Natural Assets and Climate Change Resiliency

Urban / community resilience is the sustained ability of a community to utilize available resources to respond to, withstand, and recover from adverse situations while continuing to deliver important community services. Urban areas are all vulnerable to the effects of climate change, with the impacts anticipated to increase over time, adding greater challenges at the local government level and the infrastructure that underpins all aspects of community services provision. In the long run it is nearly always less challenging and less expensive to build resilience into planning and design prior to development rather than as a response to a major event. But what are the strategies to implement this?

This workshop will focus on asset management (AM) processes that facilitate the incorporation of strategic climate change actions and natural assets to enable, support and build urban resiliency. An emphasis in the workshop will be the essential information required in the AM process to enable resiliency; the essential steps to be taken and by whom. Participants will have the opportunity to actively learn and apply specific processes in the session, thereby gaining skills to further develop within their professional context. 

Target Audience

The session will benefit those involved in infrastructure planning, design and development with an interest in natural assets and increasing community resiliency including, but not limited to, professional planners, asset management professionals, sustainability professionals, engineers and other related professions. 

Session Take Aways

Participants will gain an understanding (supported with case studies where relevant) about the following: 

• Asset management planning as it relates to enabling and supporting local government climate resiliency 
• Natural assets: defining and identifying how these ‘fit into’ the asset management inventory and how natural assets can contribute to community resiliency 
• Participants will receive, post- session, digital files of all materials applied and/or shared during the session.