Building Community Resilience to Climate Change

Up until a few years ago, my community where I live, like in Burlington, Ontario, you know, in Southern Ontario in Canada, had been pretty resilient or what I thought was pretty resilient when it came to climate change consequences. We hadn't really had many huge storms. We hadn't really had, you know, droughts or anything like that. We were pretty resilient. And up until a couple of years ago, I even said that. I was like, you know, I'm surprised. I mean, we live

in a pretty good place. You know, when you look at what's going on in the world, weather-wise, You know, consequence wise from climate change, we didn't have many floods, you know, although we did have some, but we didn't have many floods, not on an annual basis. We didn't have droughts or forest fires or things like that. A lot of other people were in much worse condition than we are. And to be honest, even today, you know, a lot of people feel

the effects way more. So when I look, when I still look at things, you know, knock on wood, we're pretty, we're pretty decent in terms of what happens with climate change. However, The last two years, we've really noticed some vulnerabilities within our own community resiliency when it came to climate change. And I'm going to talk about what those things are, especially when it comes to rain in the last year and forest fires the year before.

So we're going to talk about why I think climate change resiliency equals community resiliency. And we're going to talk about that on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. Let's start the show. Hey everybody, welcome back to another exciting episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin, and this is the podcast where you find out what's happening with the ocean, how you could speak up for the ocean, what you can do to live for a better ocean by

taking action. And today I wanted to talk about a little thing called a lot of rain, and just sort of vulnerability to climate change. Because my community, my city, was caught in some vulnerabilities. climate change consequences, rain, drought, floods, all those things that happen more and more with climate change, really highlight the vulnerabilities in our community, within our infrastructure, within

things like that. And I find that this past couple of weeks, my community, Burlington, as the city of Burlington in Ontario, and even the region of Halton, really came into some cold, like flooding mess, right? And we had a lot of rain. And what I'm going to talk about today, what this does for a community, how it affects a community, and,

you know, where we need to go from there. But first, I just want to, quick thing I want to do, if you want to find out more news, if you're new to this podcast, you've first found it, I have a newsletter where I send out, Monday to Friday, I send out news on what's happening in the ocean, what's happening in various communities around the world so that you get to know more about what you can do to live for a better ocean or inspired to live for a better ocean.

And so you get that in your inbox. It's really easy to say, it's free to sign up, really easy to do. Just go to speakupforblue.com forward slash newsletter and you can sign up for that newsletter. So that's speakupforblue.com forward slash newsletter and you can sign up for free. I don't do anything with your email other than send you an email Monday to Fridays with my newsletter. We also have jobs there too if you're looking for jobs. But

let's get back to the show. Because I feel like this is something that I've been wanting to talk about for a while because Climate change sucks dude, like it sucks, you know to be able to See communities on TV suffer is one thing. It's awful, you know, and people have you know, many people have lost their lives They lost their lost their livelihoods lost their homes We live in a fairly good city, you know, we're always in the top five cities to live in in Canada I mean we have our problems but

For the most part, we're pretty safe. It's a nice city. It's great people. It's friendly. It's small. Traffic's getting bad, but whatever. Overall, we're doing pretty well. I'm pretty happy with the city that I chose to raise my family. My wife and I chose to raise our family. But over the past couple of years, we've really seen some, I would almost say minor in terms of what climate change can do, but we've seen some effects. And it's hurt some people

more than others. And we need to talk about it because it really starts to talk to our resiliency as a community, as a city, when it comes down to climate change. And if we can, if we want to build climate change resiliency, we have to start noticing our vulnerabilities and be able to change what our city is going to be like in the future and how we plan for the future. So this is, it's going to be an interesting talk. It's gonna be a lot of

local stuff, so I apologize if you're not in the area. But it's something that I've wanted to talk about for a little bit. And up until recently, we've never really had to talk about it because we've never really felt the effects that much within the city. We had a flooding about 10 years ago. And this is one in 10-year storms, one in 100-year storms, but they're happening more frequently. And with the hurricane season coming in a little early with Hurricane Beryl,

