of designing and implementing adaptation solutions that are effective, culturally sensitive and sustainable. Vulnerability and social equity are closely related concepts and, whilst there is theoretical understanding of this relationship, there is limited knowledge on how to integrate this into adaptation practice.

This session, composed of a panel with representatives from Natural Resources Canada, Health Canada, Government of Nunavut and Government of Nova Scotia, will provide practical examples of how different organizations are considering social equity in adaptation planning and implementation and the need for empowered approaches. Following the panel, there will be a workshop component that will further explore the integration of social equity and climate adaptation.

Presenters: Erica Crawford, Olive Dempsey, Kari Tyler, Stephen Tyler, Trevor Murdock and Amanda Broad

Adaptation professionals who understand the wicked problem of climate change are trained to focus on the needs of communities and the supports that enable them to adapt and respond to climate change. At the same time that we need to develop skills to support the mental and emotional well-being of those for whom we work (e.g., www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2017/03/climate-mental-health), this work can also take an emotional and psychological toll on practitioners themselves.

This session will provide a framework and resources to make sense of the emotional landscape of adapting to climate change, engaging participants through experiential learning processes. Presentations will be in the form of role play and demonstration, and will be followed by small group work. This session will offer professionals the space to practise and reflect on skills for their own personal resilience, and leave them with practices and resources that can be applied to their work and collaborations with others.

Moderator: Cherry Tam

Presenters: Marina Melanidis and Caroline Merner

Youth may be the group that has contributed the least to the climate crisis, yet they are among the greatest impacted. It is critical that young people are meaningfully engaged in climate action, including adaptation. This workshop will expand on youth engagement methods, share best practices, and provide an opportunity to experience a youth engagement model. In the first half of the workshop, Climate Guides will share stories and best practices of working with young people and show how mentorship can be a meaningful engagement tool. The second half of the workshop will be a “Speed Mentoring” session, where several climate leaders (mentors) will lead their own roundtables that participants (mentees) can visit. The intended audience includes youth and older professionals alike, aiming to both build skills among professionals in engaging youth and allow youth an opportunity to connect with professionals and build their network.