Burlington
Environment, Infrastructure, and Community Services
Climate Action Plan - Resilience and Adaptation
EICS-12-22
Executive summary
- The purpose of this report is to present Climate Resilient Burlington: A Plan for Adapting to Our Warmer, Wetter and Wilder Weather for approval.
- As noted in more detail in EICS-02-22, while directly aligned with Focus Area 3, specifically “Develop Burlington’s Climate Change Adaptation Plan,” this report identifies risks and vulnerabilities associated with our warmer, wetter and wilder weather and as such will have impacts on all focus areas.
Climate implications
In February 2022, the International Panel on Climate Change’s Working Group II released “Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability” as part of the Sixth Assessment Report. They noted “climate change is affecting nature, people’s lives and infrastructure everywhere. Its dangerous and pervasive impacts are increasingly evident in every region of our world.”
In May 2022, the discussion paper “Preparing for Climate Change: Canada’s National Adaptation Strategy” was released for public comment. This document highlights the urgent need for climate adaptation action with people living in Canada already witnessing and experiencing climate impacts.
Impacts experienced in Burlington include:
- Damage to creek infrastructure due to erosion from extreme storms;
- Damage to roads and other infrastructure due to freeze-thaw patterns, extreme precipitation, intense heat, etc.;
- Impacts to transportation network and economy due to flooding and high wind events closing roads;
- Increasing demand for services such as splash pads and water fountains due to increased extreme heat events;
- Use of facilities as warming, cooling or evacuation centres;
- Flooded roads, parks, sports fields, paths and basements;
- Damaged or diseased trees due to ice storms, high wind events and drought;
- Health impacts from extreme heat and vectors such as infected black-legged ticks which carry Lyme disease; and,
- Impacts to mental health due to extreme events.
Preparing for Climate Change: Canada’s National Adaptation Strategy also stated that “climate impacts are complex and touch upon almost all aspects of society: emergency services, food production, housing and infrastructure, ecosystems, human health, supply chains and national security…posing serious risks to the well-being and livelihood of people and communities. The impacts also build upon each other and lead to additional effects such as increased demand for emergency assistance, loss of biodiversity, reduced food and economic security, and increased demands on physical and mental health services. Climate change impacts worsen existing inequalities and vulnerabilities and multiply existing hazards – meaning some people living in Canada are more at risk or more exposed.”
As noted by David Phillips, Senior Climatologist at Environment and Climate Change Canada, at the Oct. 27, 2021 public event, “no place in Canada will look the same in 40 years as it does today. We have moved from climate and its averages to weather and its extremes. Weather is changing faster than we can adapt to it and we cannot afford not to factor it in as it’s affecting our cost of living, economic indicators, etc. Our motivation to do something about it should be based not on what we’ve seen but what we’re going to see. We need to move from a culture of disaster recovery to one of risk preparedness.”