Previous Project Assistants
Profiles by Riley Tjosvold
Three recent University of Alberta graduates share their experiences in the Adaptation Resilience Training
Are you wondering if extreme weather is becoming more frequent or intense? You may know people who fled 2020’s California wildfires, or maybe you donated to help out after 2019’s big floods in Eastern Canada—or maybe you experienced extreme weather personally in Calgary or Fort McMurray.
While floods and fires are part of normal cycles, climate change is making some extreme weather worse. And even in the best case, Canada’s climate will continue to warm for at least the next two decades.
So while it’s crucial we continue to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases that cause global warming, it’s clear that we also need to adapt: we must protect people and communities from the negative impacts of a changing climate.
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Sonak PatelPartner Organization: City of Calgary (Municipal government) Project: Climate Risk and Resilience |
About the Project: Neighbourhoods that are close enough to share a postal code won’t experience shockwaves from the climate crisis with equal intensity.
A street lined with trees offers more shade to keep yards and sidewalks cool on hot days than one without. A block filled with plants will resist flooding more easily than one made almost entirely of concrete. A community with older residents, who are more likely to suffer from heat strokes, dehydration and death in extreme temperatures, will struggle more than parts of a city with younger residents.
These uneven climate change impacts are what the City of Calgary wanted to explore when it hired MSc in Risk and Community Resilience graduate Sonak Patel as a project assistant for its Climate Adaptation team.
“My project is working on community climate risk profiles,” Patel said. “We have an index of the roughly 300 communities in Calgary with a dashboard of different indicators that estimate each community’s unique climate risk. I combine that work with urban heat island analysis, natural asset mapping and some equity indicators to detail specific drivers of climate risk and quantify what that risk is.”
Sonak and his colleagues investigate differences in demographics, infrastructure health, and natural infrastructure, such as trees and other vegetation, across Calgary’s communities. By understanding which areas need the most attention, they can prepare Calgary’s neighbourhoods for heat waves, droughts, floods, and other looming environmental crises.
“The reason I think this work is critical is that we have limited time to address climate change, and I think we also have pretty limited resources,” Sonak said. “In a hypothetical community, if stormwater flooding isn’t a huge impact, but extreme heat is, then with a limited amount of budget, we should be focusing on providing shading to spaces and providing access to drinking water. If we took a very broad approach and tried to deal with all hazards at the same time, we’d quickly run out of resources to be able to do so.”
Sonak said that his biggest learning experiences since joining the City of Calgary have been understanding how quickly climate change strategies are evolving, and how much the impacts of climate change will vary between different groups of people due to factors such as access to climate resilience resources, information, and supports, and the physical condition of different neighbourhoods.
“This is going to be the challenge of multiple generations,” he said. “If there’s something important I’m going to do in my life, it’s going to be related to this issue. And getting into adaptation has been very eye-opening. Even in the best-case scenario, we will experience dramatic changes. We need to be prepared for them, and in many ways, we are not prepared.”
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Taylor TulissiPartner Organization: Town of Okotoks (Municipal government) Project: Climate Change Hazard Assessment and Adaptation Implementation |
About the project: A 2018 greenhouse gas inventory for the southern Alberta town of Okotoks found that 45 per cent of the community’s greenhouse gas emissions came from buildings.
Although all new municipal buildings in Okotoks are certified LEED Gold—the second highest grade given by the world’s most widely used green building rating system—new, single family detached homes do not have to meet any environmental standard.
That’s why, when the town created its climate action plan, it knew that future homes would have to be more energy efficient, less of a drain on other valuable resources such as water, and able to withstand the extreme weather and temperature changes we are beginning to see worldwide.
The community hired ART intern Taylor Tulissi to help make Okotoks homes more sustainable and climate secure.
“I’ve lived in Okotoks for most of my life, so it’s cool that I’ve been able to work here,” said Tulissi, a recent Bachelor of Science in Environmental Science graduate who studied at the University of British Columbia. “My main job was to design green building standards for the town’s future development, so I’ve researched how other municipalities have implemented green building guidelines and worked to understand what Okotoks wants to get out of the guidelines.”
Tulissi found that some home builders in the community had already adopted third party green building programs, and suggested that a first step could be to encourage other developers in the community to follow these builders’ lead. She also ranked the green building guidelines of municipalities around Canada based on how well they would work for Okotoks. The Town of Whitby in Southern Ontario came in first place, so Tulissi met with the project manager behind Whitby’s guidelines to see how they could be adopted by Okotoks.
