Atlin Workshop:
Preparing For Change –
Managing Climate Change Risks in the Atlin Area
Contents
- Introduction
- Project Objectives and Outline
- Summary of Results and Key Findings
- Community Workshop
- Next Steps
- Conclusion
- Appendix 1: Participants
- Appendix 2: Results from Weekend Breakout Sessions
- Appendix 3: Agenda
- Appendix 4: Presentation by Tristan Pearce and Dr. James Ford
- Appendix 5: Presentation by Trevor Murdock and Katrina Bennett
Community-based Climate Change Adaptation Planning
There are many successful methods of delivery for conducting community based adaptation planning. The Northern Climate ExChange, in collaboration with its many partners on this workshop, achieved a great deal of success working in Atlin using the following method.
As outlined in the 2005 Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, climate change is considered to be a significant challenge for northern communities where the features of a warming climate are already having a considerable impact.
Many people living in small, isolated communities in the North are concerned about climate-related risks to their area. Existing responses to climate change have largely focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, also referred to as climate change mitigation. Yet even with the most aggressive emission control measures, current greenhouse gas emissions commit the earth to continued climate change.
Because adverse impacts are a reality, we must implement measures to reduce or moderate the negative effects of climate change. Some of the impacts may also present new opportunities and benefits that proper planning and policy could facilitate. This work is known as climate change adaptation.
Especially for Canada’s Northern communities, adaptation should be a priority focus. It is widely accepted within the research community, that because these impacts happen at the local scale, successful adaptation planning and implementation must happen at the community and regional scale. With a population of only 100 000 across the territories and limited industrial activity, the North’s contribution to greenhouse gases is minimal: adaptation might be a better use of climate change programming effort than strictly greenhouse gas mitigation.
Adaptation planning is also a more holistic approach to the issue. Greenhouse gas mitigation is usually a good adaptation planning measure to implement, as it usually results in greater self-sufficiency and independence from “the grid”. Thus, in northern community-based adaptation planning, mitigation may be a successful means to adaptation.
It is also recognized that climate change is already occurring in the North – evidence already points to the impact of climate change on local weather patterns, wildlife, and livelihoods.
Adaptation planning can bring immediate benefits, and regional organizations and communities have stressed the need and importance of developing adaptive options that address both current and future climate-related vulnerabilities.
Climate change is not an isolated problem to be dealt with as a single issue. It is tied in with social, economic, health, environmental, cultural and other local issues, so any climate change planning work must also address the other strengths, vulnerabilities and major concerns facing the community.
Adaptation planning is a holistic approach which allows a community to address its resiliency to changes in general, and provides pathways to build stronger community capacity overall.
An approach for adaptation planning
The first step in adaptation planning is the identification and characterization of vulnerabilities. Only then can we identify adaptation needs, potential policies, programs and opportunities to reduce the negative impacts of current and future climate change.
Vulnerability refers to the susceptibility to harm in a system in response to a stimulus or stimuli.
Adaptive capacity reflects a community’s potential or ability to address, plan for, or adapt to exposure.
Vulnerability at a local level is conditioned by social, economic, cultural, political and biophysical conditions and process operating at multiple scales over time and space which affect community exposure and adaptive capacity.
Adaptation planning follows these steps:
- Identify climate change impacts
- Identify risks and opportunities associated with those impacts
- Evaluate and prioritize risks and opportunities
- Identify existing adaptation capacity
- Identify capacity needs: actions, measures and policy that are needed to advance adaptation
Actively involving communities in this process is essential. Interventions to reduce vulnerability will be more successful if they are identified and developed in cooperation with locals. Working closely with communities also allows identification of key actors and institutions that play an important role in knowledge transfer and policy development.
Despite the problem posed by climate change and the established need for action, adaptation planning and policy development is still a new idea that is not widely practiced.
Although adaptation policy development urgently needs to take place at the federal and territorial/provincial level, a good place to start is within each individual community. As climate change impacts vary greatly between places in the same region, and because each community has its own strengths and weaknesses in the dealing with those impacts, starting at the community level is an effective approach.
The overall aim of community-based climate change adaptation planning is to find answers to the following questions:
- What changes in the climate is the community seeing?
- How are people responding to these changes?
- What potential problems does future climate change pose?
- What potential opportunities does future climate change present?
- What can people do to manage future climate change?
These are the general questions that we asked over the week in Atlin. A great deal of information came out of the working group session and conference discussions, synthesized in this report.