Priorities of national climate adaptation strategy don’t match risks, expert report finds

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Canada’s $1.6-billion climate adaptation plan strings together a set of targets and priorities without identifying the country’s top climate-change risks, a new expert report has found.

In November, Ottawa released a draft of its long-awaited strategy for building Canada’s resilience to climate change, allowing 90 days for feedback before producing the final version. It sets out actions and investments in key areas, including wildfire prevention, flood mapping and adaptation to extreme heat.

In a report released on Thursday, the Canadian Climate Institute, an independent policy research organization, offers 11 recommendations that it says can make the plan workable. The institute’s chief criticism is that Canada hasn’t identified just what problems it needs to address.

“The strategy’s priorities are not mapped against Canada’s top risks,” the new report says.

“The final National Adaptation Strategy should be more transparent regarding how targets were selected, and, if necessary, the federal government should adjust the process for selecting targets to ensure that they focus activity toward appropriate priorities.”

The strategy is also significantly underfunded, the institute concludes. It argues that the government’s new funding commitment, which is to be spread out over a decade, does not match the scale of the problems that lie ahead.

“The $1.6-billion announced represents only about a $200-million average annual increase in the federal government’s investment in climate change adaptation,” the report says. “Furthermore, when considering that many of the existing programs listed in the Action Plan will run out of allocated funding in the next few years, total federal government funding for adaptation could actually be lower in 2023 than it was in 2022 unless additional commitments are made.”

The Federation of Canadian Municipalities estimates that municipalities alone would need about $5-billion annually to adapt and prepare their communities.

The effects of climate change are increasing in frequency, severity and cost. Ottawa’s disaster relief payments are growing dramatically, and the federal government expects that strategic investments to improve resiliency in at-risk communities will save money in the long run.

The new funding for the adaptation strategy has been described as a down payment, rather than a final price tag. And the draft strategy document acknowledges that its stated targets have been put forward for discussion and refinement, which it says will happen after further consultations with provinces and territories, Indigenous communities and other stakeholders.

The draft plan has some strong elements, said Ryan Ness, the institute’s director of adaptation research, but other countries that have already developed national adaptation strategies – notably Britain, New Zealand, Germany, the Netherlands and Finland – first identified the major risks they faced, and then set their priorities to match.

“They’ve got all the right pieces there for a strategy. There’s still more work to be shown in terms of of how they got there,” Mr. Ness said of the Canadian plan.

He expects Ottawa does have an idea of the major risks, but hasn’t shared the information.

“It’s fundamental to a national adaptation strategy,” he said. “I would be shocked if the folks in the room who worked on this weren’t thinking about a certain set of priority risks when developing this strategy.”

He noted that in 2019, an expert panel with the Council of Canadian Academies outlined the country’s greatest climate change risks at the request of the federal Treasury Board. The panel listed the top six areas of climate change risk as: physical infrastructure, coastal communities, northern communities, human health and wellness, ecosystems and fisheries. The risks include urban flooding after extreme rainfall, heatwaves, wildfires entering urban areas and coastal infrastructure failing during storm-surge events.

Since that report was published, Canada has witnessed a number of climate disasters. In 2021, British Columbia experienced a heat wave that killed more than 600 people, a wildfire that consumed the town of Lytton and extreme rainfall that led to unprecedented, catastrophic flooding. The federal government expects to pay well in excess of $5-billion to B.C. in disaster relief for that year alone.

The Canadian Climate Institute report also calls for a more defined plan to ensure that climate adaptation work is coordinated at all levels of government. “An effective national adaptation strategy moves away from ad hoc responses that might miss important issues, or be redundant or contradictory, by identifying the most important actions to move climate adaptation forward.”

Further delays, the report warns, will be costly.

“Without a major, nation-wide acceleration of adaptation measures, Canada’s adaptation gap – the gap between Canada’s steeply rising adaptation needs and the measures that have actually been implemented – will continue to grow, and the impacts of climate change will increasingly put lives and livelihoods at risk.”