the last couple of weeks have been really interesting. uh... starting off with hurricane barrel as many people know hurricane category five uh... coming through the caribbean ripping through islands destroying islands and then coming into the u s through houston and then up through north america up through the US and really into Canada, into Ontario. And we got a really big dump of rain. Not the huge high winds that you saw from Hurricane. It was down to, I think it

was less than a tropical storm. It was just a regular, I think it was squalls, I think it was called. We haven't had squall warnings in a long time. We rarely get them. And so when we had the Hurricane Beryl come through, we had a lot of water in very little time. And we started to see some accumulation of water. My backyard flooded a little bit, as it always does with heavy rains, but then it goes away the next day or within a couple of days. We

started to see roads get a little flooded. People were saying, just watch out. There's certain areas where you go underneath a bridge and the street goes down. That was filled with water for a while. It was just inaccessible for, like I said, maybe a few hours, maybe half a day. It wasn't as bad, and it's kind of like what we'd come to expect. Now, you'd think, we had this 10 years ago, you'd think that, you know, the city or the region

would, or even the province would think about fixing these types of things. It

doesn't seem like it was fixed. I don't have any reports saying that they were trying to fix it or they were doing anything about it, but I have a feeling our city, the way the planning goes for a lot of things, from what I understand, and I could be wrong on a lot of these things, but we plan, you know, with water, we plan on specific storm so one in every ten-year storm, one in every fifty-year storm, one in every hundred-year storm. We're just getting them more often, it seems, and

it is starting to expose what we have. So we had a hurricane barrel come through a couple of weeks ago. Obviously not as bad as what other people had, but like I said, we had some vulnerabilities exposed. Then the rain just kept coming. It would be announced it'd be a beautiful day and then you'd look at your weather app, whatever weather app you had, and then all

of a sudden it's like squall warning. And there'd be this huge, huge storm that would come out of nowhere, lasting for 15 to 20 minutes, half an hour, sometimes an hour. And then it would go away and the skies would just kind of like open up into sunny skies and clouds would go away, blue skies, and then an hour later, we'd get rain again

and then like two hours later we'd get rain again and it would continue to happen. It was almost like very, you know, a lot of people were making the observation that it was very like Florida type weather. You know, it gets so, so hot and then the rain comes and then hot again and then the rain comes and then it kind of eventually cools off. It never really did cool off but we kept getting rain and like heavy rains in

a very small period of time. And so we started to see that accumulation of water and accumulation of water until some neighborhoods in my area had so much water that fridges were floating in their basement. they had to evacuate their homes. There were some areas, one area in particular, where I saw pictures where the water was above the fence line, like a six-foot fence line. It was obviously dangerous. Nobody got hurt, thank God, that I know of. But, you know, people are

affected. I've heard, you know, anecdotal stories of insurance companies not being, not covering the damages because it's a, you know, quote-unquote, act of God or natural disaster, and so they don't, they don't cover that, which is interesting. You pay all that insurance, and then there's always the fine print. But that's devastating. When your home is destroyed, all your personal items

are destroyed. We're not used to this. We don't expect, and I think there is some sort of... assumption that the city is going to protect us, the region and the province is going to protect us from these things. We have engineers, we have a lot of great people, we have planners who do a lot of great work. They work their butt off. They can only work within the legislation, of course, but then there's all these vulnerabilities to these 100-year storms, the 50-year storms,

and we plan those because, hey, you know what? They only happen every once in a while, and we could probably handle those every once in a while. I feel safe here in terms of when flooding happens and stuff. I feel like we're OK. We get a little water in our basement. Some people are out of pocket more than others. But for the most part,

I think most of us before this felt safe. After this, when you see all the damages to homes, you see like cars being like in parking lots, like open parking lots where flooding is coming in. and we're just seeing damages to cars and cars like you can't even see them, you see the top of the roofs. It wakes you up as a city, you know, to say, hey, you know what? We're not immune to climate change. You know, we thought we were, we're not

immune. Last year we had a little bit of a taste of it, literally a little bit of a taste of it with the smoke that was coming down from the forest fires up north in Northern Ontario and Northern Quebec and we got the smoke. You know, we're, you know, we didn't get the fires, you know, that, you know, thank thank the Lord, we didn't, but we, we felt we felt the smoke, you know, our air quality went down, we

started to wear masks again, not because of COVID. We started wearing masks again, some people just because of the air people with asthma had to be careful. You know, we started to see those vulnerabilities in our society. And we had to be more careful of what we do because of the smoke inhalation. It's not good for you.

