Climate Change and Human Migration Series: Climate-Related Displacements in Canada (TRN5-V53)

Transcript: Climate Change and Human Migration Series: Climate-Related Displacements in Canada

[00:00:01 The CSPS logo appears onscreen.]

[00:00:05 The screen fades to Arjun Vinodrai.]

Arjun Vinodrai: Hello and welcome, everyone, to our event today on climate-related displacements in Canada, the second event in a four-part series called Climate Change and Human Migration. My name is Arjun Vinodrai and I'm the Senior Director of Policy and Program Development in Emergency Management and Programs Branch at Public Safety Canada.

I would like to recognize that I am speaking to you from the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe people. I want to express my gratitude to generations of Algonquin people past and present, as the original caretakers of this space I occupy. I am grateful to be here. I recognize that our participants today are from various parts of the country and therefore, you may work on a different Indigenous territory. I encourage you to take a moment to think about the territory you occupy.

I also want to note that we will be taking questions throughout the event today. To submit your question, click on the raised hand icon at the top right hand corner of your screen. We'll try to get to as many questions as we can today as time permits, and we encourage you to participate in the language of your choice.

As such, we encourage you to participate in the language of your choice.

I would now like to invite Robert McLeman, the co-creator of the series, to provide some opening remarks about today's event.

[00:01:28 Robert McLeman appears in a separate video chat panel.]

Robert McLeman is a professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, where he specializes in research on the human dimensions of environmental change. He is also currently a coordinating lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Working Group on Impacts, Vulnerability, and Adaptation.

Prior to teaching, Robert was a Canadian Foreign Service officer and worked for Canadian diplomatic missions in Belgrade, Hong Kong, New Delhi, Seattle, and Vienna. In recent years, he has advised UN agencies, the World Bank, and governments in Canada, the United States, and Europe on issues related to climate change, migration and security.

Robert, welcome, and the floor is yours.

Robert McLeman: Thank you so much, Arjun.

Thank you very much to everyone. It's a real pleasure for me to be here with you on Zoom.

I'm going to switch to English now, and thank you all again for joining us for the second part of this series. This is a very exciting opportunity for us to speak directly to Canadian officials and public servants who are engaged in thinking about, assisting, and just generally working with Canadians and Canadian communities who may be experiencing a variety of risks related to extreme weather events, climate change, and related phenomena.

We have a very good idea, I think, in general, about the types of hazards that Canadian communities face these days, floods, storms, heatwaves, wildfires, and we're even learning about new ones like atmospheric rivers, bomb cyclones, and vocabulary that many of us weren't familiar with maybe even five or ten years ago, but there's still a lot of uncertainty in terms of what will be the changes in the frequency, severity, and geographic distribution of these sorts of events, and will those changes occur gradually and will they occur predictably, or will it be unpredictable?

I'm thinking about just last week, there was a massive hurricane, Category 5, that slammed into Acapulco in Mexico, causing tremendous human hardship. The scary thing about that event is that it went from a sort of run-of-the-mill tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane within a matter of hours, and these are the sorts of unexpected phenomena that, unfortunately, we are going to have to deal with in a changing climate. And so, what that means is that sometimes our past experience may not be a good indicator of what is yet to come.

So, for example, we know that flood risks and wildfire risks occur in many parts of Canada, but could anybody have really predicted the wildfire season that we experienced this past summer? It was simply orders of magnitude greater, in terms of scale, than anything we've seen before. Could anybody have imagined that in 2021, temperatures in the interior of British Columbia would approach 50 degrees Celsius? So, there are a lot of ways in which the climate is changing and we need to be even more ready than we have been in the past to deal with those impacts. And so, not only is the climate changing, the way we plan for and how we respond to extreme weather events here in Canada also needs to adapt and change accordingly.

One of the big challenges, of course, is that Canadian communities are very heterogeneous in terms of their physical, social, economic, and cultural characteristics. Today, I'm in Cambridge, Ontario, a 30 minute drive from here is Hamilton, Ontario, two cities that have a variety of extreme weather risks that they face from time to time, but the characteristics of our communities are very different. So, that's an important consideration. I realize that I'm speaking to many people on this call who are familiar with these sorts of contexts, but at the same time, it's a good refresher for all of us.

We're going to be speaking today about First Nations communities who are often very highly exposed to climatic risks, just given the geography of where many of our First Nation communities are located here in Canada. They often have remarkable ability to cope with and adjust and adapt to environmental changes, but often, that capacity to adapt and adjust is limited by institutional arrangements with other levels of government that may not be within their control, and while there are certain commonalities that all Canadian communities face, we need to think about those local contexts and we need to think about the context of governance and governments here in Canada as well. We need to be able to better coordinate across multiple layers of government, sometimes two, three, four, or even five layers of government, and let's accept the fact that here in Canada, we have a mixed experience with cooperation across different levels of government and we need to get better at that.

So, our emphasis today in this speaker series and in today's event is on the role of the federal public service, yet at the same time, we need to think about, again, those other layers of government here in Canada and how we can do better in working across and within the federal government and with other agencies here in Canada. And so, our goal today is to stimulate participants to start thinking about how we can do anticipatory planning to better prevent and reduce harm from extreme weather events and changing climatic conditions, how we can focus on making our communities more resilient and more capable of coping with and responding to, let's face it, let's call them climate surprises because that's what we're in for.

We need to do better planning, not only for preparing for such events but what happens inevitably after they occur. We need to learn better from what we've experienced, even in the past year, thinking about evacuations of Yellowknife and other communities in the Northwest Territories. What can we do better the next time around and how can we better prepare our communities after the events to rebuild and recover? How do we assist people who are displaced in the short term, medium term, and long term to recover their livelihoods and well-being?

So, in today's panel, we're going to learn, like I said, from the experience of First Nations communities here in Canada. We're also going to learn from the experience of humanitarian agencies to whom it often falls to be that first wave of responders and rebuilding and recovery, and we're also going to look at other sectors, such as the financial sector and the insurance sector, who also play an important role in making Canada more resilient to these risks of extreme weather and climate change that can, under worse circumstances, lead to people being displaced and dislocated from their communities and their homes.

And with that, I'd like to again thank everybody, thank you very much, and I will return it back to Arjun. Thank you.

Arjun Vinodrai: Thank you, Robert, and thank you for contextualizing the conversation that we're having today and the various perspectives that we'll hear on the panel.

Now, I'd like to introduce you to Sarah Kamal.

[00:08:23 Sarah Kamal appears in a separate video chat panel.]

Sarah is a disaster displacement and community engagement specialist and the project lead for Wow-um "calling all people" Project with the Kanaka Bar Indian Band. Sarah will speak about her 2021 report Out of Harm's Way, which was produced as part of the University of British Columbia's Sustainable Scholars Program and Climate Displacement Planning Initiative.

Sarah, we are very excited to hear about your research on such an important topic. Over to you.

Sarah Kamal: Hi guys. Salut. (Speaks in Indigenous language). I'm Sarah, a Chinese-Iranian first generation immigrant to Canada. I'm here on Musqueam land at the University of British Columbia where I'm a grad student in the Science and Technology Studies Department.

Before I begin, I'd like to acknowledge that there are seven major wars ongoing globally, and those impacted are in many of our thoughts. I hope the just application of international law leads to lasting peace.