“To meet climate goals, we have to collaborate, not compete,” she said.
The town of Okotoks aims to implement the green building standards by 2033, but Tulissi said that it could have them in place well before that year.
“People are interested in sustainability here; people love to be part of the change,” she said. “You’d think that’s kind of opposite from a small town in southern Alberta, but there is an open mindedness here. And something as big as green building guidelines, I think everyone is on the same page, and we can frame it in a way that we’re helping the community, residents, and industry.”
Although Tulissi may be gone from her position with the town by the time the building guidelines are in place, she said she feels as though her work has made a difference.
“The guidelines might not be specifically how I suggested them, but I know the research I did has been super helpful for envisioning how they could work.”
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Jayranjan MauryaPartner Organization: City of Calgary (Municipal government) Project: Green Infrastructure's Role in Municipal Climate Adaptation |
About the Project: Natural spaces, with trees, grass, ponds and other green features, improve the aesthetic of urban environments, but they are more than just decoration. They provide a barrier against flooding, shade from heat, and habitat for urban wildlife, and they store carbon dioxide, slowing down climate change.
On top of these important ecological functions, green spaces also save cities money.
How much money? That’s what Jayranjan Omranjan Maurya, a second-year Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering student, has been trying to calculate for the City of Edmonton.
“We generated a dollar value for natural assets in the city, like trees, grasslands, water bodies and wetlands,” Maurya said. “Then we created a model that shows you how much money you lose if you cut down, for example, one tree, or remove a forest or grassland.”
Green spaces save cities money by reducing the need to build flood-preventing infrastructure, keeping air conditioning costs lower, and lowering costs associated with carbon taxes and protecting endangered species.
But removing green spaces can make cities money too. Mowing down a forest creates room for new residential and business developments, and cities can harvest natural resources on urban land.
So is it worth it to keep removing nature in and around Edmonton?
Not after 2025, according to Maurya. In three years, adjusting for inflation and factoring in the carbon pricing, the city will lose money every time it removes green space to make room for development.
“If we clear one hectare of forest it will take 6.2 years to make up the value that we lost in one year by cutting that forest down,” Maurya said.
“Our economy is based on infrastructure. We cannot just eliminate all the buildings and plant trees, but if you don’t want to increase the cost, if you don’t want to reduce the lifestyle of humans and different components of our environment, then a balance is needed.”
Maurya thinks that if the city maintains its current green space coverage, whether by converting more areas into green space or by not allowing new developments to be built on natural land, it can avoid the growing costs of removing forests, grasslands and wetlands.
“I think my work will be useful to prove the value of these natural assets,” Maurya said. “Policies can be built with these numbers in mind.”
Meet The Preppers
Four University of Alberta graduates share their experiences in the Adaptation Resilience Training
Profiles by Olivia DeBourcier
Are you wondering if extreme weather is becoming more frequent or intense? You may know people who fled 2020’s California wildfires, or maybe you donated to help out after 2019’s big floods in Eastern Canada—or maybe you experienced extreme weather personally in Calgary or Fort McMurray.
While floods and fires are part of normal cycles, climate change is making some extreme weather worse. And even in the best case, Canada’s climate will continue to warm for at least the next two decades.
So while it’s crucial we continue to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases that cause global warming, it’s clear that we also need to adapt: we must protect people and communities from the negative impacts of a changing climate.
University of Alberta student Olivia DeBourcier spoke with four project assistants to get to know their projects and find out what they’ve learned about community resilience in Alberta.
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Mackenzie MacKayPartner Organization: QUEST Canada (Non Government Organization) Project: Climate Vulnerability and Resilience in Power Systems |
About Mackenzie: Mackenzie Mackay did her Bachelor of Arts Honours at Queen’s University in geography and environmental studies. She recently completed her master’s at the University of Alberta, focusing on an energy security project in Tuktoyaktuk and working with Indigenous youth to figure out how climate action can be a mechanism for capacity development.
What got her interested in sustainability? “My grandfather was a really big outdoorsman. And we'd go for walks when I was little and he’d point out all the birds and stuff. And in high school, I had an awesome science teacher who exposed me to environmental science and sustainability, and sort of how to take that love for the environment and turn it into a career.”
