In CALS 503, Climate Risk Management I chose to study the City of Sault Ste Marie’s Climate Risk Assessment, completed in 2020. The assessment was hosted by the Climate Risk Institute as part of the Northern Climate Change Network risk assessment workshops and was meant to be an “initial stage in developing a climate change risk management or adaptation plan” for the City (Sault Ste. Marie, 2020, p.35).

 A total of two workshops took place, with the purpose of developing risk and climate scenarios to examine “intersections between climate-related risks” in the first workshop, and ranking/prioritizing these risks in the second workshop by assessing the likelihood and consequences of each risk (Sault Ste. Marie, 2020, p.34). The assessment utilized a top-down approach and “semi-quantitative” methodology (Sault Ste. Marie, 2020, p.34). What was particularly interesting, was the decision to only engage City administrators within the risk assessment process, including representatives from Environmental, Engineering, Risk Management, Community Development and Enterprise Services, Public Health, Emergency Services, The Algoma Public Health Unit, Conservation Authority and the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forest (Sault Ste.Marie, 2020, p.3). Having now completed CALS 503, I can appreciate the immense amount of time and resources required to engage stakeholders in a bottom-up approach, however centering the voices of community members is imperative.

The choice to only engage City Administrators meant that stakeholders were asked to rank potential consequences for “People”, a large category defined as “department staff, contractors, or residents accessing or benefitting from assets or programs” (Sault Ste. Marie, 2020, p.56), and missed the opportunity to capture the nuanced, lived experiences of citizens living in Sault Ste. Marie. Reading reflections from my classmates, it is interesting to see that stakeholder engagement was a similar critique across risk assessments. Amy Spark reviewed the City of Edinburgh’s Climate Risk Assessment, and noted that there was a lack of transparency in stakeholder engagement (Spark, 2022), and similarly Kerra Chomlak noted that “‘a more inclusive bottom-up’ risk assessment approach with early and frequent input from additional stakeholders” (Chomlak, 2022) would have improved the Town of Canmore’s Climate Risk Assessment. In reviewing the Hazard, Risk, and Vulnerability Analysis (HRVA) was produced for the Regional District of Nanaimo, Town of Qualicum Beach, and City of Parksville on Vancouver Island, Tony Cecchetti found that the assessment “omitted local Indigenous knowledge from the Qualicum, Snaw-naw-as, and Snuneymuxw First Nations” and even “alienates communities with incredible resiliency and adaptive capacity to climate impacts” (Cecchetti, 2022). 

As a cohort, it seems that we have collectively come to understand the importance of being critical of how stakeholders are engaged, and questioning “‘who dominates?’ ‘who benefits?’ and ‘who gets left behind?’” (Osborne, 2015, p.143).

References

Chomlak, K. (2022, March 12). CLIMATE RISK ASSESSMENT LEARNINGS. Retrieved from 

https://webspace.royalroads.ca/kchomlak/climate-risk-assessment-learnings/.

Cecchetti, T. (2022). Critique of a Hazard, Risk, and Vulnerability Analysis (HRVA). Retrieved 

from https://webspace.royalroads.ca/tcecchetti/critique-of-a-hazard-risk-and-

vulnerability-analysis-hrva/2. 

Osborne, N. (2015). Intersectionality and kyriarchy: A framework for approaching power 

and social justice in planning and climate change adaptation. Planning Theory, 14(2), 130– 151. https://doi.org/10.1177/1473095213516443 

Spark, A. (2022, February 18). What can we Learn from Edinburgh’s Climate Risk Assessment? 

Retrieved from https://webspace.royalroads.ca/aspark/. 

Sault Ste. Marie. (2020). (rep.). CLIMATE CHANGE RISK ASSESSMENT: City of Sault Ste. 

Marie, 2020.