1. Check out your municipal website. Explore beyond the initial pages. Dig into the planning information. Is there a climate report somewhere you can download? Information on extreme weather and emergencies for citizens? Gather all that you can including news reports. Check out the local CBC reporting or CityNews. If you know of a climate emergency in the past couple of years that affected your municipality, do some research on it.
Record what you find. Summarize it in 2 paragraphs
2. Call a planner. Yes, find someone, anyone who can answer your questions. Make contact. Collect stories. Ask questions. Locals are a font of information. Don’t ignore the possibility of learning lots. Find who in the municipality does the planning and reach out. If there are no planners you can find aim high. . . right up to the mayor’s office or the CAO or anyone else in the administration. Be polite. Identify yourself as a student. Ask when you could meet with them for a call or a video call. Make sure you are prepared with your questions. Listen. Thank them.
Who is your contact in the city? What position do they hold? If you have already made contact, what did you learn?
3. One of the problems with planning is the inability to measure progress. How will we know when we get there? Goals should involve action and measures of the results. FCM (Federation of Canadian Municipalities) provides a number of tools to municipalities to measure their progress on climate adaptation goals.
FCM climate and sustainability
Review these videos
Climate resilience and asset management
Note the emphasis on knowing the numbers in order to manage well. Of planning for climate impacts now. When renewing infrastructure climate impacts for the future must be built into the planning. Think about service delivery of all the many services a city does for residents. How will climate change impact that?
You can go further into asset management with these resources
Think through the services and assets in your municipality. What will be impacted by the extreme weather and climate impacts specifically. Don’t try to come up with numbers here. You don’t have them unless you examine the budget or speak with someone. Instead, the point is to think through the totality of impact and the requirement for wholistic thinking. What does the muncipality do? What services are provided? What infrastructure exists? How will it be impacted? You might want to color code your table from small impact to large and urgent impacts.
Make a list or a table with services and assets and the ways they will be affected by climate extremes.
While you will submit the table for Monday, consider it a work in progress as you will update it as you go along.
4. The main issue in asset planning is the culture among those who set policies for the municipality. Are they committed to dealing with reality? Planning that puts off major changes until 2050 or somewhere down the line, demonstrate a lack of commitment. They merely hope it will be someone else’s problem. They don’t want to have to worry about it. Unfortunately, the pace of change is increasing requiring that many of us reassess our own engagement in transformation. Leadership counts. Is there a way to assess municipal leadership?
FCM is teamed with ICLEI for a program that walks cities through the how to on setting up a climate plan. The plan should include milestones and when those actions are to be completed and by whom. Is your city using a program like this or this one in particular?
Research and make a list on your municipality and the programs they partner with or belong to. Or if you cannot find any info on that, note it.
Who are they connected with? Are they using the tools available?
5. Now gather your information together and assess your city on the MCIP Climate Adaptation Maturity Scale. As an outsider looking in, what do you see? How far along are they? Are there indications they are speeding things up, moving along, achieving their goals?
MCIP Climate Adaptation Maturity Scale
Complete the Maturity analysis scale for your city.
Here is a summary of the tasks
- summary of general research on your municipality
- make a contact within the municipality
- make a table of services and assets and rate the impact of climate change on each, which indicates the level of urgency and prioritizes investments
- find the partners for your municipality. Do they belong to ICLEI? Who do they get money from for climate issues? Do they need new partners?
- complete the maturity analysis scale for your municipality
