Canada's National Adaptation Strategy is the first plan of its kind to prepare communities for climate disaster. Here are its blind spots.

 Montreal, Canada. 8th May, 2017. Neighbors safeguard dams with sandbags as flooding hits Cousineau street (Photo: Marc Bruxelle/Alamy Live News)

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Canada unveiled its first ever National Adaptation Strategy (NAS) — a plan to adapt the country’s infrastructure and its people to climate change. 

The government released the strategy at the tail end of 2022, after the COP27 conference in Egypt had wrapped and just before COP15, the world’s largest international nature and biodiversity negotiation session in a decade.

“Climate change is affecting Canada in ways that are as diverse as Canada itself,” reads the NAS’s opening. It acknowledges the hazards Canadians are already facing today from coastal erosion, changes to aquatic ecosystems, heatwaves, and floods. “Many more lives will be threatened by the impacts of a warming and more volatile climate in Canada that will continue to intensify for decades to come,” the NAS’s executive summary reads, “unless we create a more climate resilient society.”

Among the NAS’s most ambitious goals is the creation of “evidence-based adaptation measures to protect health from extreme heat” for 80 per cent of Canada’s health regions by 2026 and for Canadian health systems to make adaptation plans for climate resilience by 2030. By 2040, the NAS says, Canada should not have a single death from extreme heat waves.

But the NAS covers a wide variety of goals around hardening infrastructure, from the ravages of climate change, protecting nature and biodiversity, and helping workers in the construction sectors – like civil engineers – apply climate change adaptation tools. Underpinning these plans is a $1.6 billion commitment from the Canadian government, described as only the first investment in an ongoing climate adaptation strategy.

The NAS was hailed by major non-profits and charities like the Canadian Red Cross and Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE) as a concrete blueprint to address climate change. Dr. Claudel Pétrin-Desrosiers, a CAPE board member, said such a strategy is “critical” to reducing mortality and morbidity from environmental disruptions overall.

However, the NAS is far from perfect. Six organizations working at the intersection of human health and climate change welcome the plan, but believe the Canadian government needs to do much more on climate adaptation overall. 

Canada is no outlier here. According to the United Nations, estimated climate adaptation financing needs worldwide are expected to be anywhere from $160 billion U.S. to $340 billion U.S. by 2030. Today, annual adaptation financing is less than a tenth of that. In Canada alone, the cost of cleaning up after climate disasters is estimated by the Insurance Bureau of Canada to be around $5.3 billion a year.  

All six organizations said the NAS was a good start, but needs to be fleshed out to better address Canada’s urgent adaptation needs. Here are the major blanks they addressed: 

More funding for adaptation projects to protect human health

The federal government described the NAS’s $1.6 billion in commitments towards climate as a “down payment.” What the rest of the mortgage looks like remains to be seen, but it is clear to some the down payment alone won’t be nearly enough to meet the scale of the problem. According to the Insurance Bureau of Canada, the total cost of addressing climate-related damage today is just north of $5 billion a year.

Zita Botelho, executive director of Watersheds B.C., a conservation organization, says the NAS boosts the Disaster Mitigation and Adaptation Fund, a previously launched federal initiative to protect Canadian communities from damage done by extreme weather events, to $489 million over 10 years. “That $489 million could easily be spent in a year,” Botelho tells Future of Good. 

Botelho also wonders how overlapping pools of money from the various initiatives within the NAS would compliment one another — the “layering of different funding envelopes”, as she put it. Climate adaptation often requires solving multiple overlapping issues, each of which may technically receive funding from a different source: the federal government, provincial government, or even different subsections within the NAS.

For example, Indigenous communities in B.C. depend on harvesting salmon and shellfish from rivers as a traditional food source. Climate change has drastically affected the salmon population, undercutting food security in these communities. This is a health issue, and solving it requires not only the protection of source waters, but also working with Indigenous communities themselves to ensure they can continue to harvest salmon and shellfish for years to come.

There is also a need for community-specific projects to ensure residents of an area prone to harmful climate hazards understand the health implications. Sheila Murray, project director of Community Resilience to Extreme Weather (CREW), an initiative formed to help Toronto’s most diverse neighbourhoods prepare for climate disasters like heat waves, says the federal government should consider community-focused funding.

One project CREW has wanted to expand is a plan to map out flood plains in local Toronto communities like St. James Town, a diverse and impoverished neighbourhood of 19 high-rise towers in downtown Toronto. “In the best of worlds, there would be funding to build out stuff like that,” Murray says, “so people would really begin to have a sense of how climate can impact their lives.”

Improving consultation with local communities on adapting to climate change

Julius Lindsay, director of sustainable communities at the David Suzuki Foundation, says work at the city level is pivotal to climate adaptation efforts. Yet the NAS doesn’t give a lot of details on how the federal government will work with local communities.

