What can be done now to prevent disastrous climate change consequences down the road for the Hamilton community?
Project Description:
Context: Public Work’s Climate Resiliency Program is set to launch publicly in 2021. The program aims to unify Hamilton’s sustainability efforts across all community, organizational, and city initiatives, with a goal to collaboratively build a resilient future for Hamiltonians. This will allow for the prioritization of funding for certain initiatives and awareness of our most pressing sustainability issues. The stakeholders involved include leaders of sustainability/environmental organizations in Hamilton, the general public, and city staff, who can provide perspective on Hamilton’s sustainability assets and needs. Creative ideas about how to conduct a comprehensive horizon scan to capture all perspectives, opportunities, and best practices should be incorporated in the Climate Resiliency Program.
Problem: Climate change is a serious problem. In order to prevent disastrous consequences down the road for the Hamilton community as well as the global community, definitive action needs to be taken now.
Hamilton has already been seeing the effects of climate change: extreme heat and droughts, rising lake levels leading to flooding, and increasingly frequent heavy precipitation events leading to infrastructure, shoreline, and escarpment erosion. Drastic city changes are needed to preserve the wellbeing of future generations.
On a global scale, the current consensus among environmental scientists is that humanity only has seven years to drastically change our global consumption and interactions with the environment before we face catastrophic and irreversible consequences.
Challenge Summary: To collect and analyze data that informs the practices of community engagement as they pertain to climate resiliency in cities around the world. We aim to develop a set of recommendations to aid the development of a horizon scan for Hamilton’s Climate Resiliency Program.
City Staff: Arlen Leeming Customer, Senior Project Manager, Sustainability, Public Works
Faculty, Course, and Students: Semester in Residence 2020, Ananya Yadav, Wendy Zhang, Henry Challen and Derya Demirci
Where will the work go? The report will support the development of Hamilton’s first Climate Change Resiliency Strategy. The podcast will be available for listening on City CAST. The sustainability website will hopefully be considered by the City for further development.