Today, however, we'll be talking about a different global concern, that of growing human migration in the context of climate change. We've already begun seeing how a changing climate is leading to weather-related disasters that are more unpredictable, costly, deadly, disruptive, frequent, and extreme. In 2021, for example, B.C. broke Canada's heat record three days in a row with a heat dome that caused 700 excess deaths. It was the deadliest weather event in Canadian history, called a once-in-a-millennium event.

That year's heat dome and droughts contributed to uncontrollable fires in the B.C. interior that burned Lytton and evacuated thousands, followed a few months later by the atmospheric river which was the costliest natural disaster in Canadian history, washing out bridges, train tracks, and roads, and cutting off any access to many communities. Then, there was an extreme winter. All of that in six months. The B.C. interior then had two difficult fire seasons, which included Lytton burning again in 2022 and West Kelowna burning in 2023. As Retired Chief Patrick Michel of Kanaka Bar Indian Band says, we are no longer planning for future events, we are living them.

I'll set out some terminology from the Out of Harm's Way report, then highlight some key issues, then present some thoughts on our capacity to cope societally. A key question I hope we can all keep in the back of our minds is this, how do we transition together from infrastructure premised on predictable sedentarism to a new normal of flexible nomadism where people can flee harm safely, then return and rebuild, or rebuild elsewhere? How, in other words, do we enable ourselves to move with waves of disaster?

Let's start with some terminology. The key terms around climate change and human migration are still not fully settled. Climate displacement, climate migration, disaster displacement, human mobility in the context of climate change, these are all terms adopted by different organizations when referring to different shades of the same thing, more or less what the International Organization for Migration calls environmental migration. Environmental migrants are, quote, persons or groups of persons who predominantly, for reasons of sudden or progressive change in the environment that adversely affects their lives or living conditions, are obliged to leave their habitual homes or choose to do so either temporarily or permanently, and who move either within their country or abroad, unquote.

First thing to note, people usually move for a complex matrix of reasons, but in these cases, the environment is the biggest factor. Second, a less accepted term is climate refugee as harm from climate change is not a valid form of persecution as legally recognized for refugee status under international law. Third, the definition mentions sudden or progressive change in the environment. That's because weather-related disasters that can trigger a move are often categorized as either sudden onset or slow onset events.

Sudden onset events include severe storms, floods, extreme weather conditions, and wildfires. People may need to evacuate, find temporary housing, and then return once the disaster abates and their home is safe or rebuilt. Sometimes, the displaced people can't return and are in limbo for months or years, sometimes moving many times before they integrate into a final situation that works for them. Slow onset events, meanwhile, occur gradually across many years, making a place uninhabitable. Examples can include desertification or sea level rise. Also, repeated sudden onset events like recurrent flooding can cause severe repetitive loss and force people to relocate. It may take decades for the full impact of slow onset events to be realized.

Finally, the terms for what climate displaced people do in the face of these disasters are not defined. People can be evacuated. They can be displaced. They can relocate, retreat, engage in buyouts, migrate, resettle. These are all strategies in the face of these forms of disaster. There's no real clarity yet on where one begins and another ends, and they often overlap. For example, evacuation, which is considered to be a temporary move, may become a relocation if the person is not able to return to their original home.

The takeaway here, though, is that people are moving in response to climate change exacerbated disaster in many different ways, and we don't even have clear terminology on it yet. Regardless, there are things we can do to ensure safety and agency for people as they move and seek shelter.

Briefly, some key issues I'd like to outline. Disaster-related movement is longer than we think. A recent study in B.C., for instance, shows that rather than the three-day, 72-hour evacuation that we might have in our minds that we prepare for, on average, the amount of time that people are evacuated is 22 days. Also, people who lose their homes often can be without home and unable to return for a decade. There's also a growing body of research that talks about both the right to move as well as the right to stay. In some cases, it's not always the best idea to move.

In terms of different cases that have been happening around Canada, certain things can be learned. For instance, there's compounding trauma that can arise due to cascading disaster. In some places, there's a cycle of constant response mode that people are engaged in, causing a lot of burnout. As it is, wildfire seasons are more intense and longer in some areas of the world. In fact, they go on all year. Post-disaster, there can be other disasters. For example, rural youth can be exposed to urban drugs in the place to which they're evacuated, leading to addiction, murder, and violence rates rising on the return home.

Finally, relocation planning can take decades, which is difficult amid varying governments and political commitments that shift as time moves on. Some things that we do understand is that solutions have to be locally informed because they're very specific to the geography and the needs of particular communities, but the capacity to respond can be uneven. So, what happens is, post-disaster, learning rises and so people have a greater ability to respond to the disaster that comes next. But likewise, their reservoirs of coping can also be depleted.

There are some pragmatic challenges I'd like to speak to. One is jurisdictional confusion. Sometimes, five levels of government have to be at the table to collaborate on a particular issue around people moving. Operating across silos is very difficult. The kinds of subject areas that have to come together and speak the same language and come to an understanding can be quite overwhelming.

So, for example, in the situation of wildfire, the involvement of health, emergency management, wildfire services, the Ministry of the Forest, Ministry of Transport, to talk about highways, all of these often have different regional authorities with which draw maps differently. And so, one neighbouring community might be under this authority and that authority for that ministry but a completely different situation will be the case for the neighboring community, and yet they all have to work together.

Making the case for decision-makers to invest or prepare for unknown events can be quite difficult, and I'd like to acknowledge that. The rule of thumb out there is that one dollar in preparation saves ten dollars in emergency response. But at the same point, it can be difficult to find the political will to understand whether or not planning for a disaster that never happens is a good thing. It can be difficult to find a balance between flexible funding and financial accountability in the fog of disaster response.

One of the key learnings, especially in situations of housing recovery, is that quick initial funding can be very important for reducing further harm. So, for example, flooded homes might need to have that quick initial influx of cash to address problems like mold before it gets much, much worse. But at the same point, if money disappears in a community, that can erode community trust over the longer term. We can reduce future exposure. We can, for instance, update building codes to reflect disaster resilient materials and practices that are state-of-the-art. We can encourage public awareness that there needs to be a whole of society approach to resilience, bearing in mind, of course, that communities who have shown resilience are tired of being asked to be resilient.

But the understanding can be that the more we keep ourselves safe, and when possible, look out for each other locally, the less the emergency management teams have to shoulder. We can develop regional plans, relationships, and safe overflow hubs to accommodate movement when it needs to happen quickly and reduce distress in those circumstances. We can coordinate data collection and ensure community-level risk mapping and tools to enable communities to make plans as well as ensure well-defined roles in emergency response.

We are no longer planning for future events, we are living them. As Retired Chief Patrick Michel also says, hope flows from action. We've seen that our capacity, societally, to cope with a pandemic had hard limits imposed by our health care system. Follow that logic to disaster response and the premise is clear. Our ability to cope with climate displacement will depend on the investments, planning, safeguards, and degree of redundancy we instill in our disaster response institutions. It will also depend on proactive communications and partnership with the public.

Enacting all this is a big task and might feel daunting. The thing is, we've done it before. Think of the global efforts on the Y2K bug or how we stretched in ways we'd never have imagined during the pandemic. We can do it again. Our attitude can be, this is just something we have to do. Being a nomad used to be a way of life for many and still is for some. We can learn from peoples willing to share teachings around migration in Canada and elsewhere.

Our mission, if I can summarize it, is to make migration boring again. We can do this because, as Retired Chief Patrick says, our children and grandchildren are worth the investment. Thank you.

Arjun Vinodrai: Thank you so much, Sarah. You've given us much to reflect upon, including your comments with regards to the pragmatic challenges, ways we can reduce future exposure, and highlighted a number of issues I know that are discussed in the context of climate adaptation, disaster risk reduction by a range of stakeholders and jurisdictions.