We don't want to see this. And so, you know, you have, last year, you have this year, what's happened so far this year, there's something that tells me we're just starting this, especially if we're starting to get more hurricane weather that comes up. I think Ontario has only had one hurricane, I think it was in the 1950s, and it devastated us, because obviously we're not built for hurricanes or storms. We get tornadoes in certain parts of Ontario, but not where

I live, it's very rare that we get them. But the thing is, is climate change is bringing this type of weather. And it's erratic. We don't know when it's going to happen. And we don't know how it's going to happen. But people are still fighting it politically. And that'll be for next episode. I want to talk more about that in terms of the communication. But my concern is for the people who are in vulnerable spots in their homes, where they were prone to flooding here, like in the

last couple of weeks. How do they go forward? They could fix their house up again, but to what avail? Do they have to make certain adaptations to be able to stop the water from coming into their place? Do they have to make a large investment in their home to ensure that there's enough drainage around them to not only Get rid of the water, but not flood the area. How is the city going to help? We have an organization called Conservation Halden, which

is a great organization. I'm trying to get an interview with them about this soon, just to be able to talk about it. Because when it comes to cities, we have to make sure that we are resilient. I've had interviews. Just the other day, I had an interview with Rocky from Rare, who's in the Philippines, talking about how Rare and other partners are working with fishing communities to make sure

that they're resilient. Not only can they continue to fish after big storms, but how do they get back up and running if they can't fish right away? Like their marine protected areas have to be protected and they have to be sort of filled back up again and allowed to recoup after a storm. They may not be able to fish again. Well, they have a savings account, a community savings account where they put money in

and they put that together. I guess for us, That's taxes, like here in Canada, like we'd have to have, like we'd have to rely on our city to make the right infrastructure plans and to make sure that we're adaptable and we're resilient to these types of storms in the future. From what I gather, you know, on some of the comments on social media within the city is, do

we feel confident that our politicians can do that? I feel right now that there's some problems there because we weren't resilient according to what I've seen, and this is anecdotal, we aren't resilient now. So how are we going to be resilient in the future? I feel like this is a bit of a wake-up call. When you look at climate resiliency, you look at community resiliency. This is something that we have to ensure we are resilient to

these types of storms. We're going to see these types of storms more often. I know we're in an El Nino year. It's the last year. There's going to be an El Nino year next year. How does that work? I don't really know off the bat. I have to do some research on that. But there's obviously things are going to change. El Nino is going to come back at some point quicker and maybe even worse than before. We're seeing record high

ocean temperatures, which is affecting hurricane season. We don't know what hurricane season is going to be like. It's already started apparently. Normally they say, oh, after June 30 to November 30 or October 30 is the hurricane season. But we never see a category 5 in July or at the end of June. That's sort of new to us. It hasn't happened in a long time. And it seems like it's going to happen more

often now. That's worrisome for Caribbean nations and people in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, Central America, Southern US. But it's also now we have to worry about here in Ontario because that water's coming. That system could come right up the US and right up to Central Ontario. So this makes it, it's a wake up call. And I think it's a wake up call to us a little bit late for us here in Southern Ontario, from what I gather. But

we are also seeing changes locally that worry me. We're starting to see in Ontario more development, more pressure being put on development, and people need more housing. So where do politicians go when they need more housing? They need to build more houses. So where do they go? They go to green spaces. In the province of Ontario, just north of Toronto, there's the green belt. It's a green belt that's protected on purpose. Same with the escarpment. It's a huge,

