Welcome and Overview
Welcome to the second course on Risk and Resilience for the MACAL program. This course will deepen your conceptual and practical understanding of climate risk and resilience assessment and planning. The course will also move beyond assessment and planning by focusing on implementation, change-making, and impact. Assessing risk and resilience is only the first step in a complex process of turning knowledge into action, and creating meaningful change to protect and enhance things of value to a particular community. You will assess the extent to which completed risk assessments have led to demonstrated outcomes and impacts in their target sector. A variety of sectors, settings, and approaches will be explored to give you a comprehensive understanding of the state of practice in Canada, and to a certain extent, internationally.
The course will begin by building on common understandings of climate risk management and will further situate this practice in real-world applications. Specific attention will be paid to the various contexts in which risk and resilience activities occur. You will also explore how the field is—and is not—reflecting approaches to equitable planning, and will have opportunities to interact directly with the scoping challenges that resilience can lead to.
The course will also focus on tools and processes for risk and resilience in the following common planning milieu: built environment and infrastructure, ecosystems, communities, and the private sector. You will critically evaluate resilience plans that have been created at various scales, and assess the extent to which they have been, or are likely to, lead to change, and how they reflect commitments to equity, decolonization, and justice. You will learn process- and outcome-oriented strategies for integrating equity into climate resilience initiatives in various settings. Throughout the course, guest lecturers will provide insights into lessons learned, emerging practices, and specific tools (e.g., nature-based solutions).
The course then creates space for you to translate information and approaches for risk and resilience into outcomes and impacts. Strategic planning, action prioritization, and consensus building will be explored using a combination of real-world examples and guest lectures from practitioners. The emerging field of implementation science will be discussed, bringing in promising concepts including adaptation pathways, solutions spaces, and similar. The costs and benefits of climate change impacts and adaptation will also be emphasized, since this is such an integral part of translating knowledge into action.
Finally, the course will explore approaches for monitoring, reporting, and evaluation that have successfully demonstrated positive outcomes associated with risk and resilience. Although conceptually rich, this area of practice is nascent in terms of consensus on demonstrated approaches. Other emerging issues within the risk and resilience space will also be discussed.
Stay Connected
- To each other via the course blog and your own WordPress blogs – be sure to set up your Feedly. See here for instructions. You will need to add the OPML files to your Feedly for each course.
- #RRUMACAL on twitter;
- subscribe to the Resilience by Design YouTube channel
- Instructor email addresses can be found in Moodle,