[00:22:15 Joanne Eyquem appears in a separate video chat panel.]

Our next speaker is Joanna Eyquem, Managing Director of Climate Resilient Infrastructure at the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation within the University of Waterloo. Joanna specializes in research on risk mitigation measures for floods, wildfires, and extreme heat. Joanna also has 20 years of professional experience in environmental consultancy in Canada and the United Kingdom, and sits on several advisory committees, including the Advisory Table on Resilient, Natural, and Built Infrastructure for Canada's National Adaptation Strategy.

Joanna, welcome and over to you.

Joanna Eyquem: Thank you so much, and I'm so pleased to be with you today to talk about these important measures which, really, I'm very passionate about. So, hopefully, that comes across in my delivery.

So, yes, as you mentioned, my work at the Intact Centre focuses on how we can reduce climate-related displacement through measures taken before a hazard occurs, so that we don't have that problem in the first place and be that flooding, coastal erosion, wildfire, or extreme heat. So, we're really trying to accelerate the preparedness that Sarah mentioned by providing practical tools for residents, communities, governments, the financial sector, and I'm not going to cover everything here but I'd like to really focus on two key points in my opening remarks here, kind of ahead of the discussion, hopefully get people thinking about this and what we need to focus on.

So, my first point is that there's currently low public awareness of climate risks, really, until people are personally affected. So, for example, 94% of Canadians are living in high-risk flood areas, that they remain unaware of their flood risk. And so, public outreach and awareness is actually key to underpinning the whole of society approach that is called for in the national adaptation strategy. So, focusing on informing people of the risks, but at the same time, what they can do to prepare both physically and mentally to me is really fundamental to kind of preparing to cope with these climate risks and would also help build public support for the investments that are required to adapt our infrastructure.

So, the good news is that we already have tools for that. The Intact Center, for example, has worked hard at preparing a suite of climate-ready infographics that many organizations are already using, like the Red Cross, the First Nations Health Authority, and municipalities, to basically inform people of actions around their own home that they can take to prepare themselves for what's coming, and I think we're not really communicating those actions at the moment urgently to people. COVID-19 actually demonstrated that we can be really effective in public communications across the country but climate impacts are not yet perceived as urgent enough, really, for such a public awareness campaign, and I think that's something that we could work on.

And the other thing I think is that taking action, as Sarah alluded to, can actually help people reduce the anxiety that many people are feeling around climate impacts, and hope flows from action. I really like that quote. So, this is a way that people can actually act themselves and maybe it will help relieve some of that anxiety.

So, my second point is also that working with nature is also key to our resilience. Our built environment is set within nature and not somehow separate from it. So, natural hazards are effectively natural processes that are changing, and climate change is not the only cause. So, degradation of our ecosystems has actually reduced natural resilience. It leaves people more vulnerable to flooding, erosion, and fires. For example, a demonstration across North America actually found that flooding and drought is worse in human managed watersheds. So, where we have intervened, these risks are actually worse.

So, the paradigm that we are seeing in climate adaptation has really changed globally from thinking that we can control natural hazards to a more flexible approach, such as using land-based zoning or nature-based solutions that look at restoring and valuing the services that nature provides for climate resilience and beyond. We're probably mostly familiar with carbon as being nature-based solutions values, but the value of those services goes way beyond that. So, by working with nature, we can actually reduce climate displacement by building that natural resilience to climate risk, and I think that's underscored by the global biodiversity framework, specifically target 11. if you want to go and check those targets, which references restoring nature services to people.

So, there are places where changes in natural hazards will make it more and more dangerous to live and I think conversations around moving out of harm's way before a foreseeable disaster are very sensitive, but it's necessary to have those conversations with communities so that we have different options on the table and we're able to make informed community decisions as the risks increase. They're already bad and they're going to get worse, so we need to be preparing mentally for that as well, and it's preferable to have a proactive management plan rather than having a reactive management once an event hits and people lose their livelihoods and their homes.

So, I think, that's what I wanted to bring to the conversation, so engaging with the public and nature, and I think a combination of those two things will really set us up well to preparing for climate risks of the future.

Arjun Vinodrai: Thank you so much, Joanna, and thank you for your presentation.

[00:28:24 Melanie Soler appears in a separate video chat panel.]

Now, joining us next is Melanie Soler, the Vice President of Emergency Management at the Canadian Red Cross. Melanie has extensive experience in disaster management work for large, recent domestic and international disasters. She led Red Cross operations for the 2013 Southern Alberta floods recovery, the wildfires in 2016 in Fort McMurray, and the B.C. wildfires, and has advised Israel and the Bahamas in major event recovery planning. Melanie provides leadership at the Red Cross for Canadian emergency operations and with Canadian Red Cross international operations in designing and implementing new innovative solutions for COVID-19.

Thank you for joining us, Melanie, and over to you.

Melanie Soler: Thanks, Arjun, and thanks to my colleagues before. What a context you've set, and I'll try to build upon many of the examples that you've already laid out in front of us.

So, I have been with the Canadian Red Cross, as Arjun said, focusing in emergency response domestically for more than ten years, and prior to the 2013 events, if you had asked Canadians what the Canadian Red Cross was most known for, it was for international disaster response, and what's interesting to note is in the past ten years, we have responded to more than 60 major disasters domestically. And so, you can see that now, what we had considered domestically a once-in-a-hundred-year event is becoming quite regular for us, and cyclical events, as we've heard, like spring floods and fires and hurricanes, are having a larger impact on communities.

We heard Sarah refer to them as cascading events. I think of them in my mind as stacked events, and we can see, for instance (inaudible), those who experienced evacuations and loss in the Fraser Valley are also still reeling from the impacts of the services they've lost in the area of Lytton, and then we can also see in Nova Scotia, as they are still weathering the impacts of Hurricane Fiona, they were quickly followed up with flash flooding and then urban interface wildfire.

And so, from the Canadian Red Cross perspective, our mandate here is in partnership with authorities and, of course, with our federal partners, our provincial and our territorial partners, municipal, regional, and then, of course, Indigenous leadership. You can see, as we referred to more than five layers of governments working on these events, you then introduce the sometimes complex, maybe confusing matrix of not-for-profit, NGO, and even public or private sector actors in addition to those authorities. And so, while the signs are becoming increasingly clear that we are in the midst of climate-related events, collectively, we have not yet mastered emergency response to the size, scale, and frequency of what we're seeing currently in Canada and what we can expect into the future.

So, I like to give examples across sort of two areas of focus. So, we can look certainly on recurring impacts on Indigenous community. As we monitored the evacuations this summer, there were many times during the summer that the only population impacted by evacuations and displacements were Indigenous people, and these evacuations were often recurring and, again, stacked across different types of events. And then, we can look at what I call like catastrophic loss, which is sort of in the realm of a Fiona-type event whereby you have large loss and you have catastrophic recovery for families and community infrastructures, and usually, in my mind, those kinds of events breach the safeguards of insurance or other relief supports for financial backing.

So, the role of the Canadian Red Cross, if you're unfamiliar with us, the role we play in disaster response primarily focuses on human impacts. And so, domestically, we are providing services related to human displacement, relief support, and into long-term recovery. So, how do we do that and based on our experience, for instance, in the past 60 events that we've worked in, and those are only major events, and I'm not sure how we calculate all of the COVID-related response, but for the context of today, we're going to talk about natural disasters.

