Resilient communities don’t just happen by accident
Today’s communities must ensure disaster and climate resilience are integral to their emergency and long-term community planning efforts.
Addressing future risk potential requires a deep understanding of local risk landscapes and how best to adapt, accommodate, protect, and retreat as these landscapes transform in response to our changing climate.
Our mission is to help Canadian communities map out hazard and climate exposures, identify those people, assets, and infrastructure at risk, and explore actions communities can take to enhance hazard resilience.
Mapping is at the core of risk planning and resilience building
Hazard Exposure
Where is your community exposed to potential hazard risks and how does that risk vary spatially across the community?
Assets at Risk
Once hazard zones are identified, which structures, roadways, important cultural and archaeological sites, and critical infrastructure are potentially at risk?
Vulnerable Populations
Who in the community is most vulnerable to hazard risks and where in the community are the most likely to be located?
Recent and Ongoing Project Work
BC’s Disaster and Climate Risk and Resilience Assessment
BC Ministry of Emergency Management and Climate Resilience
Working with our partners, Sage on Earth, BGC Engineering, and GeoBC, we provided geospatial support and advice to combine scientific and analytical approaches to risk assessments with qualitative, equity-based engagement to establish the Province’s first comprehensive Disaster and Climate Resilience Assessment.
Look for Phase I (Provincial Assessment) of this exciting project in the second half of 2024!
Disaster Risk Reduction Pathways
Natural Resources Canada / Canadian Safety and Security Program
Headed by Natural Resources Canada and funded through the Canadian Safety and Security Program (CSSP), the DRR Pathways project was a partnership bringing together researchers and practitioners working in hazard and climate risk reduction from government agencies, communities, non-governmental organizations, and academia to establish shared pathways to disaster resilience for British Columbia.
As part of the University of British Columbia team, Dr. Reynolds worked on three projects that contributed to the project in collaboration with community and government partners. The first explored social vulnerability in the City of Vancouver as part of the city’s seismic retrofit program using earthquake modelling from the Geological Survey of Canada. The second explored risk dynamics in the Metro Vancouver region: how neighbourhood changes over time coupled with projected growth can help estimate future hazard impacts. And finally, our team explored neighbourhood resilience, recovery, and recoverability metrics for the City of Vancouver.
Two of these projects were published as part of the Resilience Pathways report in 2022.
CHERP
The Canadian Hazards Emergency Response & Preparedness Initiative
CHERP is a research outreach and engagement project with the goal of making it quicker and easier for community residents to learn about, prepare for, and respond to local environmental and climate-related hazard threats. Working with our partner communities, we’re developing a mobile app that helps simplify household emergency planning, adapting to the unique needs of individual communities and households.