9: ADAPTATION HUB: Creating opportunities for capacity-building through a national portal
As we neared the end of the second year of the ALN project, an opportunity came up to tackle an emerging issue in building Canada’s capacity for climate adaptation; how will we move beyond websites with articles, case studies, disparate courses and programs to scale learning up to a national level?
Specifically, Natural Resources Canada was looking for a team to develop recommendations and a roadmap for a national climate adaptation platform that would advance capacity building in this field.
Though we already had our hands full with the ALN project, we were keen to take this on, as we had just essentially built a similar platform at a provincial level and knew we had valuable insights and expertise to share. In February 2021, we bid on the project and won. It would turn into a tremendous learning opportunity – and a hellish challenge. The whole thing had to be completed in just six weeks before the end of the fiscal year.
We knew that the only way we could succeed would be to collaborate with partners in the climate adaptation community. So we built a coalition with ICLEI, the Climate Risk Institute and Solvable. Our plan was to integrate our collective decades of expertise in developing digital learning experiences and systems with insights from learners and experts in the climate adaptation community.
First, we completed an environmental scan, to determine what was already available and who was doing similar work around the world.
Using this as a foundation, we then ran a series of online discovery sessions with climate adaptation professionals and experts to identify what was already working well in existing platforms – including our own – and how we could do better.
As with other parts of the ALN project, this exploratory work was severely hampered by the ongoing pandemic. Levels of stress and exhaustion across the community, combined with extremely tight project deadlines made it difficult to generate deep engagement.
Despite these obstacles, we were able to get feedback and ideas from over 50 researchers, rights holders and leaders across Canada, as well as experts at five International Adaptation Hubs. Then we distilled our findings into two key recommendations.
First, any national platform to develop capacity for climate adaptation would have to take a federated approach. Canada already has many organizations doing this work in various ways at provincial, regional and national levels, including government agencies and academia. It wouldn’t make sense to try to replicate all of that in one new, singular entity.
The second recommendation addressed one of our team’s key insights. There is already an abundance of information and learning resources available. It’s just hard to find. To make a new portal or platform truly useful, it would need some kind of contextual artificial intelligence or wayfinding that would enable the system to suggest content to users based on their identified needs, interests and professional and/or community profile.
We submitted our recommendations, along with a suggested roadmap for implementation, at the end of March 2021. Though we didn’t receive any formal feedback, our impression was that our suggestions were not exactly what NRCan expected. Our discussions with them indicated that they may have wanted only an upgrade to a basic website that could act as a clearinghouse for climate adaptation information.
However, our experience over the last three years of this project, combined with decades of earlier related work, indicates that the topic and digital landscape of climate adaptation are much too complex for such a simplified approach.
A few months later, Canada held a federal election, which resulted in a departmental shuffle of priorities and responsibilities for climate adaptation capacity-building. As the ALN project drew to a close, we awaited public sector strategies and funding to advance climate adaptation knowledge-sharing and capacity-building.
Though we were not able to advance this scaling effort as far as we would have liked, we did see positive outcomes of this work.
First and perhaps most importantly, we were able to advance the federal government’s understanding of how best to advance climate adaptation capacity building. Training professionals is not their core function and our experience suggests that they could benefit from fostering more education and training partnerships like the ones the ALN set out to achieve.
Second, we were also thrilled to be able to develop new collaborative relationships with ICLEI, Solvable and the Climate Risk Institute during this project.
Since this national climate adaptation portal project wrapped in April 2021, we’ve continued to work together with these organizations, sharing other aspects of climate adaptation capacity building, and we are hopeful we will find new opportunities to advance our national impact in the future.
