Risk-Based Climate Change Infrastructure Adaptation in Ontario

Risk Sciences International (RSI), in cooperation with the Ontario Centre for Climate Impacts and Adaptation Resources, now Climate Risk Institute (CRI), released a workshop presentation report titled “Climate Change Adaptation for Infrastructure and Planning: Case Studies.”

The report provides practical guidance on how local governments and communities can design and implement their climate adaptation strategies. It explains how projections from climate models vary and are laden with uncertainties as to the timing, impacts, and intensity of extreme weather, making their usefulness and application challenging in any local area.

However, using a risk-based approach to decision-making and planning can guide local governments and communities in their climate adaptation plans and in engineering designs to adapt infrastructure to climate change. This approach will include robust data-gathering and monitoring of extreme climate events, while carefully observing emerging trends.

Some of the highlights of the report include:

• Importance of infrastructure resilience and the pathways towards it, which provide for legal responsibilities of local governments to protect and safeguard communities against disasters and severe weather events through infrastructures, use of warning systems, and application of soft (ecosystem-based) and complex engineering designs;
• Incorporating future climate change into asset management.
• Use of municipal and land-use planning to reduce risk from climate change and realise opportunities from climate change;
• Potential impacts of the changing climate on assets in a community, and identifying structures (electric, water, roads & bridges, buildings) that are at most risk to various extreme climate events;
• Importance of forensic climate engineering to understand infrastructure failures from climate/weather events and to help identify infrastructure failure thresholds and the breaking point climate threshold of structures and assets to help adapt to climate change and build resilience.

Lastly, the report says that science is continually changing, and it is vital to stay up to date. Climate change projections should also be put in context with historical climate data.

Communication and interpretation of science are essential, especially for decision-makers, who need them to formulate realistic adaptation actions and policies.

Brief information about the two organisations, RSI and CRI:

The RSI helps organisations, both public and private, across sectors understand and manage risk and supports risk-based decision-making (RSI, 2020). Conversely, CSI is a non-profit, academic entity that provides support for climate change impacts and adaptation based on science and local evidence to improve preparedness and resilience.

Their projects include delivering training on climate change impacts and adaptation to professional planners in Ontario and conducting vulnerability assessments in a Northwestern Ontario forest (Climate Risk Institute, 2019).

To read the entire report, click on the link below:

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