Climate and emergencies conference aims for realistic approaches

The organizers of a virtual conference hope attendees left better prepared to manage emergency response and recovery in the North.

The Disaster Response and Emergency Management Symposium North took place online from September 28 to 29. It featured sessions on topics including overcoming northern challenges, pre-disaster recovery planning, caring for evacuees, managing the mental health of public safety staff, and securing critical infrastructure against climate hazards.

NWT Senator Dawn Anderson’s keynote speech on the opening day of the conference emphasized the importance of including northerners in emergency planning.

“We cannot make decisions about the North without the people who will live with the consequences,” she said.

Indigenous people in the North have long monitored and adapted to the environment, and have passed on that knowledge, Anderson said. She added that disaster response and emergency management in the NWT is unique due to factors such as distance and a lack of infrastructure and redundancies, with climate change adding pressure.

Ultimately, Anderson said, disaster preparedness and response is about people, communities and “ensuring that the next generation can continue to call the North home.”

The senator said promised federal investments in the region, such as upgrades to airports and major projects like the Mackenzie Valley Highway, need to consider benefits to northerners from the start. That includes ensuring people can evacuate safely on roads, that airport improvements strengthen medical travel and emergency supply, and residents have access to reliable communication, she said.

“Resilience cannot become the reason we expect people to make do with less,” she said. “It cannot become an excuse for inadequate infrastructure, inadequate preparation or systems that depend on northern people somehow finding a way through when something fails.”

Virginia Sarrazin, a climate risk and resilience leader at engineering firm WSP, said resiliency cannot be achieved by applying southern standards to the North, and local and Indigenous knowledge is essential.

“It requires solutions that reflect remoteness, climate change, ground condition, limited redundancy and local capacity, and realistic construction and maintenance constraints,” she said.

Sarrazin said resilient design has three objectives: redundancy where feasible, safe failure so damage does not spread, and rapid recovery based on realistic local resources.

The NWT has been no stranger to climate emergencies in recent years, from wildfires and floods to coastal erosion and permafrost degradation.

A shoreline revetment project to protect Tuktoyaktuk from coastal erosion was one climate change mitigation effort highlighted at the conference.

Charles Klengenberg, director of lands at the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation, and Kearney Coupland, an assistant professor at the University of Guelph, said the project has a 30-year design life, giving community members time to discuss and make decisions on relocation.

“Community relocation and retreat needs to come from communities,” Coupland said.

She said this is one of the first community-led managed retreat and relocation cases in Canada due to climate change. She said there is an emphasis on youth and future decision-makers.

In the final session of the conference, Paul Gruner, chief executive officer of the Tłı̨chǫ Investment Corporation, discussed lessons learned from the NWT’s historic 2023 wildfire season, in which nearly 70 percent of the territory’s population was affected by evacuation orders.

Gruner said lessons include improving communication, being clear about who is accountable, and being more proactive about things like firesmarting, which can have the added benefit of providing meaningful employment.

Gruner believes Canada should start looking at wildfire management as a national program rather than downloading responsibility onto provinces and territories, particularly in the North, which has a smaller population and fewer resources.

External reviews were conducted into how the city of Yellowknife handled the capital’s evacuation as well as the NWT’s wildfire fighting practices and the territory’s emergency management and handling of evacuations.

Those reviews highlighted issues including communication, a lack of planning, challenges maintaining critical services, inadequate support for vulnerable people, and a loss of public trust.

The Office of the Auditor General of Canada recently began reviewing emergency management in the NWT.