“There was only one direct mention of cities and communities,” Lindsay says, “and it was in an appendix. I think there needs to be a stronger connection to how adaptation happens at the local level, and how the federal government can support that.”

CREW is a great example of the type of work done at a grassroots level – neighbours helping neighbours during bad heat waves or storms. But organizations like the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM), which represents nearly 2,000 city and town governments across the country, also routinely call for better climate adaptation funding at the federal level.

In fact, FCM submitted a series of recommendations for the NAS, including “a long-term mechanism for collaboration” between municipal governments, Indigenous communities, the federal government, as well as civil society more broadly. (The NAS itself says Canadian municipalities were consulted for the drafting of the plan itself, along with national Indigenous organizations, NGOs, universities, professional associations, “and some regional Indigenous organizations and governments.”)

Meanwhile, the health effects of climate change – illness from extreme heat, flood damage, and degraded water infrastructure from storms – are not evenly distributed. Some provinces, such as British Columbia, have been inundated with disaster after disaster, including the worst heat wave ever recorded on Canadian soil in 2021, but organizations from the westernmost province were few and far between during the NAS’s drafting.

“There’s very little representation from British Columbia on the NAS’s advisory list,” Botelho says, “and nobody from our extended water protection community in B.C.”

There is also a great need for any climate adaptation strategy to better integrate equity into its work, Lindsay says. “Climate change is disproportionately affecting marginalized communities in this country, including racialized communities and Indigenous communities.”

This is apparent in CREW’s work in Toronto’s St. James Town. Many of the 19 high-rise apartment towers are brutally hot during heat waves. (Murray says a recent survey of four buildings found over a quarter of residents with air conditioning units wouldn’t even turn them on because of the cost of running them.)

Lindsay says the federal government needs to start “meaningful engagement and connection” with Indigenous and racialized communities disproportionately affected by climate adaptation problems. Earning their trust and understanding their ideas won’t be a quick process – Lindsay measures it in years and decades, not weeks. “It’s got to move at the speed of trust,” he says.

More realistic biodiversity targets to protect humans and nature

In the eyes of Leora Berman, founder and chief operating officer of The Land Between, an Ontario-based conservation charity, plans like the NAS often don’t consider just how important biodiversity is to climate adaptation. The protection of species living alongside us doesn’t just safeguard the environment, it safeguards us, too.

“Freshwater snapping turtles are the best janitors and gardeners of our aquatic ecosystems,” she explains by way of example. “You cannot duplicate that with any man made solution.” Snapping turtles gobble up the carcasses of dead animals on the bottom of freshwater lakes, she explains, and rid the surrounding ecosystem of harmful pathogens. This safeguards water for all creatures – including humans drinking it.

The NAS does mention biodiversity and nature-based solutions as a crucial component of its adaptation goals, with goals to conserve 25 per cent of all Canadian land and water by 2025, with 30 per cent under protection by 2030. It promises to not only halt, but reverse the loss of nature by 2030 as well – a goal Berman suggests is too modest.

“Some of the science says that the second largest threat to our living on this planet is the loss of habitat and habitat fragmentation,” Berman says – the first being climate change itself. “And so the science indicates that we need 50 per cent natural cover.”

Even this target is a tall order. World leaders recently celebrated the signing of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework at COP15, a plan that calls for the protection of 30 per cent of the Earth’s land, water, and marine areas. This agreement came only after two weeks of intense international discussions, including a brief walkout by dozens of Global South nations over financing concerns for the plan. 

And while some politicians, including Guilbeault, still hope to reverse biodiversity loss in the coming decades, some ecologists have suggested such a target is impossible to achieve in less than 80 years given the fact reversing environmental damage will require generations to restore the populations of threatened species.

Berman acknowledges that the NAS touches on some very good elements overall, but doesn’t feel it gives communities and governments enough guidance on tackling climate adaptation. She says the federal government will need to negotiate with provinces, especially those that might not appreciate the need to prioritize biodiversity and halting nature loss.

“If a province doesn’t see the need to secure nature and to care for nature,” she says, “they certainly might understand the need to secure health systems.” 

As she – and freshwater snapping turtles – demonstrate, those two goals are not mutually exclusive.

Building on the NAS

The Canadian government promises to review the NAS every five years through consultations with provincial governments, municipalities, NGOs, experts, and Indigenous representatives. It isn’t intended to be a one-size-fits-all, final approach to the trouble of climate adaptation. “I always expected it to have a certain level of generality,” Lindsay says, “because it’s the federal government doing it, and they’re doing it for the whole country.”

While having a higher-order framework is a good start, the urgency of climate adaptation in Canada has never been higher. “Climate impacts are getting worse by the day, and we need a strong National Adaptation Strategy to protect Canadians,” says Ryan Ness, adaptation research director for the Canadian Climate Institute, in a statement. “The current plan is a good start – specific improvements will position it for success.”

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