Climate resilience: How do Canadian cities compare?

Abstract

Impacts of current and future climate are increasingly manifesting as extreme weather-related events. From heat to flood to smoke, Canadians are experiencing adverse conditions that pose health risks that can be attributed to climate change. All cities and regions face risks and acknowledge the need for planning, but the nature and severity of these risks vary based on local geography and population vulnerability.

CANUE’s HealthyPlan.City tool supports health-focused planning by identifying areas where vulnerable populations face disproportionate environmental risks. This webinar will introduce a new feature in the tool—the Climate Health Equity Resilience Index (CHERI). Users can view a snapshot of their city’s CHERI score using a single infographic, and can see the factors contributing to it and also be able to compare results across Canadian cities using common national data. This innovative tool - CHERI - aims to accelerate efforts to build climate resilience, with a focus on vulnerable populations who have fewer resources to protect themselves and cope with the long-term impacts of extreme events. After all, resilience, the ability to recover quickly in the future, will depend upon the well-being of all citizens.

The goal of CHERI is to accelerate efforts to build climate resilience focusing on vulnerable populations who have less resources to be protected from and cope, long term with extreme events.

Speakers

Dr. Jeffrey Brook is an Associate Professor in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. For over 25 years he was a research scientist at Environment and Climate Change Canada. He has wide ranging expertise related to air quality and environmental health, contributing to the development of Canadian policy through his research, participation on national and international committees, past leadership on federal science assessments and through studies on children’s health via his leadership role on the CHILD (Canadian Healthy Infant Longitudinal Development) Cohort Study. Dr. Brook started and serves as the scientific director of the Canadian Urban Environmental Health Research Consortium (CANUE.ca), which represents an open data resource for Canadian researchers. He is one of the co-directors of HealthyDesign.City, which aims to make CANUE data visualization and analysis tools widely accessible.

Joey Syer has been the CANUE Data Director since November 2022. He oversees the development of CANUE datasets and projects dedicated to their improvement in epidemiological research. Joey is also a part-time course instructor at the University of Victoria in Population Health and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and Spatial Epidemiology and Outbreak Detection. Prior to CANUE, he spent 10 years (2012-2022) as a geomatics specialist at Hemmera, an Ausenco Company. Joey holds degrees in GIS and Epidemiology. He has a strong interest in environmental epidemiology, using GIS, remote sensing, and machine learning to improve environmental exposure data quality, and a wide range of health outcomes.