Climate adaptation and confronting multiple hazards—all at once—is now a necessity, not a choice. What used to be predictable is now uncertain. Disaster risk reduction is no longer a linear process of preparation, response, recovery, and mitigation. Rather, it is a continuous, overlapping, and iterative cycle, requiring attention to proactive adaptation, “building back better,” prevention rather than mitigation, systemic interconnections, and equitable approaches.
P4A Director, Sharmalene Mendis-Millard, at ICLEI Canada's Livable Cities Forum 2024 in Vancouver, BC (Photo credit: Laura Harvey)
"Communities are facing cascading and compounding climate hazards, with severe weather events and costs growing exponentially. Insurance losses alone in 2024 broke records at $8.5 billion from 273K claims. Comparatively, the losses were $3.6 billion in 2023 and $3.5 billion in 2022. These figures only capture a slice of the full range of social, mental, physical, and economic impacts borne by communities in both the short and long terms—with some more impacted than others.
To meet this moment, Partners for Action (P4A) evolved to take an equity-informed, multi-hazard approach to advancing community resilience—a focus that is reflected in our activities over recent years.
We built momentum with new partnerships, widened engagement, and increased student opportunities. We leveraged our core funding to build relationships, high-performing teams of staff and students, and a reputation for community-centered climate equity work, which enabled us to secure further funding for applied research—including an international partnership on managed retreat.
In this post-COVID period, we saw rising costs for construction and retrofits due to inflation, supply chain issues, and labour shortages, rising insurance premiums, and insurance policies starting to be denied in high-risk areas. These and other factors have resulted in post-disaster reconstruction challenges, and Canada experiencing a housing crisis at the same time as feeling the effects of the climate crisis. We now see an urgent need for climate resilient affordable housing in low-risk areas.
P4A’s contributions to helping address these issues range from research on disproportionate impacts of disasters and socioeconomic vulnerability indices for flood risk mapping, to cross-sectoral convenings and creating public resources, such as a database of multi-hazard resilient retrofits that has fed a national platform. The results demonstrate what is possible when research, policy, and practice are aligned.
Significant shifts at the federal level to focus on flood risk reduction and adaptation have been welcome, with a commitment to a national flood insurance program (2023), greater investment in the Flood Hazard Identification and Mapping Program (FHIMP, for 2024-2028), and the launch of a National Adaptation Strategy (2024). A wave of funding (e.g., Natural Resources Canada’s Climate Change Adaptation Program; the Federation of Canadian Municipalities’ Green Municipal Fund Local Leadership for Adaptation) has led to an explosion of capacity building initiatives. A new Canadian Centre for Recovery and Resilience formed out of a partnership between Public Safety Canada and the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, and not-for-profits like ICLEI Canada, Climate Caucus and Tamarack Institute have developed convenings and programming to build adaptive and resilient communities.
Despite these strides, the work ahead remains urgent; flood and climate resiliency with an equity lens is more pressing than ever. Climate-related disasters are intensifying, with communities across Canada experiencing lethal heatwaves, unprecedented flooding, prolonged droughts, and severe wildfire seasons. Meeting this challenge requires sustained attention to equity, particularly for those made vulnerable by systemic barriers. Building on the work P4A and others have done, initiatives such Waterloo Climate Institute’s Municipal Climate Adaptation Certificate, and the Climate Equity Lab, led by Gore Mutual with Co-operators, York University and Social Innovation Canada, provide promising avenues.
Reflecting on the past 10 years, P4A played an instrumental role in catalyzing innovative, collaborative research and convening stakeholders across Canada as a leader in whole-of-society flood resiliency. The work achieved through P4A — raising awareness, advancing equity-driven planning, and promoting actionable climate adaptation strategies —stands as a testament to the power of partnerships, applied research and stakeholder engagement that P4A has become known for.
I am proud of the work we have done under the P4A umbrella, catalyzed by the support and thought leadership of Co-operators and Farm Mutual Re, and enabled by building high-performing teams of staff and students with the capacity to do collaborative work. After 10 years of impact, the work will continue through projects we began or supported at University of Waterloo, and through the people who gained applied research experience and have gone on to influence research, policy and practice elsewhere – P4A's true legacy."
Sharmalene Mendis-Millard
Director, Partners for Action (2023-2025)
Adjunct Faculty, University of Waterloo