Climate Change: Adaptation Tools and Guides
Changing Climate, Changing Communities: Guide and Workbook for Municipal Climate Adaptation
Download Changing Climate, Changing Communities: Guide and Workbook for Municipal Climate Adaptation
Changing Climate, Changing Communities: Guide and Workbook for Municipal Climate Adaptation is a compendium of resources that provide a milestone based framework to assist local governments in the creation of adaptation plans to address the relevant climate change impacts associated with their communities. Changing Climate, Changing Communities is aimed at municipal staff interested in working on climate change adaptation strategies.
Protecting your Community from Climate Change: a Training Program for Ontario Municipalities
This course is intended to help municipalities and municipal departments take action to adapt to climate change. It builds on the experience of some local government leaders in the field, and includes links to reports of their efforts. It also draws on the important work of Canadian and international climate change scientists and adaptation researchers.
A Practitioners Guide to Climate Change Adaptation in Ontario’s Ecosystems
This guide was developed to help practitioners respond to and prepare for climate change. It introduces the concepts of climate change adaptation, vulnerability, and risk. It also describes vulnerability and risk assessment tools and techniques, and a framework that can be used to support adaptive management in a rapidly changing climate. Ultimately, the guide seeks to assist natural resource managers to identify ways that climate change vulnerabilities and risks can be integrated into decision-making processes that include adaptation action plans, strategies, and policies.
Adapting to Extreme Heat Events: Guidelines for Assessing Health Vulnerability
This document, Adapting to Extreme Heat Events: Guidelines for Assessing Health Vulnerability (the Guidelines), addresses the need for information on considerations specific to the assessment of vulnerability to the health impacts of extreme heat events. The stakeholders and assessment steps relevant to the investigation of heat-health vulnerabilities in Canadian communities are presented along with examples of method application and information on key challenges and limitations.
Community Based Adaptation in Brampton Through the Sustainable Neighbourhood Retrofit Action Plan (2011)
The Toronto and Region Conservation Authority has established several pilot programs throughout the Greater Toronto Area to promote climate change adaptation and sustainability in established urban neighbourhoods. The Sustainable Neighbourhood Retrofit Action Plan (SNAP) program based in Brampton focused on the County Court neighbourhood.
Through a series of community and stakeholder engagement efforts and in partnership with local businesses, residents and neighbourhood groups, the SNAP developed an action plan for the community that identified recommended actions for the municipality, the neighbourhood and the private landowners. The case study describes the SNAP program and discusses the features of the Brampton SNAP program. In addition, the case study examines the challenges that were encountered throughout the process and the lessons learned by the project team.
Guide to Writing Community Climate Change Adaptation Case Studies
This guide is for people who are writing or planning to write community climate change adaptation case studies. This guide is intended to help writers produce case studies that meet the needs of practitioners. The guide provides an overview of different types of community adaptation case studies, including introductory (“gateway”) case studies, worked examples, process case studies, learning histories and comparative case studies. The guide also outlines key considerations for scoping a case study, steps for writing a case study, and challenges and benefits associated with case study writing.
Achieving Hazard-Resilient Coastal & Waterfront Smart Growth
This report presents an overview of ideas shared by smart growth and hazard mitigation experts at an August 2011 roundtable. The roundtable participants focused on how coastal and waterfront communities can create environmentally and economically sustainable neighborhoods while minimizing risks from coastal flooding. The report provides ideas for further research, tools, services, and approaches that federal and state agencies, academics, organizations, and practitioners could consider to improve integration of smart growth and hazard mitigation approaches along the coast.
Climate Adaptation Tool (CAT)
Created by the Norfolk Climate Change Partnership (UK), the Climate Adaptation Tool (CAT) is an excel-based risk management tool designed to guide organisations through the full process of adapting to the risks that inevitable climate change poses. The 3 stage process includes:
- Conducting a climate change risk assessment to identify vulnerabilities and opportunities;
- Deciding on adaptive responses to those risks;
- Implementing and reviewing the decisions.
You can download the CAT guidebook here, which explains in detail each step of the excel-based, climate change risk management tool.
You can download the Excel sheet (the tool) by clicking on the “Visit site” button below.
Adapting to Climate Change: An Introduction for Canadian Municipalities: Case Studies Section (2010)
Adapting to Climate Change: An Introduction for Canadian Municipalities is a compendium of eleven case studies developed by Natural Resources Canada to provide municipal decision-makers and staff with examples of climate change adaptation actions, focusing on how to develop and implement strong adaptation measures. Each case study outlines the climate change impacts on the selected community, the plan-making process, measures adopted, next steps and lessons learned. The case studies included in the report are:
- Clyde River’s Community Climate Change Adaptation Plan
- City of Kamloops’ Wildfire Protection Plan
- Metro Vancouver’s Stormwater Management Plan
- Edmonton’s Urban Forest Management Plan
- Regina’s Water Conservation Program
- London Ontario’s Climate Change Adaptation Strategy
- Toronto’s Heat Health Alert System
- Quebec City’s Environmental Services Adaptation Plan
- Le Goulet’s Climate Change Adaptation Plan
- Planning for Sea-level Rise in Halifax Harbour
- Preparing for Storm Surges in Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia
Promising Practices in Adaptation & Resilience: a Resource Guide for Local Leaders
This Resource Guide represents a synthesis of the best available information we were able to find about the ways in which experts and practitioners across the country are working to meet the challenges outlined above. The Resource Guide is intended to help practitioners in cities and metropolitan regions resolve local issues, by showcasing promising practices in climate adaptation and resilience, and by providing efficient access to some of the very best information and resources that are available.