And as discussed, in our view, the best way is to prepare in advance. And so, we want to encourage more emergency response planning to identify different kinds of scenarios. We want to plan coordination mechanisms in advance, above and beyond the traditional government coordination centres that exist, expanding that idea to be more inclusive and more detailed planning. From all of these events, we can provide historical data on the benefits and the risks of different kinds of response modalities, and we can inform on the risks of different choices with the outcome that community leadership and supportive actors and households are better equipped to make informed decisions when the time comes.

We also want to understand the implications for choosing certain destinations in regard to displacement. And so, oftentimes, we see in some jurisdictions, there are pre-defined host communities and they're selected at the willingness of the host community to basically put up their hand first. We also see that there's mutual aid agreements between provinces and territories, and some of those are more detailed than others. Some of them are fairly specific in advance, and some of them is just a willingness to open the door when the time comes.

And we want to encourage more community determined destinations. We want to explore more options for shelter in place and/or specifically in indigenous communities, supporting communities to move in advance into traditional lands where there's a familiarity already. During activation, we want to ensure that those coordination mechanisms are activated and that there are resources and workforce available, and those resources are well-known to the community who are in the midst of evacuation and to the authorities that can basically turn on and pull levers when the time comes.

Another thing we want to watch for carefully in evacuation and activation is making sure we're implementing equity on the ground, and there was a recent report today where this was, or today... last week, where this was echoed by the Ombudsperson, excuse me, for being twisted up in that in British Columbia, and the way it was described there was embedding equity on the ground, and what this means to us is integrating a cultural safety program, and outside of Indigenous communities, ensuring that there's consideration in the design for diversity and inclusion. As Robert had mentioned, we're a diverse country made up of all kinds of different communities. And so, we want to respect that in the design and the implementation of our activation.

The Canadian Red Cross is also a big advocate for autonomy of choice in regard to ESS. And so, this is the practice of understanding the modality and the fit for the community coming in regards to the emergency basic needs of the population. So, this could be as simple as understanding the community's chosen modality for emergency lodging, for food, whether or not cash is an appropriate modality or not, and then again, making sure that those modalities are accessible and inclusive in that for instance, we know in many cases, if you look at the Northwest Territories, we were active in Edmonton, sheltering more than 2,000 families in hotel and the extensions were ongoing and often the extensions were last minute, and we had to be able to provide a modality whereby people could come in person or they could phone. Many people didn't have the capacity to be able to tolerate any kind of wait time or lineups. And so, what you want to do is be able to provide sort of the most flexible service options.

And as also mentioned by Sarah, the 72-hour, be ready for 72 hours, certainly breached. So, we heard about the example in B.C. and then we can also look at the example in Peguis First Nation where that is a community who's been impacted by cyclical and increasing in severity since 2009, 2011, 2014, and 2022 was the worst, and we are still hosting families in Winnipeg who are unable to return home almost a year and a half later.

So, those longer-term displacements means we need to design into a recovery operation whereby longer-term displacement means longer-term supports, and as these families grow and evolve over a year and a half, their situation changes. So, their basic needs that they had identified in the early days of evacuation, of course, as a family grows, those have also evolved. And so, we look at best practices during initial days of displacement, especially when communities are coming into host communities to try to couple the services and the service actors that the community's familiar with into the evacuation location. So, as a best practice out in Manitoba, the University of Manitoba is transformed into a community reception centre with familiar community actors and places where people can continue to receive service from known providers or raise flags that new services are required.

In regards to the (inaudible) event and longer-term displacement, we know that even those who are fully insured can be out of pocket $60,000 or more on average. And really, the insurance industry is well built for house fires but potentially not other kinds of risks and mitigation. And so, again, it goes back to how can supports through case management begin to collect the data, advocate for those who are impacted, and begin to influence the design of future programs. Oftentimes, people who experience these stacked events often become ineligible for programs that might have been offered previously if the footprint of their property hadn't been identified as basically no longer sustainable.

So, happy to engage in conversation going forward and thrilled to work towards better solutions in the future. Thank you.

Arjun Vinodrai: Thank you so much, Melanie, and thank you for your presentation on the role of the Canadian Red Cross in responding to climate-related disaster and human displacement and evacuations, and really appreciate the perspectives from the day-to-day operations during emergencies as well, and thank you to all of our speakers for the diverse perspectives that we brought today, certainly very emblematic, as I mentioned, of various conversations that are happening on emergency management, disaster risk reduction, and climate adaptation.

We have now reached the panel discussion portion of the event. So, we will take approximately the next 20 minutes just to handle and take on a couple of questions amongst the panel, and I did want to give the audience a reminder that after this discussion, we will have a Q&A with the audience. So, if you would like to submit a question, click the raised hand icon in the upper right hand corner of your screen, and we encourage you to participate in the language of your choice.

As such, you can participate in the language of your choice.

So, I'm going to move into the panel discussion, and before we start, I know I was asked to just speak a little bit about how disaster response works in Canada, including the role of respective governments as well too. So, I'll take a couple of minutes just to cover that, and then I will begin with a couple of questions focused on best practices, gaps, and other considerations that I will pose to specific panel members, and if other panel members during the course of the conversation do have something to add, I do invite you to join in as well to liven up the conversation as well too and add new dimensions.

So, certainly, just to speak a little bit about how disaster response works in Canada, I would begin by noting that in Canada, emergency management, a large part of the response operation lies with the provincial and territorial government's jurisdictions, and since most emergencies are... initially in the first instance, they are often local in nature, it is local authorities, and I think certainly this came through in some of the comments as well too, who are very directly involved as the first responders to emergencies.

The federal government exercises leadership at the national level in emergency management in close collaboration with the provinces and territories and other stakeholders as well too, and also does have responsibilities for jurisdictions and lands and properties that fall under federal responsibility as well too. A key aspect of the work that the federal government pursues in emergency management is around coordination amongst all partners involved and also, when requested by provinces and territories, when resources have become stretched in a particular jurisdiction, recognizing emergency response can become quite resource intensive, providing assistance when requested by the province as well too, and in instances where recovery costs exceed certain thresholds, assisting provincial territorial governments with regards to the recovery costs through the disaster financial assistance arrangements.

In addition to the provinces and territories and federal responsibilities, and certainly as represented in our panel today, when it comes to emergency management, there are a multitude of other emergency management partners such as Indigenous peoples and governments, municipalities, communities, volunteers, and non-governmental organizations, the private sector, critical infrastructure owners and operators, academia, and volunteers, and that's why often when we hear discussions around emergency management policy, you'll typically hear terms such as whole of society, recognizing as a collective system-wide effort involving multiple stakeholders as well too. And certainly, this is why discussions such as these, particularly when we look at issues related to disaster risk reduction, are important when we're bringing together the various perspectives to understand how we can improve disaster response and our collective resiliency to emergencies.

Finally, I did want to note that one of the key elements for advancing discussions on emergency management and resiliency is the Emergency Management Strategy for Canada, which establishes FPT priorities to strengthen the resilience of Canada by 2030. This strategy also seeks to guide FPT governments and their respective emergency management partners in carrying out priorities aimed at strengthening Canada's ability to assess risks and to prevent, mitigate, prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters. This all supports strong leadership from FPT governments and EMs in their respective roles and responsibilities, and the collective works to improve emergency response in Canada.

