Following the release of the report Measuring Progress on Adaptation and Climate Resilience: Recommendations to the Government of Canada, Canada’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Catherine McKenna, said this: “Taking action to help Canadians adapt to climate change is a priority for the Government of Canada. The ability to adapt, prepare, and be resilient in the face of a changing climate helps protect the health, well-being, and prosperity of Canadians.”
Here’s the report’s Executive Summary:
Climate change impacts are being felt across Canada in significant ways. With observed increases in average temperature and precipitation over the last six decades, including especially rapid rates of warming in the North, climate change is already affecting Canada’s environment and economy, as well as the safety, physical, mental, cultural, and spiritual health and well-being of Canadians. As these impacts are projected to intensify in the coming decades, it is essential that Canadians act now to adapt and build their resilience to climate change.
To help to overcome the challenges associated with climate change in Canada, actions to adapt and build climate resilience are being carried out across the country, by all levels of government, as well as by nongovernmental organizations, Indigenous Peoples, the private sector, academia, professional organizations, and individual Canadians. These actions are crucial for building Canada’s capacity to thrive under new climate conditions. However, effectively managing climate risks requires coherence and high levels of coordination between actions that result from an understanding of Canada’s overall progress on adaptation and climate resilience, including to what extent collective action and investments are building adaptive capacity. A robust approach to evaluating progress is needed to increase understanding, support informed decision-making and continuous improvement, and ultimately, enhance climate resilience.
The Expert Panel on Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience Results was launched by the federal government in August 2017 to advise the Government of Canada on measuring overall progress on adaptation and climate resilience. The Expert Panel was asked to recommend a suite of indicators to measure progress on adaptation and climate resilience in Canada. The recommended indicators were to align with the five key areas of action identified under the adaptation and climate resilience pillar of the Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change, Canada’s national plan to address climate change, build resilience, and grow the economy. It is under this framework that the Expert Panel, following an ambitious, eight-month process of discussion and deliberation, proposes a suite of 54 indicators across the following five chapters:
- Protecting and Improving Human Health and Well-Being, focused on the key determinants of health as they relate to climate change impacts, and objectives and indicators that could be used to monitor and evaluate progress toward increasing the resilience of people, communities, and health practitioners to a broad range of health impacts associated with climate change;
- Supporting Particularly Vulnerable Regions, focused on Canada’s northern, coastal, and remote regions and objectives and indicators to measure the resilience of these particularly vulnerable regions to slow onset climate change impacts (e.g., permafrost thaw, coastal erosion);
- Reducing Climate-Related Hazards and Disaster Risks, focused on objectives and indicators related to reducing impacts from rapid-onset climate-related events (e.g. floods, wildfires and other events), aligned with the four components of emergency management: prevention, preparedness, response and recovery;
- Building Climate Resilience through Infrastructure, focused on objectives and indicators to measure the resilience of Canada’s traditional, cultural, and natural infrastructure, new and existing infrastructure, critical and non-critical infrastructure, and the interdependencies of its infrastructure systems; and
- Translating Scientific Information and Indigenous Knowledge into Action, focused on objectives and indicators related to the respectful consideration and use of Indigenous Knowledge Systems and science to co-develop information related to climate change impacts, build the capacity of Canadians to act on this information, and mobilize action on adaptation.
The indicators recommended within these chapters are diverse and are intended to identify and measure key elements that would reflect progress on adaptation and climate resilience in Canada. While the full suite is appropriately broad, consistent with the scale, scope, and complexity of the climate change challenge, the Expert Panel has identified a sub-set of 19 indicators from within the larger set that could serve as a starting point for future discussion and work on measuring progress on adaptation and climate resilience, including consideration of a measurement program for adaptation and climate resilience in Canada.
In addition to advising on proposed indicators, the Expert Panel also considered how to implement a sustainable approach to monitoring progress on implementation. Chapter 7 of this report details an approach to mobilizing the Expert Panel’s proposed indicator suite through a sustainable, robust, broadly
applicable monitoring and evaluation framework.
In this context, the report highlights several elements essential to implementation of a monitoring and evaluation program for adaptation and climate change resilience in Canada, including:
- The importance of working with Indigenous Peoples and Indigenous Knowledge Systems to measure progress on adaptation and climate resilience and respond to the results from monitoring and evaluation; and
- The need for continuous improvement to both the indicator set and monitoring and evaluation program, necessary to reflect the rapid evolution of climate change science and the information and results of monitoring and evaluation efforts.
Building on the above-mentioned chapters, the Expert Panel has also included a Call to Action. This highlights the vital importance and urgent need for action to build climate resilience in Canada complementary to and aligned with actions to mitigate climate change and calls on all orders of government to build on the Expert Panel process, working in close collaboration with Indigenous Peoples, the private sector, communities, non-governmental organizations, professional associations, academia and civil society.