098 // NATIONAL ROUND TABLE ON THE ENVIRONMENT AND THE ECONOMY
That means moving away from trying to find “perfect” solutions and looking to strategies that minimize the costs, financial or otherwise, of being wrong.217 These strategies include the following:
1 // Promoting long-term planning processes that include monitoring and review functions, and allow for the inclusion of new information as it becomes available. Long-term planning applies to areas such as coastal zone and watershed management, energy planning, and urban design and redevelopment. British Columbia’s Living Water Smart initiative, for example, is a comprehensive plan to keep the province’s water healthy and secure for the future. It comprises innovations to modernize the Water Act, including provisions for an efficient and flexible water-allocation scheme that can adapt to changing conditions.
2 // Prioritizing options with the potential to bring benefits even in the absence of climate change. “Win-win” options enhance the capacity of ecosystems, businesses, communities, and households to adapt to the effects of climate change and contribute to the achievement of environment, economic, or social outcomes, such as increased biodiversity, economic competitiveness, and poverty reduction. “No-regret” options reduce risks from current climate conditions, and include strategies to minimize damage from natural hazards. “Low-regret” options have relatively low or negligible costs, so even if it turned out that they were not required to address the future effects of climate change, there is low regret from incurring the (unnecessary) costs.
3 // Prioritizing strategies that are reversible and avoid “lock-in.” Because of uncertain climate futures, decisions with long-term implications made today, such as zoning, siting major industrial operations, and building connecting and critical infrastructure, could constrain our options tomorrow and could prove costly over time. For example, building coastal protection structures as an adaptation option to safeguard homes and commercial operations from storms and sea-level change can perform well, provided they are designed to withstand changing climate conditions and are adequately maintained over their service life. If built, little incentive would exist for governments to discourage development along the seafront. However, the