Equitable climate adaptation starts with community
Relationships are key to responding to climate change
CLIMATE ADAPTATION
This article summarizes key insights from a recent webinar exploring equitable climate adaptation. An expert panel discussed examples, approaches and strategies around local climate adaptation through an equity lens, sharing insights into local climate priorities and resources to support community climate adaptation projects.
Many municipalities are beginning to centre equity in their responses to climate change. Equitable adaptation involves understanding the history and context of the systems we work in—and recognizing that many are systems of privilege and inequality. It means finding new ways of thinking about things and new ways to do them.
Doing so means building relationships: engaging, collaborating and partnering with equity-owed groups to ensure they get what they deserve.
Emmay Mah, executive director of Toronto Environmental Alliance, suggests that municipalities look at the “partnerships they need to have in place with community agencies, organizations and neighborhood groups to protect residents in extreme situations, but also to build community climate resilience over time.”
But this work can take a long time, and as Ewa Jackson, managing director of ICLEI Canada, points out, it isn’t always an easy fit with the way municipal projects are typically designed, funded and administrated.
At the same time, the climate is lending a real sense of urgency to get these projects.
“These are no longer hypotheticals,” says Rachel Mitchell, then-senior manager of programs at Clean Foundation. We're having to deal with climate impacts at an increased frequency, certainly with the severity of the impacts as well.”
Brad Badelt, then-director of sustainability for the City of Vancouver, says equity-focused climate adaptation is an area that the city is still learning about, but one that it’s already “playing catch-up” with too.
Seeing adaptation through an equity lens
Mah says it’s critical that the well-being of the communities that are directly and/or disproportionately impacted by climate change are placed at the centre of municipal climate adaptation plans.
What does that look like? Badelt describes a tree-planting project in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside neighbourhood as “a small but really concrete example of shifting practices to focus on adaptation measures where they are most needed.”
The area is dominated by concrete and asphalt, making its residents very vulnerable to the urban heat island effect during Vancouver’s now regular heatwaves. Over a few years, the city shifted from planting as many trees all over as possible everywhere to focusing more on areas like this one, where planting is much more difficult.
Planting here is also more expensive, because they city has to remove concrete to make tree wells. “There's a lot of maintenance involved, but obviously the need and the benefits are much higher here,” says Badelt.
But equitable adaptation projects don’t always have to be about physical infrastructure. Social infrastructure is equally important.
It's really important that local governments take up the responsibility of properly resourcing frontline community infrastructure - Emmay Mah, Toronto Environmental Alliance
Leveraging existing social infrastructure
Mitchell says a good way to engage with equity-owed groups is to first engage with the organizations that work closely with underrepresented groups, even when there’s not an obvious climate connection. “Maybe it's the United Way or another group that's working with under-housed individuals,” she says.
Mah agrees, suggesting that a good place to start is by looking at existing social infrastructure: mutual aid networks, community support models and neighbours helping neighbours. These structures, Mah notes, are prime tools for multi-solving during a crisis.
Mah outlines some research Toronto Environmental Alliance did (with support from the City of Toronto and the Atmospheric Fund), which found community organizations that had already done some work on preparedness or capacity-building for emergencies were able to pivot much more quickly to support residents in a crisis.
For example, community volunteers in Toronto’s St. James Town’s high rises had started training to be prepared for an extreme weather event before the pandemic. When it hit, they were able to spring into action, reaching out to residents in their buildings who needed support, going floor to floor to deliver food and checking in with isolated seniors.
After seeing how effective these community responses were, the City of Toronto committed to dedicating resources for local support networks when it adopted its new net-zero strategy, recognizing them as cornerstones of social and physical infrastructure.
Mah says they’ll keep working work with the city to look at how these can be integrated into climate resilience plans, calling it “a work in progress.”
Making adaptation project design and funding more equitable
If we want municipal adaptation projects to be truly equitable, there is still a lot about them that may need to change.
Jackson points out that municipal adaptation project design can be at odds with a focus on equity, which is based on shifting the balance of power. Shifting power requires building trust, which takes time, but many municipal projects face accelerated timelines. Building relationships in a time crunch is close to impossible—especially with groups with long histories of inequity and marginalization.
“Bringing people together to collaborate only in phase one or phase three when you need something is, by definition, transactional,” says Jackson. “Equitable climate adaptation or equity in anything can't be transactional. There needs to be a minimum degree of collaboration. Otherwise, it's just consultation, which is very different than equity-building.”
Jackson suggests using more flexible models, like the agile project design method, but recognizes that funding models may need more agility to match.
Another solution is finding ways to get over some of the legal hurdles of empowering community groups to do more. Again, leveraging social infrastructure that is already in place. This thought was echoed by the other participants.
“It's really important that local governments to take up the responsibility of properly resourcing frontline community infrastructure”, Mah says. “And that translates to funders of this work as well.”
Featured tools and resources:
Case study: Climate adaptation through an equity lens
FCM anti-racism, equity and inclusion efforts
ICLEI Canada, Equitable climate adaptation: Considerations for local governments
Tessa Watkins, Wheel of privilege (available in English only)
Climate Atlas: Indigenous knowledges
Indigenous Climate Hub, Climate change adaption (English only)
City of Vancouver, Sea2City design challenge (English only)
Community Resilience to Extreme Weather (CREW), Neighbourhood heatwave response project (English only)
Climate Caucus Handbooks (English only)
Government of BC, Systems-based approaches for climate resilient infrastructure (English only)
Climigration Network, Lead with listening: A guidebook for community conversations on climate migration (English only)
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