To date, the strategy's deliverables have focused on supporting initiatives related to flood mapping, providing better flood risk information to Canadians, and examining options how to improve insurance coverage and reduce risk for those in the areas at greatest risk of flooding. The strategy's deliverable also includes support for better public awareness, which is certainly a theme that we have heard on this panel today, and initiatives such as the National Risk Profile report that was issued earlier this year, which does build risk awareness as part of the Canada... as part of the country's first national risk assessment on disaster risk and capabilities across our emergency management system.

And I think in the spirit of talking about the system-wide perspective, I'm going to now move into the panel itself, and I'm going to begin having talked a little bit about the process and roles, and certainly do welcome the perspectives of panelists as well too. I am going to begin by talking about some perspectives on gaps, and I think, Melanie, I'm going to begin to talk... to pass it over to you, and I'm going to ask you how you see that disaster response is being affected by the scale of climate disasters and the need for response due to climate-related displacement that Canada is now facing.

Melanie Soler: Okay. So, I might mention it more as a challenge than a gap, but they could be synonymous. And so, I think what we saw this summer was a good example in that in and across B.C., you had these... and Alberta, you had these rolling evacuation orders, and that's quite distinct from when you have an isolated event, say, for instance, in Fort Mac or even Fiona, where there is a timestamp and you can identify a boundary and identify sort of a caseload.

But what happens is when you have these rolling events, it becomes very difficult for government to target assistance as they have in the past to certain groups. And so, in the past, people received assistance if they were out for ten days or more or if they were under evacuation order for more than five days or cumulatively more than x days. And then, there was also the unknown ability of the population impact which... in a financial means, meaning there's no multiplier. So, you may make a commitment to provide assistance to those who are going through these rolling disasters, but the multiplier can go horses out of the barn as we saw in Fiona. The multiplier for those impacted by Fiona grew exponentially and we were unable to get the data to know... from power companies or others, to be able to know who exactly is the target population.

And so, that's one of the biggest gaps. It's quite straightforward when it comes to evacuation of Indigenous community. There, we get more into the realm of jurisdiction and not knowing when the community will be able to go back. But in these large disasters we saw in Alberta and B.C. that went literally from May through August, it's very difficult to sort of define the caseload.

Arjun Vinodrai: Thank you very much for that, Melanie, and I do agree with you as well too. It's useful to think about the challenges and the opportunities for action moving forward as well too.

And the next question, I am going to pose it to Joanna and then to Sarah. It really does actually touch upon perspectives on challenges for public institutions, and I know that recently, there have been a number of reports, and I have heard several of the panelists refer to various reports, and personally, I am thinking about Public Safety Canada's recent expert advisory panel report on the Disaster Financial Assistance Arrangement, which identified key areas that could be further strengthened, and these include issues such as improvement of coordination and alignment across program partners, developing risk assessment capabilities and decision tools for use by different sectors, Indigenous communities, and the public at large.

And I guess the question, I will start with Joanna first, is from your perspective, what are some of the key challenges for public institutions when it comes to planning and implementing strategies to address climate-related displacement?

Joanna Eyquem: Yeah, I think definitely the coordination really resonates with me. So, I am preparing for a kind of presenting at the House of Commons. At one point, I did look at how many departments were involved in climate adaptation. When you look at mandate letters for different functions of government, there's actually actions for 15 different departments. So, while everybody has action, there's not actually a core centralized role that is kind of monitoring our progress on adaptation and preparedness, and I think that kind of having several departments involved but not like a coordinating core has hindered our progress, and I think the jurisdictional boundaries that you also mentioned kind of... our provinces have very, very different approaches to things like watershed management, which in terms of managing river flood risk is very important. So, that variation and lack of consistency and approaches is something that we are trying to work on by providing national standards and guidance that people use, but they're essentially voluntary and what we see is a patchwork of approaches across the country.

Arjun Vinodrai: Thank you very much for that Joanna, and maybe, Sarah, I'll pass it over to you.

Sarah Kamal: I guess from a coordination standpoint, like Joanna, that resonates a lot with me. The thing that strikes me is that, often, the gaps are difficult to see except for when people start noticing, wait a second, we're taking care of Indigenous people who are on reserve but those who are off reserve kind of fall off of the map, and there are other vulnerabilities, like renters, for example, because a lot of policies deal with home ownership. Those who rent often aren't getting assistance for years. In fact, after an event happens, sometimes it's important to note that insurance, for example, can be prohibitively expensive in rural areas. And so, the kind of coverage that we might assume, if we're coming from a different perspective, might not actually be there.

And so, then, when we think about how to act and coordinate together, part of the issue might be that we don't really have good models yet for how to deal with long-term displacement. The short-term evacuations are dealt with quite well, but since we don't know what to do when people lose their homes... and often, people are given estimates of, in two years, you kind of come back to your home and then it turns out to be four years because there's contamination that has to be taken out, and those estimates keep getting pushed. And so, for those who are in those traumatic spaces, the uncertainty can just add to the difficulties that they're experiencing.

I guess some of the things that I think about, having walked with some communities over the last couple of years in their recovery process, is that the exhaustion of doing the work versus trying to coordinate with others can be overwhelming. It's often a case of, as Melanie pointed out, not knowing who it is that you're supposed to call, who's the contact person who can solve this problem for you. There can often be that awful cycle of talk to this person, no, they say talk to that person, and they keep going back and forth. So, I think that's a really key issue that needs to be solved in terms of the coordination piece.

Another thing that has been coming up and is very much part of the conversation in British Columbia is building up regional tables so that the relationships can be built among neighbouring communities. What many communities are saying is that it's really hard to go it alone. And so, having that enabling infrastructure support for those conversations to be happening so that the coordination can at least be there, the names and the resources and the collective ability to respond can be built up prior to an event happening, can make all the difference.

Arjun Vinodrai: Thank you very much for that, Sarah, and I certainly would echo just thinking about my work in emergency management and response to coordination, and making sure people are connected and hopefully before the event happens is a very key part of it and certainly a large focus. I think activities across all jurisdictions and amongst various partners as well too.

And I did want to... just before moving to talk a little bit about best practices, did want to just seek the perspectives also on this last question and just what we've heard so far of both Melanie and Robert, just if there's anything you wanted to add just on this discussion point before we do move on. Maybe I'll start with Melanie.

Melanie Soler: Yes, definitely. I think there is a strong word for advocacy and people understanding the knowledge that each stakeholder has and, as has been described collectively, bringing that around the table. I think one of the challenges we're seeing, especially in times of fiscal restraint, is services being awarded through competitive process, as they should be with government dollars, but to the lowest bidder, and the successful person or organization responsible for the recovery operation or whatever it might be, may not have the institutional knowledge or the experience in understanding how to architect and design that collectively. And so, again, it's about making the collective knowledge available to whoever the lead agency is, sort of in a spirit of collaboration and then selecting complementary supports above and beyond what the lowest cost bidder might have been for the service.

Arjun Vinodrai: Thanks for that, Melanie, and maybe I'll pass it over to Robert, if there was anything you wanted to add on this one.

Robert McLeman: Well, hey, I feel like my expertise is so small compared to that of the other panelists but I do hear a recurrent theme, which is the better prepared and coordinated we can be, recognizing that this is going to happen over and over again... and I think there has historically been a desire to hope that emergencies don't happen as often as they do, both in terms of the people who are responsible for community planning and preparations but also amongst the general public. I think all of us just kind of hope that it won't happen to us again. I think about the community of Peterborough, Ontario, where they had about... well, we're going back almost 20 years ago. They had one of those one in a hundred year floods. And so, there was this sort of after the fact, saying, okay, now we've got another 99 years to wait, and the next one came two years later.

