Daniel Henstra

Canadian Disaster Management Policy: Moving Toward a Paradigm Shift?

In light of rising disaster losses in recent years and predictions of a more hazardous natural environment in the future, many countries around the world are revising their policies for disaster management to incorporate a stronger emphasis on disaster mitigation and risk reduction. In this paper, we argue that Canada has not sufficientl y integrated mitigation into disaster management and we discuss several barriers that impede progress in this area.

The tools of climate adaptation policy: analysing instruments and instrument selection

Governments have a key role to play in the process of climate adaptation, through the development and implementation of public policy. Governments have access to a diverse array of instruments that can be employed to adapt their operations and influence the behaviour of individuals, organizations, and other governments. However, the choice of policy instrument is political, because it affects the distribution of benefits and costs, and entrenches institutional procedures and resources that are difficult to redeploy. This article identifies four key governing resources that governments employ in the service of adaptation and analyses these resources using criteria drawn from the policy studies literature. For each category, specific policy instruments are described, and examples are provided to illustrate how they have been used in particular jurisdictions. The article also discusses instrument selection, focusing on trade-offs among the instrument attributes, processes for setting the stage for instrument choice, jurisdictional constraints on instrument selection, and ways to avoid negative vertical and horizontal policy interplay. Policy relevance Adaptation is a nascent field of public policy, and courses of action to reduce vulnerability and build adaptive capacity are in their infancy. This article contributes to policy development and analysis by identifying the range of policy instruments available to governments and analysing concrete ways in which they are employed to implement adaptation policy objectives. Taking stock of these adaptation tools and comparing their behavioural assumptions and attributes helps to illuminate potential policy options, and to evaluate their technical viability, political acceptability, and economic feasibility. Providing examples of how these instruments have been implemented successfully in other jurisdictions offers ideas and lessons for public officials.

Toward the Climate-Resilient City: Extreme Weather and Urban Climate Adaptation Policies in Two Canadian Provinces

Abstract Extreme weather events, such as unusually high or low temperatures, severe winds and heavy precipitation, pose a threat to people and property in cities, and are expected to become more frequent and intense as a result of climate change. Managing this risk requires effective climate adaptation policies – strategic courses of action designed to strengthen urban resilience to climate-related stress. City governments have a key role to play in adaptation policy design, but they appear to face challenges in marshalling political commitment and technical capacity. This article examines elements of urban climate adaptation policy targeting extreme weather and analyzes the policy development process in two major Canadian cities, Toronto and Halifax.

The Dynamics of Policy Change: A Longitudinal Analysis of Emergency Management in Ontario, 1950–2010

Although cross-sectional studies off er valuable insights about the determinants of specifi c policy choices, it is now widely accepted that a richer understanding of policy cycles in any particular domain demands analysis of a decade or more. 1 Scholars have increasingly turned their attention to historical patterns of policy development, seeking to explain the dynamics of policy stability and change over time. 2 Th e predominant depiction of policy development that emerges from this literature is a stepped, evolutionary pattern characterized by relatively long periods of policy stability, punctuated by moments of signifi cant change. 3 However, recent studies suggest that the historical pattern of policy change may vary depending on the characteristics of the policy domain under examination and the nature of the policy subsystem that surrounds it. 4

How Flood Experience and Risk Perception Influences Protective Actions and Behaviours among Canadian Homeowners

Canada is a country in the midst of a flood management policy transition that is shifting part of the flood damage burden from the state to homeowners. This transition—as well as the large financial losses resulting from flooding—have created a window of opportunity for Canada to implement strategies that increase property owners capacity to avoid and absorb the financial and physical risks associated with flooding. This work presents foundational research into the extent to which Canadians flood experience, perceptions of flood risks and socio-demographics shape their intentions and adoption of property level flood protection (PLFP). A bilingual, national survey was deployed in Spring 2016 and was completed by 2300 respondents across all 10 Canadian provinces. The survey was developed using assumptions in existing literature on flood risk behaviours and the determinants of flood risk management in similar jurisdictions. The paper argues that property owners are not willing to accept greater responsibility for flood risk as envisioned by recent policy changes. This finding is consistent with other OECD jurisdictions, where flood risk engagement strategies have been developed that could be replicated in Canada to encourage risk-sharing behaviour.

