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City staff presented the final draft of its Climate Resiliency Strategy, Climate Ready Ottawa, at the October 21 meeting of Council's Environment and Climate Change Committee meeting. Ecology Ottawa delegated on the strategy, commending the plan for its comprehensive scope and the public engagement leading to it, as well as offering some recommendations for its improvement.
Please read our delegation below, or watch it here.
Our Executive Director William van Geest addresses Council's Environment and Climate Change Committee on the new Climate Resiliency Strategy
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Thank you for the opportunity to address you.
City staff deserve commendation for their work on this document. I’ll first mention their public engagement, which was considerable at every stage of the document’s development. We also participated in a meeting several months ago between City staff from multiple departments and other community organizations prompted by a letter that we submitted as part of the Peoples Official Plan coalition, which we convene. It’s clear that City staff were weighing our feedback thoughtfully.
But of course it’s the document that concerns us today—and this, too, is of high quality. It covers a broad range of topics—communities, infrastructure, natural environment, and extreme weather. And for each of these outlines clear risks, long-term objectives, and action plans, striking the balance between high-level strategy and concrete action.
This is no mean feat. While we conventionally classify resiliency—or adaptation—to climate change as an environmental problem, it isn’t. It’s a problem for the entire city: all City operations, all City assets, all residents will be affected, and in unpleasant ways, if we’re lucky, but likely in life-threatening ways. So the fact that City staff have created a plan this comprehensive is admirable.
Relatedly, the last praise I’ll confer here is for the report’s clear-eyed description of the threat that climate change poses. As the report notes, “extreme weather cost the City more than $35 million between 2017 and 2023.” This is to say nothing of the cost to residents, of course. Similarly, the 2022 derecho alone incurred “an estimated $24.1 million in incremental costs to the City.” The report also notes that “building assets as part of lifecycle renewal are expected to add an estimated $680 million (2025 dollars) over the next 10 years.”
The good news, of course, is that we have the opportunity to act now. The report also notes that “every dollar invested in proactive adaptation can avoid $13–$15 in recovery costs.” In other words, investments in climate resiliency are among the best the City can make.
This brings me to my first request. The Plan calls for an investment of $25 million over five years for its implementation. We urge you to support this. To take the projection I just cited, this investment would yield from $325 million to $375 million. You’d be hard-pressed to make a better investment—with the possible exception of trees. And to be clear, this should be in addition to the CCMP Capital Fund, which in the last budget was $6 million.
Our second request is also funding-related. This plan should include funding for community groups already doing good work that support the plan’s goals. To take one example, there are groups across the city planting native plants and trees in urban settings, which will increase resilience for biodiversity, prevent erosion, and help with stormwater absorption, to name a few. These groups are maybe a second exception to huge return on investment mentioned earlier: they can stretch a dollar like no other.
Our third request: better plans for wildfire smoke. While the Plan anticipates an admirable range of the disasters we know are coming, we see little to protect people against the effects of wildfire smoke, which have increasingly become a problem in recent years.
We’re pleased to see the acceleration of the Tree-Planting Strategy proposed here, something we’ve called for multiple times in recent months. And we also support the “tree valuation and condition assessments” to quantify the many benefits trees have for climate resiliency.
One final note: the Strategy takes as its touchpoint the Term of Council Priorities, a modest document with minimal public input, rather than the Official Plan, which is enormous and was informed by extensive public input. This is a concerning pattern in Plans lately. Indeed, this Strategy’s lifespan will exceed that of the Term Priorities; it should be indexed to the Official Plan, as should all other documents of this nature.
In closing, we have essentially two options for responding to climate change: on our terms, with modest cost and low risk, or when disaster strikes—as it will, and already has—with high cost and high risk. This strategy offers a clear plan for the former. We encourage you to support it and fund it.