So, I think that part of the challenge, for especially folks on this call who work in the federal public service, is to continue to... within government, with their interlocutors in other levels of government and in the communities in which they work, is to keep reminding... even at the risk of sounding shrill, to keep reminding folks that we do need to continue to prepare in advance, because the risks are not going away. They're only going to get greater. And so, money well spent is money spent in advance of a disaster, I guess, is what I'm trying to get to.

Arjun Vinodrai: Absolutely, and thank you to all the panelists for these comments, and I'm certainly hearing a lot about preparedness, exercising, being prepared so that when things happen, we know what to do, who to call. I think that's also one of the points I heard too, and that coordination piece, and I certainly know in many conversations I've had, including sometimes when we do do exercises, we often do begin by talking about the governance, who does what, and that's obviously talking about understanding roles within the federal government, with the federal, provincial, territorial governments, and then broader from the whole of society as well too. So, I know that's something which is a significant piece and I think, as is being highlighted, a very fundamental piece in terms of advancing preparedness as well too.

I wanted to move to the next question, and before I'm jumping into best practices, I did just want to continue to invite the audience to use that raised hand icon to submit questions you do have as well too for our question and answer period as well too. But as we are receiving those questions, I did want to just ask a bit about best practices, and I think I'd begin by saying that many communities in Canada and abroad are developing strategies to minimize the impacts of future disasters, and I recognize that we have diverse perspectives on this panel. I wanted to ask the panel, what are some examples of best practices that you've seen that allow communities to recover physically from disaster events and enhance overall community resiliency after a disaster? And I think I will begin with Sarah and Melanie, and I'm going to particularly ask maybe that you could focus on best practices by municipalities and Indigenous communities, and of course, anything in addition that you would like to add as well too. So, maybe, Sarah, we'll start with you.

Sarah Kamal: One of the difficulties following a disaster is ensuring that mental health supports and psychosocial supports are there, and often, it's one of those pieces that kind of falls off the side. So, I'd like to highlight the Dancing Deer Disaster Recovery Centre, which was set up by former Chief Darlene Yellow Old Woman-Munro in Siksika First Nation. So, for two years, she obtained funding to develop kind of a psychosocial support team which had a nurse, a counsellor, a number of different people across ranges of kinds of support and social work and so forth, and they went and they knocked on doors of everybody in the community. They had their list, they could speak in languages that people needed, and they ensured that people were okay as best they could, and advocated for them. So, specifically, as Melanie was mentioning, if a community is away from home, in their case, it's been, I think, nine years in some cases, and shifting through five different temporary shelters in some cases as well, they saw that the children had nothing to do and so they advocated for a playground, for instance. So, these are the kinds of things that can be very central in understanding the needs of a community when they're in those moments of extreme stress.

Another thing I'd like to highlight is the importance of a collective plan and a long-term vision. So, Tribal Chief Tyrone McNeil speaks of, I think it's called the EPS, the environmental something... sorry, I don't remember what it stands for, but bringing together 31 coastal communities and working together to have an idea of what is necessary for sustainability, preparedness, and so forth in emergency management has given them a way to advocate for and to say this is what we need to have done in order for our communities to be ready and as disaster-prepared. So, I think the rebuilding of nation-level decision-making for First Nations, for example, can be one of those best practices.

Another thing that I think about at the municipal level might be how some communities are converting themselves into climate destinations, so whether it's Buffalo, New York, Duluth, Minnesota, sometimes the Greater Toronto Area because of the shelter of the Canadian Shield and the freshwater being available, can be seen as destinations that people can go to, and I guess thinking in terms of what planners can do in an individual municipality, it's possible to build models of future movement and then prepare for the fact that there might be, say, 50,000 additional people coming into the community over the next 20 years and thinking about the social fabric and how you can prepare both infrastructurally but also on the human level to ensure that there's the cultural readiness there based on the assumption of how... the ideas and models of how people are going to move in the future.

Arjun Vinodrai: Thanks for that, Sarah, and maybe Melanie, over to you.

Melaine Soler: Yeah, a lot's been said already and I agree with all of that. The one thing that has not been said yet is the point about livelihoods. And so, briefly, I'll just mention that when we talk about communities, we also need to understand that people live and work in their communities. And so, often, we talk about how we might support small businesses or livelihood programs. One of my favorite programs we worked on after the Fort Mac fire was to support people to be able to rebuild infrastructure on their trap lines. And so, again, like not exactly qualified for our small business program, but a livelihood program that we were able to craft in partnership with the Government of Alberta and other actors to be sure that the way people support their families are also able to recover and then become more resilient as well. And so, what we see is, again, it's another aspect of that collective approach. When people go back, they have to have assurances that... I always say safe, warm, dry, they have a place to be safe, warm, dry, that they have health and educational supports for their family, and that they have a way to sustain themselves through livelihoods.

Arjun Vinodrai: Thank you very much for that, Melanie, and Joanna, I'm going to pass it over to you, and I'm just thinking about some of the work that you've recently done, particularly with regards to coastal communities, and I know we're talking a little bit about best practices in the work that you've reviewed and I know that you authored a study in 2021 on the threats to coastlines in Canada due to climate-induced... climate change-induced flooding, and it examines several effects of the coastal flooding mitigation measures used abroad. I was wondering if you could tell us a bit about some of these international responses and some best practices you might highlight as well.

I think you are on mute.

Joanna Eyquem: I knew I'd be the one. Sorry about that. Yeah, so, the Rising Seas and Shifting Sands report was really to highlight the fact that we can combine grey and natural infrastructure solutions for coastal risk management, and this kind of highlights kind of what we've seen in Europe, the Netherlands, and other places, that actually this idea of restoring natural resilience can be part of our toolbox when we're looking at how we handle flooding and erosion on the coast.

And I think the other element of that was the need for kind of a systems-based approach, so one that works with natural processes, because erosion on the coast is actually a natural process and if you stop erosion at one place, you can actually make things worse down drift because the sediment is eroded in one place and then deposited somewhere else. So, you might actually be depriving someone of their beach material. So, this is kind of a common theme around our current work, looking at more strategic shoreline management planning and there's a call out for regional coastal communities approaches as well from NRCan at the moment, really to look at this, kind of how municipalities should be more working together at the natural system scale in order to kind of look at this long-term vision for our coasts, because at the moment, kind of short or small band-aid solutions, just that kind of (inaudible) level or municipal level are not really appropriate to coastal problems.

Arjun Vinodrai: Thank you very much for that, Joanna. And certainly, the point of taking a systems-wide approach to building resiliency is something that comes up in a number of discussions with various partners as well too. And before moving to considerations, I can just see that my colleagues from the Canada School have just highlighted to me there was a question that did come in from the audience as well too, which I think really does build off some of the themes that we are talking about at this point, which if I was to look at our conversation so far around the challenges, best practices, I know we've been talking a lot about resiliency, and I think that's a theme that's sort of cross-cutting through the various presentations, the ability to bounce back from events, the strength of the community. And certainly, I know at Public Safety, we certainly speak about resiliency in many contexts, including in the emergency management one.

I guess, coming from the audience, we do have a question which is, could the panelists speak a bit more about community resiliency? What can be done to strengthen resilience at the community level and what are some of the gaps and challenges? And maybe, I'll start by passing it back to Joanna first, just to see if you wanted to share your perspectives on this too, because I really do feel it sort of builds off the conversation we've been having so far.