Municipal flood risk sharing in Canada: A policy instrument analysis

Although municipal governments have long dealt with flood hazards, escalating damage to property and infrastructure has prompted greater interest in policies that share the responsibility for risk reduction and the burden of costs with other levels of government and non-governmental actors. However, flood risk sharing is a significant policy challenge, because it requires consideration of the consequences of flooding, in addition to its probability, and it involves engagement with a broader pool of stakeholders in managing flood risk. Scholarly literature on risk sharing tools available to Canadian municipalities and the extent of their adoption is scarce. To address this gap, this paper identifies a set of policy tools by which municipalities can share flood risk, and assesses how and the extent to which they are adopted in the cities of Calgary, Alberta, and Toronto, Ontario. This analysis reveals that, despite a diverse range of policy options, risk sharing tools are underutilized and continue to be informed by single hazard-based design standards rather than an assessment of flood risk.

Urban resilience implementation: A policy challenge and research agenda for the 21st century

Resilience has risen rapidly over the last decade to become one of the key terms in international policy and academic discussions associated with civil contingencies and crisis management. As governments and institutions confront threats such as environmental hazards, technological accidents, climate change, and terrorist attacks, they recognise that resilience can serve as a key policy response. Many organisations including the United Nations, the European Union, the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, government agencies and departments, international non-governmental organisations and community groups promote resilience. However, with the rapid rise of resilience has come uncertainty as to how it should be built and how different practices and approaches should come together to operationalise it (Chandler & Coaffee, 2016). Whilst there is a variety of different interpretations given to resilience from practitioners and an open debate about resilience principles and characteristics in academia, we adopt the crisis and disaster management definition of “the capacity of a social system to proactively adapt to and recover from disturbances that are perceived within the system to fall outside the range of normal and expected disturbances” (Boin, Comfort, & Demchak, 2010; p. 9). By developing resilience, a system becomes capable of reducing the impact of shocks and resuming normal functioning more quickly following a disaster and better equipped to meet population needs and minimise economic losses caused by crises (Lagadec, 2009; Meerow, Newell, & Stults, 2016). However, it should be noted that this definition fails to capture preexisting socio-economic inequities within society and that in many countries “negotiated resilience” may be desirable (Ziervogel et al., 2017). Moreover, in the rapidly emerging policy discourse of resilience, cities and urban areas have become a key focus of action where rapid urbanisation and greater global connectedness present unprecedented challenges. Such increased urbanisation also concentrates risk in cities making them increasingly vulnerable to an array of shocks and stresses. Under such circumstances, city managers are increasingly seeking to enhance urban resilience by addressing underlying risk factors, and by reducing the exposure and vulnerability of people and assets to a range of current and future threats. In this sense urban resilience provides different frameworks for reducing the multiple risks faced by cities and communities, ensuring there are appropriate levels of resources and capacities to mitigate, prepare for, respond to, and recover from a range of shocks and stresses (Coaffee & Lee, 2016). Many initiatives organised through global governance networks promote the importance of city-based resilience whilst a range of private sector and philanthropic organisations have advanced programmes of work and frameworks by which cities might develop the capacities to become more resilient. Most notably, major cities throughout the world have joined the 100 Resilient Cities programme (http://www. 100resilientcities.org/) (Rockefeller Foundation & Arup, 2015), pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation, to develop resilience strategies to face disruptive events and address vulnerabilities that amplify crises and erode coping abilities (e.g., inequality, ageing infrastructure, environmental degradation) (100 Resilient Cities, 2016). Organisations of the United Nations are also urging the development of operational frameworks for dealing with integrated risks management, as the UN Habitat City Resilience Profiling Programme, enhancing resilient communities building in relation to Sustainable Development Goals and the Sendai Framework on Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 (UN, 2015) that followed the Hyogo Framework for Action 2005-2015: Building the Resilience of Nations and Communities to Disasters (ISDR, 2005). However, empirical studies show that despite the popularity of resilience, its implementation sometimes lead to business as usual approaches neglecting social justice (Anguelovski et al., 2016; Ziervogel et al., 2017), or lock-in the development path through unsustainable trajectories, and thus resulting in a complex and underestimated set of trade-offs across spatial and temporal scales (Chelleri, Waters, Olazabal, & Minucci, 2015). This implementation gap (Coaffee & Clarke, 2015) remains between resilience as ambitious objective and the “demonstrated capacity to govern resilience in practice” at the urban level (Wagenaar & Wilkinson, 2015; p. 1265). The implementation of resilience challenges the normal functioning of public administrations (Bourgon, 2009; Duit, 2016) by highlighting the need to replace silos with horizontal management (Matyas & Pelling, 2015), take interdependence with external partners into account (Henstra, 2012; McConnell & Drennan, 2006; Valiquette L’Heureux & Therrien, 2013), and encourage flexible and adaptive processes rather than regular routines that maintain the status quo (Pelling & Manuel-Navarrete, 2011; Stark, 2014). Whilst from a governance perspective we can readily acknowledge that “the building of urban resilience will be most effective when it involves a mutual and accountable network of civic institutions, agencies and individual citizens working in partnership towards common goals within a common strategy” (Coaffee, Murakami-Wood, & Rogers, 2008), municipal authorities are undoubtedly struggling to do so. In seeking to identify the different knowledge gaps and future research questions regarding the implementation of urban resilience we ran a 3-day intensive knowledge-brokering workshop on Co-constructing Knowledge for Urban Resilience Implementation at the Ecole nationale DOI: 10.1111/1468-5973.12233

