BUILDING RESILIENCE FOR THE URBAN POOR
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and creation of an information system on climate change that includes a virtual platform on forest fires’ risk management. In relation to green space, the city also plans to create ecological corridors and to explore REDD+ afforestation as a potential adaptation mechanism with financial benefits. Mainstreaming Climate Change in Halifax
The Halifax Region Municipality (HRM) collaborated with the Canadian Sustainable Environment Management Office and ClimAdapt, a network of regional private-sector companies with climate-adaptation expertise, to produce the Climate SMART (Sustainable Mitigation and Adaptation Risk Toolkit) series. Climate SMART includes documents aimed at mainstreaming concerns about climate change into municipal planning and decision making. Among these documents, there is a Climate Change Risk Management Strategy for HRM, as well as a Developer’s Risk Management Guide. These two documents guide both the public and private sector in concerns about physical development through a riskmanagement approach to prevent, tolerate, and share risk in the built environment. Both reports encourage the use of natural ecosystem responses to climate concerns. In relation to coastal and storm-related flooding, the Climate Change Risk Management Strategy for HRM encourages the use of LIDAR (light detection and ranging) technology to establish precise elevation for coastal-inundation models, improved urban-design criteria for infrastructure, and urban greening (Halifax Regional Municipality 2007b). The city has established new precipitation return periods for use in municipal physical planning to reflect the expected increase in storm intensity and frequency. This information is being used to analyze current land use, zoning, and settlement patterns. For the private sector, the Developer’s Risk Management Guide encourages four strategies to deal with the effects of climate change (Halifax Regional Municipality 2007a). First, the strategy calls for prevention, toleration, and sharing of loss through the use of natural systems (in the form of green belts) and proactive planning to mitigate precipitation and heat affects. Second, it calls for the change of land use to accommodate and possibly take advantage of expected climate changes. Third, the strategy calls for relocation of planned development to areas expected to be less vulnerable to climate. Finally, the plan encourages restoration and retrofitting of developments following damage or climactic change. Toronto’s Wet Weather Flow Master Plan
Much like Halifax, Toronto officials expect climate change to bring heat waves and intense precipitation. In recent years, Toronto has experienced a record number of days with average temperatures over 30°C, leading the city to issue 18 extreme