Building a Resilient Canada - The Expert Panel on Disaster Resilience

Thanks also to the CCA’s Board of Directors and Scientific Advisory Committee, and its founding Academies — the Royal Society of Canada, the Canadian Academy of Engineering, and the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences — for their guidance and oversight throughout the assessment process. [...] The role of the peer review monitor is to ensure that the Panel gives full and fair consideration to the submissions of the peer reviewers. [...] The Panel identified several areas where a lack of information is a challenge in Canada, including the quality and availability of extreme weather records (particularly in remote locations), disaster data, and economic analyses of the costs and benefits of adaptation. [...] The complexity of disaster risks — in terms of the breadth of hazards, the geographic range and jurisdictional scales implicated, the interconnectivity of current systems and potential for cascading impacts, and the multitude of factors influencing exposure and vulnerability — warrants a complex response. [...] Finally, the resilience of communities is linked to the resilience of the ecosystems they depend on; a comprehensive approach to assessing and cultivating resilience includes greater efforts to understand and enhance the resilience of natural systems to the hazards posed by climate change.