Abstracts
Transferring Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Knowledge to the Community of Communities
Phillip Hill1, David Mate
1Natural Resources Canada
phill@nrcan.gc.ca
The effects of changing climate will be borne in large part by cities and communities. There is increasing awareness in Canada that communities will need to develop appropriate planning to prepare for and respond to the multitude of impacts (social, economic, and environmental) that they may face. Despite this growing awareness, there is still a large communication gap to fill between scientists and municipal officials. Since 2003, Natural Resources Canada has been working with individual municipalities, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) and the Canadian Institute of Planners (CIP) to investigate the impacts of climate change on municipalities in a project entitled Municipal Case Studies: Climate Change and the Planning Process. The results of our case studies add to the growing body of knowledge on climate change I&A, but there is a challenge involved in transferring this knowledge to the broader community. In the course of this work, it has become clear that there are at least three municipal levels (politicians, planners and other practitioners) with different information needs that need to acquire knowledge about climate change impacts. Each municipality is faced with a unique mix of climate change impacts that affect an equally unique socio-economic context. Given the large matrix of user groups and climate change issues within municipalities, our approach has been to ask municipal practitioners directly what form the transfer of knowledge should take. We are organizing a national forum in March 2005 to elicit this information and preliminary results of the forum will be presented.
2005-04-05 |
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