I guess, feature. Those are both huge features in Ontario that we've decided to protect as a people and we love so much and we've protected them pretty well so far, but it seems like more pressure to build homes seems like there's going to alleviate some of those protections and

put homes in there. There's a big scandal that's been going on for the last couple of years with the Ontario government and a little bit of like, you scratch my back, I scratch yours, you help me get elected, I'll help you provide some space for you to make billions of dollars on homes. That allegedly happened. And there's no recourse, it seems like. There's no consequence for politicians who do that. And

we're starting to see that. We've seen that for years. We're starting to see that more and more. And you look at some of the flooding that happened in Toronto, and you look at the lack of green belt in the first place. There's a reason why we protected it. And you're starting to see like, hey, some of these green spaces are there not only just for beauty and the fact that we love nature, but it's the fact that it helps make ourselves resilient against these big storms. It helps handle, and even

though there might be some flooding, it minimizes that flooding. But it seems like the money and the greed outweigh the protections. And unless we have organizations and communities that step up to our leaders and say, hey, you know what, like, what are we going to do going forward? Like, we're in the situation now, you know, we're developing, City of Burlington is designated as a place to grow in Ontario. We're going to grow and

we're growing. We're putting up, you know, condos left, right and center. We're not expanding our infrastructure in terms of roads. There's lots of traffic now. We have huge problems. If we have a bridge that's close by, if that bridge goes out because of an accident or high winds, the city shuts down, essentially, especially

at rush hour. So there's a lot of problems that we have locally, and we need to help solve those so that when these big storms or these consequences from climate change come up, we're more resilient to them. And that's a thing for planners, and for engineers, and for politicians, and for the community itself to get involved, and no more. I'm not saying

that the work isn't going on. We have some great people, I feel, in our city offices, and I feel like there's a lot of people who are doing some great work out there and trying their best. but they work within the legislation. And sometimes the legislation has to change for us to become more resilient. So it'll be interesting to see what happens to these plans going forward with this community, like my community, being so vulnerable and being identified as so vulnerable.

I have friends, unfortunately, who are in hotels right now because their basement got flooded. It sucks. It sucks to see them go through that. And so it really sucks when you see a community who's not close, close, but a city that you love, that you live in, go through such a tough time. And obviously, I'm getting it late. I've been privileged to be able to live in a community where we haven't really seen that much damage from climate change. But we just

got exposed. And I think a lot of people do get exposed. And it's what we do after that will help. So I'm hoping to have some people on the podcast that will be more local. But the idea is, yes, this is like, you know, I'm trying to get answers as well. But it's also to show you like you can get answers, you know, and it's good to seek answers. It's good to get educated within your own community to do things. It doesn't necessarily

mean you have to get involved in government, although it would be helpful. But it's also just as a community member, you should know that you have the

right to understand what the plans are. to talk to your city councils, councillors, to talk to your mayor, to talk to sort of if you have a conservation authority or an organization that's environmental like even, you know, there's people here like that work for non-profit organizations who know a lot about this type of stuff and why we're flooding and why you know, we can be vulnerable and where we can be more resilient in certain areas and what we need to do about it and how we

can do something about it as a community. So that's sort of what I want to kind of get out today. You know, it's been a really tough couple of weeks for my city and here in the city of Burlington, and it really sucks. Luckily, you know, we've had minimal damage from the storm, but, you know, We're

fine now, but you never know in the future. So this shows that just because I do an interview with somebody in the Philippines, like Rocky, who's great and doing great work there and making sure that we're resilient in those small island states, doesn't mean that back here in a developed country, we're not exposed to vulnerabilities when we hit some of these climate change consequences. And I feel like

that's something that we need to build on. around the world, not only in places like the Philippines and beautiful places like that, but also here in my city, in my country, in my province, and go from there. So I'd love to hear if you have any, you know, ideas of working with counselors, working with local officials, engineers, things like that, to get more information. I'd love to hear from you. If you can hit me up on Instagram, at

howtoprotecttheocean. I'd love to hear wherever you are in the world. I'd love to hear your experience with trying to get answers and what kind of answers you've been able to get or even have had struggled to get answers from. I'd love to hear your feelings on that. Hit me up on Instagram, DM me at

howtoprotecttheocean. And of course, if you want to sign up for that newsletter to get more information on what's happening, updates on what I'm doing, and updates on the podcast, you can sign up if you just go speakupforblue.com forward slash newsletter. That's speakupforblue.com forward slash newsletter. Thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. Have