Flood risk management and shared responsibility: Exploring Canadian public attitudes and expectations

Funding information Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Grant/Award Number: 430-2015-00521 One of the central tenets of the flood risk management (FRM) paradigm is that responsibility for flood mitigation and recovery must be shared with stakeholders other than governments, including property-owners themselves. However, existing research suggests that this imperative is unlikely to be effective unless propertyowners demonstrate a sense of personal responsibility and are willing to undertake protective behaviours. In Canada, several recent policy changes have effectively transferred more responsibility to homeowners, but it is unclear whether Canadians are ready to accept this obligation. This article presents results from a national survey of Canadians living in high-risk flood areas, which probed their attitudes concerning the division of responsibility for flood mitigation and recovery among governments, insurers and homeowners, as well as their willingness to adopt protective behaviours. The survey, which received 2,300 responses from all 10 provinces, indicates that Canadians are willing to accept some responsibility, but for most this perceived responsibility is insufficient to influence their decisions on mitigation and recovery. Governments in Canada could learn from jurisdictions that have addressed this disconnect through policies designed to improve awareness of FRM among property-owners.

Application of re/insurance models to estimate increases in flood risk due to climate change

BackgroundFloods are the most common and most expensive natural hazard, and they are expected to become more frequent as the climate changes. This article presents research that used re/insurance catastrophe models to estimate the influence of climate change on flood-related losses. The geographic focus of the study was the Canadian Maritimes—specifically Halifax, Nova Scotia—and it sought to determine how municipal risks due to rainfall-driven riverine floods could change as a result of climate change.ResultsFindings show that annual flood losses could increase by up to 300% under a business-as-usual climate scenario by the end of the century (i.e., no mitigation or adaptation), even without accounting for changes to the built environment that could increase exposure (e.g., no population or economic growth).ConclusionsIncreasing flood risk demands an open discussion about how much risk is acceptable to the community and what controls on further growth of exposure are necessary. Moreover, projected increases in flood losses put into question long-term insurability in the Halifax area, and highlight a broader problem facing manyother areas in Canada as well.