10. FUTURE: Advancing capacity-building for climate adaptation

From 2019 to 2022, we worked with businesses, educators, non-profits, professional associations, scientists and all levels of government on the ALN project, to begin to shift the narrative on building our capacity for climate adaptation, from being something we should maybe think about for the future – to a critical responsibility every organization needs to commit to now. 

In pursuit of our core project goals, we engaged over 12,000  climate adaptation experts and professionals across Canada and the world through ALN courses, the Climate Adaptation Competency Framework (CACF) and our professional knowledge network.

Despite the challenges and constraints of working in an extremely dynamic environment, created in part by the global COVID pandemic, we also took on and met complex additional challenges beyond building and delivering a suite of courses. We built an open learning repository, developed a climate adaptation micro-credential strategy,  piloted the use of the CACF to inform future use cases, developed recommendations and a roadmap for a national climate adaptation hub, and produced a unique and powerful course on embedding Indigenous perspectives into future climate adaptation work.

We’re proud of what we’ve been able to achieve with our team, our collaborators and our community. Yet, we know that this work is just beginning.

We need to find new ways to move climate adaptation from the fringe to the mainstream. Not just because we know that climate change will affect us in the future, but because it’s something we can do to make a difference right now.

Which begs the question – where do we go from here?

As we wrapped up the ALN project, we reached out to our team members and partners to find out what they think Canada needs to do next to improve our climate adaptation capacity. Here’s what they said.

Universities need to take a lead role – not just as educators but also as innovators. Specifically, they must become more agile in the way they develop and deliver learning experiences to provide smaller courses in tighter timeframes. Such a shift will do more than just improve national climate adaptation capacity; it will also help universities stay relevant in an increasingly competitive marketplace that includes new kinds of private and corporate schools.

Improving collaboration is essential to finding new ways to tackle the complex issues we face. No one person or institution alone has all the answers. This includes shifting the way we create public-private partnerships between governments, universities, research bodies and businesses. Specifically, we need to get research funding bodies like the Tri-Councils to make climate change research a priority across their programming to advance innovation and impact.

To take this one step further, we need to invest in building, supporting and growing more networks to enable this kind of collaboration. That means we also have to invest heavily in communications and engagement resources and staff to develop and sustain relationships within and between networks.

We also need to acknowledge and address the systemic barriers to doing this work, in particular, our siloed structures in government and organizations. Finding new ways to create real integration will not only free up resources and capacity but will also create opportunities and space for breakthroughs to happen.

In addition to navigating structural challenges within the public sector, we continue to struggle with policy conflicts. The climate emergency calls for a radical shift in culture, in the way we manage our natural and financial resources. But our federal and provincial governments continue to invest in fossil fuel projects. Without a clear commitment to a net-zero future by our political leaders, we cannot hope to convince the rest of society to invest in climate action.

We need more and stronger leadership across sectors to make climate adaptation mainstream. Despite clear evidence that climate change is already affecting communities, families and businesses across the globe, we continue to behave like we have all the time in the world. Recent events in Canada show that we’d rather react too late and spend billions on repairs, restoration and rebuilding than be proactive and spend far less to anticipate and adapt to the impacts of climate change ahead of time.  Without visionary and courageous leaders who are willing to break free of electoral cycles to invest in our future, we’ll lose the opportunity to become global leaders in climate adaptation innovation. Plus, we’ll be doomed to continue to suffer severe loss and damage.

Yet, amid all these concerns, we also heard optimism and hope for the future. When we look at how society responded to environmental issues like acid rain or pesticides in the past, we can see what is possible. Recent commitments by the federal government to invest billions in employment training because of the pandemic, and to spend millions protecting the environment and supporting nature-based solutions show us that there is a better path forward.

Finally, we heard that we need more of the kind of work that we’ve done here over the last three years – open, whole-hearted, passionate and purposeful collaboration across sectors and silos. A commitment by diverse leaders, experts, learners and citizens to bring their best selves to a shared challenge. To put aside ego, individualism and profit in pursuit of a collective good.

As the ALN project drew to a close, we began to explore a new opportunity to build on these insights and continue this important work – an emergent pan-Canadian organization known as “CanADAPT”.  As a collaboration with the Climate Risk Institute and other NGOs, CanADAPT will likely be established as a not-for-profit co-operative, so it can become an inclusive model for many public and private-sector education and training providers. Its goal will be to continue to focus on national workforce development to address the impacts of climate change. At the time of this report, a team had already begun the initial work to conduct community research, develop a business plan, and create a digital environment to support pan-Canadian capacity-building for climate adaptation.

And that is our story. It’s been our great honour and privilege to do this work with an amazing community of global citizens who believe in the possibility of a brighter future. We can’t wait to see where the journey leads.

Get in touch if you’d like to join us.