Joanna Eyquem: Yeah. So, I'm a geographer. I'm a geomorphologist by trade. So, I often think in different spatial scales. So, I see this kind of onion or layered approach to resiliency with individuals, buildings, communities, and watersheds or like coastal units, and we need to work at all of those scales really. So, we need to engage the public at the (inaudible) and building managers, but the community level and community planning is very key. I think what we also see in a lot of community scales, that actually, some of the risks go together because sometimes we get kind of tied into looking at one risk at a time but we really need to be looking at all the different risks in tandem. With flooding and extreme heat, say, a lot of the solutions can actually be complementary, particularly when we're working with natural infrastructure. So, if we're extending vegetation cover, we can actually be soaking up more water and being more spongy in our cities, but at the same time, reducing the urban heat island effect or providing people places to shelter where it's cooler with tree canopy when it's very hot.

So, some of the actions go together. Other actions, for example, with wildfire, with looking at trying to remove combustible materials away from houses so that we reduce the risk of catching on fire... which kind of goes less well with some of the other approaches for heat, for example. You might be removing natural (inaudible), so those areas might actually be more kind of... more hot compared to the surrounding areas. So, I think the idea of looking at multiple hazards and looking at these kind of trade-offs between the different risks... because we've tended to focus on fire and flood because it causes (inaudible) damage but extreme heat causes the most fatalities and impacts on our health directly. So, I think that has moved up the agenda since the heat dome, but trying to keep those kind of like crossovers in mind when we're (inaudible) community resilience is really important.

Arjun Vinodrai: Thank you for that, Joanna. I think it's really interesting that you highlighted, I think, one of the first measures really is about understand the risks, that public awareness piece which then informs the mitigation measures, and certainly took on board the point too you make about thinking across hazards, I know sometimes referred to as the all hazards approach, thinking beyond including about not just the floods and fires but all the other events that we do seem to be seeing more and more in the news across the country as well too. But with that, I'm going to now invite Sarah to take the question as well too, in terms of your perspectives about community resiliency, what can be done to strengthen at the community levels, and gaps and challenges you see from your perspective as well.

Sarah Kamal: One of the key parts is having updated data lists that really set out who's where, who's doing what, what their specific needs might be, whether it's because of health or anything else, mobility for example. I agree with Melanie that having fuel management or cultural practices that from a First Nations perspective have been there for a long period of time in terms of stewarding the environment and ensuring that the community is safe, need to be practiced and allowed in some situations. Actually, people cannot do these activities on Crown land, for example, which borders their property, and that's an important consideration. I think having shelter-in-place infrastructure is really important. So, there are spaces that are being built up in Kanaka Bar Indian Band, for example, that have solar power generation and alternate... they're working on building alternate electricity.

One of the main concerns when everything did happen in the Lytton region was that communication, power, everything just burned because it was such a raging inferno. And so, not having any of that obviously hampered any ability to respond. Having memoranda of understanding with different businesses, whether it's transport agreements with buses so that, if necessary, those forms of transportation would be available in a moment of disaster or having hotels that ensure that there's accommodation. So, for instance, a lot of people were moved out several times from different hotels as the displacement was prolonged because there might have been a big conference or whatever, and that just added to that sense of dislocation. All of these, I think, can be part of the resiliency building over time.

Arjun Vinodrai: Thanks for that, Sarah. And Melanie?

Melanie Soler: Yeah, those are all great points, and I'm not our organization's expert in community resilience but I've watched her doing that for a long time, my colleague Sarah Sargent. And so, again, the easiest audience to captivate in regard to resilience are those who have already experienced disaster. So, some of our best practices is we reserve a portion of our appeal or our donor funds to run sort of climate change adaptation or risk reduction projects, and those projects are identified with the community at the time to see what, in their context, could be useful in strengthening resilience. And as you know, as you already said, Arjun, like know your risks and know what are the tangible, practical steps we can take, at the household level certainly but also at the community level, and then community strengthening events.

And so, one of the things we launch immediately during times of response are granting programs and/or community-based event programs to try to bring the community back together again with psychosocial supports as Sarah noted, which should never be secondary. And so, that's how we do it with captive audiences. But again, we are seeing more coastal community grants which are very high tech, well-informed programs coming from government. And so, we advocate more for that kind of funding for communities to be able to couple with partners who are well-equipped to know about these climate change adaptation programs and how to bring that knowledge into community in a way that's accessible.

Arjun Vinodrai: Thanks for that, Melanie, and thanks to all the panelists for the responses and perspectives to that really useful question.

And I think that's a bit of a segue way to another question which we did have, and it does touch on an aspect of resiliency which we talked about, knowing the risk, the mitigation measures one can take, thinking across hazards, but it's also about understanding how impacts are different among different communities as well too, including, in certain cases, disproportionate impacts for some communities as well, which can include a number of groups, including Indigenous communities.

And I think what I'd like the panel to take a second is to reflect on what are some examples of justice and equity being integrated into planned relocation, particularly when it comes to vulnerable populations, and what are some of the vulnerabilities that have been highlighted in recent emergency responses, including vulnerabilities in urban, rural, and northern settings? And I think, Joanna, I will invite you to take the first crack.

Joanna Eyquem: Great. So, I think when I talk about vulnerabilities, I think... I did a lot of work on extreme heat and developing national guidance on kind of practical actions to reduce extreme heat risk, and vulnerability is such a key element in kind of pre-determinants of health and social kind of conditions. For example, people who are socially isolated or live on their own or who are elderly or have preceding medical conditions are more vulnerable to extreme heat risk, simply because if we don't know there's a problem because of wildfire and (inaudible) it's quite obvious where the problem is with heat, we don't necessarily know in advance, if we haven't prepared, where those problems are. So, I think for heat, it's particularly blatant, kind of the social inequity kind of really targets those kind of like underserved communities.

And I think some of the good news though, is that I live here in Montreal and they're actually using some of the senses of environment data on urban greenness to really target providing natural infrastructure in underserved communities where they don't have access to green space at the moment, but using the really high quality data that's coming from the federal government. So, I think that it's such a great example of how the governments can work together to kind of even things up in terms of equity of access to green space, which is really important for kind of managing heat in our towns as well as for managing flooding.

Arjun Vinodrai: Thanks for that, Joanna. Maybe Melanie, I'll invite you next.

Melanie Soler: Thanks. When I think about equity in my universe, I think about equity and access to service, and that doesn't mean equal service to all people. It means that people have equitable access to services that sort of respect their dignity and their basic needs. And so, an example of that is, for instance, this summer, we had evacuees coming out and Alberta Emergency Management was very generous in bringing them down into Alberta, and what we found is each municipality sort of was offering their own recipe of service, doing the best they could with the resources that they had. And again, from my vantage point, you sometimes saw people going from municipality to municipality, shopping around for service. And again, better communication and collaboration can help articulate how there is equitable service happening. So, number one is letting people know where they can receive services and to what extent.

And then equity, also for us, where we see that often is in Indigenous community, where I think it was mentioned earlier, probably by Sarah, is you could have a federal department caring for and providing services to members of a nation, and you may have a Métis settlement outside who may not have access to the services. And going even further, what we see sometimes is you have families where you have one nation member who's eligible for service but their partner for one reason or another is not, and we don't only see this in Canada, we saw this a lot in the Ukraine too, where we had Ukrainian families coming over where you had a Ukrainian married to a Russian. So, again, response is complicated and it's difficult to apply black and white service standards.

Arjun Vinodrai: Thanks for that. Melanie. And Sarah?

