hamilton

Hamilton’s Declaration of Climate Emergency in 2019 was a public recognition of a longstanding fact: the impacts of climate change are here in Hamilton and will increase over the 21st century. Hamilton is not alone in this; the impacts of climate change are becoming more apparent globally every year, with annual average temperature records toppling regularly and hurricanes that exceed in wind speed of our existing meteorological frameworks.

 

We’ve seen a world-record-breaking heat dome in British Columbia and catastrophic

floods, prairie droughts that affect food availability and pricing for the whole country, far northern communities with their territory eroding into the ocean, dry-day flooding events in coastal communities on both coasts, and historic wildfires that burn entire communities to the ground. Here at home, we’ve seen extreme heat events, waterfront flooding, escarpment erosion, increases in vector-borne diseases, extended power outages, air quality impacts from wildfires thousands of kilometers away, and flooding.

 

Hamilton’s commitment to climate action predates this Adaptation Plan. Staff have been

developing and delivering programs such as expanded stormwater capacity, sewer

separation, extreme temperature response programs, infrastructure improvements, and

programs to assist homeowners in recovering from basement floods. But this

Adaptation Plan represents the City’s first effort in pulling together these existing efforts

and extending them in new ways to address a carefully considered list of priority climate

impacts through a comprehensive program, based on internal and external stakeholder

consultation.

 

This Plan, created with ICLEI Canada through their Building Adaptive and Resilient

Communities (BARC) framework, is based on up-to-date projections for Hamilton’s

climate throughout this century, relying on global and national climate models reflecting

a range of GHG emissions scenarios. These projections were then used to create over

70 climate impact statements, reflecting all of the ways that climate change may affect

City operations and the community at large.

 

Through the Vulnerability and Risk Assessment (VRA) process, staff consulted with

every City Department and dozens of community organizations, including businesses,

industry, environmental organizations, social service organizations, and institutions such

as Hamilton Health Sciences, and our school boards and post-secondary academic

institutions. These conversations developed a full picture of how these climate impacts

will affect all of Hamilton’s communities, and determined a list of thirteen high-priority

climate impacts reflecting the most significant concerns of the City and the community, which this Adaptation Plan will work to mitigate. This process is described in detail in the

Vulnerability and Risk Assessment Report.

 

ICLEI then completed a best-practices review of Adaptation Plans from across the

country to assemble a list of known adaptive actions already used to address these

impacts; using contributions from staff and the community, this list of preliminary

adaptive and supporting actions totaled over 130. Duplicated actions were removed,

overlapping actions were combined, and actions already underway with dedicated

budgets and staff time were removed. These existing actions are of course important

and form a part of the City’s Adaptation response, and new actions will reflect and add

to them, but given that they are already demonstrated City priorities, it was considered a

duplicated effort to include them in the Action Prioritization Exercise. We ended up with

a list of 27 new adaptive actions that would protect the City and community from

projected climate impacts.

 

These actions were then ranked in a Prioritization exercise by internal and external

stakeholders, into three categories: urgent (under 2 years), high priority (3-5 years), and

medium priority (5-10 years). This process is described in Action Development and

Prioritization beginning on p. 28.

 

Staff then used these prioritized adaptive actions, sorted into four themes and eleven

objectives, to undertake Implementation Planning focusing on scope, supporting

actions, participants and leaders, resourcing gaps, next steps and monitoring metrics.

An Implementation Schedule table summarizing these completed worksheets is

included in Appendix A, and constitutes the scaffolding of the Adaptation Plan.

 

The four Resilient Themes of the Adaptation Plan are:

     1. Built Environment

     2. People and Health

     3. Natural Environment, Water and Agriculture

     4. Energy and Economy

 

The objectives relating to each of them and their related adaptive actions are shown

starting on p. 31.

 

Staff and ICLEI realized the importance of two enabling actions (not related to a

particular theme or objective, but underlying the success of the whole Plan) through

Implementation Planning discussions internally and externally: the creation of a

centralized Climate Change Office, and the development of a City-wide program to track key climate impact metrics. The centralized Climate Change Office would have dedicated staff and resources to coordinate and carry out adaptation and mitigation projects and programs and take the lead on most of the actions in this Plan. As well, while information for key climate metrics often exists, it is not being collected or stored in a way that makes for easy sharing or use. Creating a process to address this would support the success of the entire program.

 

While the completion of this Plan is a substantial milestone for the City and staff, the hard work of implementation and monitoring is about to begin. The Implementation Schedules in Appendix A will guide and structure that work, in some cases for decades to come, and show a path to decreasing inequality, protecting residents and businesses from climate impacts, and improving quality of life for all in a sustained and coordinated effort across the City and community.