Climate Adaptation Planning for Manitoba Communities

From Impacts to Actions

“From Impacts to Actions” is a collection of three guides designed to help Manitoba municipalities and communities in completing the adaptation planning process. Developed by the International Institute for Sustainable Development and supported by the Government of Manitoba Climate Action and Energy Innovation Division (CAEID), these guides provide a comprehensive walkthrough of each stage of the climate adaptation process.

The Climate Adaptation Workbook for Manitoba Communities accompanies these guides, offering 19 worksheets to support communities through every stage of the adaptation planning journey.

Stages 1 & 2

Stage 1: Starting the process: Considerations for adaptation planning describes how to prepare for an adaptation planning process. You will need to take steps like raising awareness of climate change, explaining the need for an adaptation plan and confirming the plan’s scope and objectives. Then, you will work on building a team; identifying knowledge keepers, funding agencies and peers; finalizing a work plan; and creating a community profile.

Stage 2: The climate vulnerability and risk assessment (CVRA) guides you to think about how climate change will impact your community. You will think about how to identify, evaluate and prioritize climate change risks. This stage will help you decide how to manage those risks and which risks to focus on first.

For support completing Stages 1 and 2, refer to:

	Climate Vulnerability and Risk Assessment Guidance for Manitoba Communities (CVRA Guide) Helps identify a community’s climate risks and actions that will reduce the risk and severity of these risks.
	How to Use the Climate Atlas of Canada Provides step-by-step instructions to gather climate projections that can be used in the CVRA process.

For further resources and training videos to support stage 2, visit the MCRT Capacity Enhancement in Vulnerability and Risk Assessment (CEVRA) Project page.

Stages 3-5

Stage 3: Adaptation planning helps you create a plan to address your climate risks in order of priority. You will think about the timeline, costs, resources, team and more.

Stage 4: Implementation describes how to put your plan into action. You will think about getting approval from decision-makers, finding funds to pay for the work and adding your plan to municipal budgets and policies. This stage is iterative to include improved climate change knowledge and reflect changes in your community.

Stage 5: Monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) helps you evaluate your plan’s progress and effectiveness. You will use the tools in this stage and new information about climate risk to update your adaptation plan on a regular basis. Information gathered through MEL activities produces important insights that help with the ongoing learning of what works (or does not work) and how to regularly revisit and improve the implementation of the adaptation plan.

For support completing Stages 3, 4 & 5, refer to:

The Adaptation Planning Guidebook for Manitoba Communities: From Impacts to Actions Helps identify actions that will reduce the anticipated impacts of climate change on communities and their residents.

Climate Adaptation Workbook

In addition to the “From Impacts to Actions” resources, the Climate Adaptation Workbook for Manitoba Communities provides 19 worksheets to guide communities through the adaptation planning stages as outlined above.  Each worksheet is associated with a planning step in the CVRA Guide and the Adaptation Planning Guidebook.

These resources were developed as part of the Manitoba Climate Resilience Training (MCRT) Program.

The MCRT program was developed to increase the knowledge and capacity of local decision-makers, economic sectors and communities for adaptation planning. Adaptation initiatives focused on building climate resilience through agriculture, infrastructure, health, emergency management organization, water & natural resources.

From 2018 to 2022, the MCRT started as a cost-shared project supported by Natural Resources Canada through its Building Regional Adaptation Capacity and Expertise (BRACE) program and the Government of Manitoba – Climate Action and Energy Innovation Division (CAEID). MCRT’s subsequent phases were solely funded by the latter.