Sarah Kamal: I guess in terms of vulnerabilities, I would say that for remote and rural communities, they have particular vulnerabilities like access roads being cut off through debris slides, and washouts that continue after the disaster and aren't paid as much attention to. If a fire, for instance, creates the conditions for that to happen, and that's certainly been the case for two years, a lot of people are triggered just driving around. As I mentioned before, communications and power infrastructure, if it goes down, it's down, and that can lead to all kinds of things, additional disasters like food rotting and maggots and stuff like that, refrigerators then needing to be taken out of the community. Often in such communities, the ability of EMS to respond as it is is not extraordinary. So, for the community that I've been working with, there has been the one ambulance that can only respond to critical emergencies and takes 45 minutes to reach some communities, and if you have a non-extreme event, it might take a couple of hours. So, for those of us who are used to a four minute response time, that's not the case for everybody. And so, then, as Melanie mentioned, when there's loss of services because one community is not available and there anymore, that can be quite a strain on the entire region.

And then, in terms of specific vulnerabilities for First Nations, there are past histories in governance which have caused forced relocation or sometimes forced communities to settle in places rather than be able to seasonally migrate. There have been ways in which risk has been increased because of the locations where a community has been made to settle, leading to many communities to talk about unnatural disaster in their case or man-made disasters when things do happen, and the fact is that having contributed the least to global warming and having had the least and even defended against the kinds of climate change that we're seeing, these communities are the most impacted, not only in terms of numbers but also in terms of the highest loss that they then also experience because the kinds of disasters that are impacting First Nations, for example, impact their way of life, have implications on their relationships, their kinship with the trees, the bears. I mean, I hear stories of... the bears that are named are no longer around in the community and people are concerned, and just a cultural way of life as well. So, I think when we talk about vulnerabilities, having a sense that these forms of loss are far greater as well for those who are disproportionately impacted is important.

Arjun Vinodrai: Thanks for that, Sarah.

And I'm seeing a couple more questions coming in as well too from the panel... from the audience, and thank you for this, and I'm going to be a little creative and sort of put two of them together, I think, which I think this should work. So, our first question is that Melanie noted that often, people who experience disasters might become ineligible for particular programs. So, the question is what can government programs do to be more flexible and supportive? And Melanie, I'm going to pass to you first and then invite Sarah and Joanna to add should they wish.

But there is also one additional question which I'll invite you to cover in your response as well too which is, would Melanie, the representative of the Canadian Red Cross, speak to strategies that she has seen succeed in her work abroad that could be used or have been successful in Canada as well too. So, I guess perspectives on how governments' programs can be more flexible and supportive, and any international best practices you'd like to highlight. So, Melanie, over to you.

Melanie Soler: Thank you. Boy, the second one is a bit of a doozy, recognizing all of our 190 partners abroad. There's a lot of variance there. But the first one, what can government partners do? So, the intent of folks becoming ineligible, like really, is in the spirit of safety. It's my belief that (inaudible) overly simplistic example is after the Southern Alberta floods, if you didn't install like a backflow valve in your basement of your house, next time, you were ineligible for the DRP program, and that's like a very small investment. But again, unless people knew that that was the case and unless people understood, you have many elderly people who maybe didn't have the capacity to hire a plumber who was... so, the spirit of the restrictions, I think, are from a perspective of public safety, whether that's like you're uninsurable because that slope's for sure going to slide, so unless you can build a $170,000 retaining wall, you should move and we're not going to give you insurance. And so, again, it's like balancing that with incentivizing people and providing financial means for people to do the mitigation or for people to be able to relocate in doing that. And again, it's striking a delicate balance, all with the spirit of enabling people to make sure that their family dwellings are safe. And so, again, how we do that is, I think, another whole of society approach, balancing the economics, again, with mental health, and the economic aspects of like just putting a policy in place.

Arjun Vinodrai: Thanks for that, Melanie, and I can see... I just wanted to see Sarah and Joanna, following that question, if there was anything you want to add, and I think I can see Joanna?

Joanna Eyquem: Yeah. So, yeah, one thing that I've been commenting on is actually kind of trying to crowd in private sector funding as well for adaptation, because while we say that we have climate finance, 90% of climate finance goes to climate mitigation to reduce greenhouse gases, and only 10% to adaptation. So, I know we've been exploring with the Canadian Infrastructure Bank, for example, how we can maybe expand the green infrastructure program to really kind of include resilience and also nature in some of those investments, or maybe those are public-private partnerships and how we can be a bit more creative about recognizing avoided costs in the future as kind of a revenue stream, because that's things that we won't have to spend in the future if we can make upfront changes. So, that was one element.

And I think the other the other thing was kind of, it's not just the federal government, I wanted to also say. There's the provincial governments and match funding programs as well. So, I think often, it's quite easy to advise or try and kind of advocate with the federal government for funding but ultimately, the federal government often doesn't have the jurisdiction to actually put these things in place, and that requires these partnerships and relationships. And obviously, how we set up some of the funding programs does incentivize the action that we want, but sometimes we perhaps need to be a bit more strategic as well and not just kind of rely on the municipalities who need the money to apply because some of them actually don't have the resources to make the applications as well. So, rather than allocating on like application merit, allocating money based on risk.

Arjun Vinodrai: Excellent. Thanks for that. And Sarah, is there anything you wanted to add on this question?

Sarah Kamal: Just briefly, on the supportiveness aspect, I think the key is enabling agency for those who are disaster impacted and maintaining flexibility. So, one example that occurred on the ground was people were being re-triggered by having to go in again and get more vouchers for accommodations for food and so forth. There have been some issues, I know that's (inaudible) issue, but just to speak to it, having the ability to have one community navigator say, I am taking care of this many families and do kind of a mass re-registration and receiving those benefits was really, really important for the community. It's also important to note that often, the people who are stepping up in these roles are volunteer. Sometimes they're in fact the emergency management person who has only just recently been put in the position. So, if I had a magic wand, I would love if there were... kind of as there is provincially with those health nurse lines that people can call to find out what to do in situations, it would be great if there were a 24/7 kind of a hotline that would explain to people, this is what you need to do, these are the procedures that you have to go through whether you are a professional or a public... member of the public at large. In circumstance like this, I think it's the uncertainty that really adds to the burden.

Arjun Vinodrai: Thank you very much for that, Sarah, and I did want to thank all the panelists for their perspective as well too. I'm realizing we have reached time. I wanted to just thank everyone for the conversation which has been really useful. I think it's touched upon a number of issues related to risk awareness, resiliency, community experience, role of jurisdictions, and really useful for our collective thinking around emergency response in Canada and whole of society perspectives.

So, with that said, on behalf of the school, I'd like to thank Robert, Sarah, Melanie, and Joanna, as well as all of the audience from across the country for being part of today's discussion and for all the useful questions that have been posed as well too. I did want to note that the School has more events and courses to offer. On November 6th, the School is hosting an event on climate literacy in the public service where you can learn more about the new suite of climate literacy courses for public servants that has been developed by Environment and Climate Change Canada.

And the next event in this series will take place in February and March of 2024. The next event will focus on climate change in Tuktoyaktuk, an Inuvialuit hamlet located at the tip of the Northwest Territories. And the fourth event, which will happen in March, will focus on weaving Indigenous knowledge into decisions on climate change migration as well. Keep an eye on the School's website and newsletter for more information on these events in the coming months.

Once again, I wanted to thank you all for joining us today, and again, thank all of our speakers and presenters, and wish everyone a really wonderful day. Thank you. Thank you very much.

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