Strathcona County – Climate Resilience Plan 

Overview

Strathcona County received $79,995 for the completion of a Climate Resilience Plan.  

This project was funded by the Government of Alberta, through the Municipal Climate Change Action Centre’s Climate Resilience Capacity Building Program.    

Approach

Strathcona County is a specialized municipality in central Alberta that comprises a diverse range of urban and rural communities and land uses. Strathcona County strives to be a model of ecological integrity, protecting their environment and preserving agricultural heritage, while investing in infrastructure and quality services.  

The need for a climate resilience plan was identified as a gap in current strategic planning documents, including the Environmental Framework, Corporate Strategic Plan, and Municipal Development Plan. The Climate Resilience Plan was completed to tie together existing efforts to address current climate impacts while also providing a foundation for embedding climate resilience and adaptation into higher level policies and plans at Strathcona County. 

Strathcona County engaged ICLEI Canada to facilitate workshops with internal staff, liaise with the County’s internal project team, and deliver a final Climate Resilience Plan based on workshops and data gathered from County sources.  

Through this project, Strathcona County completed a corporate climate resilience plan, titled “Degrees of Resilience: Our Climate Adaptation Compass” and associated supplementary materials, including a Cost of Doing Nothing (CODN) report, draft implementation schedules for resilience-building actions identified in the Plan, and internal training session materials designed to be delivered at the end of the project to affected County staff.  

Results

The Climate Resilience Plan is a corporate-level plan intended to guide resilience building actions undertaken by Strathcona County as part of its municipal operations.  

The Cost of Doing Nothing Report is intended to assist in making a business case for climate resilience actions in day-to-day operations and overall planning at the County.  

County staff also developed and delivered a staff training session, intended to facilitate internal staff conversations on the outcomes of the Climate Resilience Plan and implementation considerations. The session was based on the FCM guide, “Talking it Through: A Discussion Guide for Local Government Staff on Climate Adaptation,” which aims to support municipal staff with communicating to decision-makers and elected officials about adapting to local climate impacts. 

Benefits 

In Strathcona County many adaptation efforts are already underway at the operational level, as various departments respond to increasing pressures on the infrastructure and services they are responsible for. Completing this process helped Strathcona County to establish a common understanding of the anticipated climate threats, and created a space to focus on what efforts are currently underway and what gaps need to be addressed to prevent climate-related disruptions to municipal service delivery and operations.  

The community will ultimately derive benefit from this project from reduced service disruption, more resilient municipal infrastructure, and increased climate resilience and adaptation considerations embedded into social and economic related programs and services provided by the County.  

The corporate climate resilience plan also sets the stage for a more robust future engagement and planning effort aimed at community-level climate resilience building in Strathcona County. 

“Recognizing that our climate is already changing, we need to prepare for the effects, specifically extreme weather events. We must build resiliency into our human-engineered and natural infrastructure and ultimately the social fabric of our communities. We now have a Climate Resilience Plan that provides clarity on how Strathcona County responds to the challenges of climate change so we can remain an inclusive, healthy, and resilient place to live for generations to come.” 

Jocelyn Thrasher-Haug, Manager of Agriculture and Environment, Strathcona County