Supporting Community Resilience: A Portrait of Community-based Responses to Marine Hazards in Canadian Coastal Municipalities

AbstractCoastal communities are facing an increasing range of marine hazards, from rapid disasters, such as floods, tsunamis and oil spills, to longer-term change, such as sea level rise and ocean acidification. They also... [ view full abstract ]

Abstract

Coastal communities are facing an increasing range of marine hazards, from rapid disasters, such as floods, tsunamis and oil spills, to longer-term change, such as sea level rise and ocean acidification. They also exhibit particular vulnerabilities due to the economic importance of resource-dependent sectors such as fisheries and tourism and in terms of coastal infrastructure. There is currently momentum in Canada to improve community resilience to hazards, especially in the context of a changing climate. In this presentation, we provide a general overview of Canadian coastal municipalities’ capacity of response to hazards by drawing from a national survey conducted with Canadian coastal communities, together with selected case studies. We begin by contextualizing municipalities’ capacity of response by outlining the development pressures they face and by situating response to hazards in relation to municipalities’ overall priorities. We then describe the diversity of responses currently planned and implemented and compare Canadian coastal municipalities’ portfolio of responses with community-based hazard response types derived from a global analysis of published case studies. We also discuss the factors that enable and constrain implementation of responses to hazards in Canadian coastal municipalities. We conclude by suggesting avenues of action that could be further developed in the Canadian context to improve coastal municipalities’ resilience by complementing existing response portfolios.