About the Project: She’s been collaborating with four municipalities to understand how climate change is impacting them and threatening their energy systems.
Mackay’s partner organization, QUEST Canada, works from a largely socio-political perspective to accelerate the adoption of community-scale energy systems. For this project, they conducted workshops in four municipalities, with Mackay leading two of them. Within Big Lake County, Black Diamond, Raymond, and Ponoka, they worked with municipal staff, elected officials, and utility representatives to determine the municipalities’ energy challenges and vulnerabilities.
“If there was a massive ice storm or something, and a bunch of power lines were cut off, does your hospital have backup power to provide those essential services? Do the senior citizens homes have backup power in the winter? And if they don't, what plans do you have in place to make sure those people are safe? So it's both the technical infrastructure as well as the social and the planning lens.”
Mackay’s next step will be identifying ways to improve the municipalities’ resilience by doing a climate risk assessment. She will then recommend ways to build on the capacities and resources different communities already possess to reduce their risk.
According to Mackay, a strength of small municipalities is their ability to provide support for other members of their community when disastrous events occur. Some are also well equipped with emergency preparedness plans and emergency response drills. “But up to this point, there hasn't been a huge focus on things from a climate change lens or resilience lens,” said Mackay. “It's an emergency kind of lens that they're looking at these things.”
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John Paul LelisPartner Organization: City of Calgary (Municipal government) Project: Climate Adaptation in Infrastructure |
About John Paul: John Paul Lelis graduated from the University of Alberta with a BSc in Civil Engineering and is now completing a masters in Structural Engineering.
What got him interested in sustainability: “I grew up in a place where you could see people just throwing their trash anywhere. Without any regard for Mother Nature. And with climate change, in the Philippines we also experienced strong storms more often. I wanted to make a change. As cheesy as it sounds, I wanted to have a career where I could make a positive change.”
About his project: Adapting to climate change not only involves being aware of the likelihood of more extreme weather events, but also making sure that our buildings are built in a way that anticipates climate change’s effects.
John Paul Lelis is passionate about sustainable building design and is working with the City of Calgary to review their building codes to see if they can stand up to the test of climate change.
“We're really designing for historical conditions right now,” said Lelis. “And we are looking to see how climate change would affect how we should be designing our infrastructure.”
Lelis’ project will determine best practices and standards considering what our future built environments might look like.
While the practice is helpful to see what components go into building design, Lelis says that what would benefit municipal infrastructure most in the long run would be to consider sustainable and resilient design on a systems level.
“I think it's really important for everyone to think about adapting to potentially new normals in the future,” said Lelis. “ And the job that I'm doing is adapting infrastructure. Whether it's homes or transportation, infrastructure or buildings.”
Lelis hopes to bring his passion for sustainable buildings into the field of building design.
“I want to make our buildings more resilient and more environmentally friendly.”
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Amanda RooneyPartner Organization: Battle River Watershed Alliance (Non-Profit Society) Project: Climate Change and Watershed Health |
About Amanda: Amanda Rooney did her BA in Environmental Studies with a Certificate in Community Service-Learning at the University of Alberta.
What got her interested in sustainability? “I think the first kick into sustainability was my Community Service-Learning placement with Sustainable Food Edmonton and my agriculture and resource economics course AREC 173 with Brent Swallow. And then I think the second kick was going to study in the Netherlands. I was like, ‘Oh, boy, they've got a lot of really good ideas’.”
About the Project: For Amanda Rooney, examining the health of the Battle River Watershed and how it might be affected by climate change requires a holistic approach.
“What I've realized from doing this work is that there are huge benefits to looking at health from a watershed perspective,” said Rooney.
Rooney and her organization are grading the health of the watershed using indicators ranging from biodiversity to personal well-being to community health. They take into account the economy and land management as aspects of community health.
“We're pretty familiar with Alberta’s boom and bust cycles,” said Rooney. “Health is really tied to that. Whether it be mental health or even food security. If you don't have enough money to put food on the table, then that can impact your health. Or it can impact the way that you're able to manage the land.”
Taking an integrated approach to watershed health allows for the consideration of many factors in environmental health, but the approach also requires rigorous research.
“I think we take our water for granted,” said Rooney. “It seems like we could be doing quite a bit better, but I think there's just maybe not the pressure here as in like the United States or like places in Europe.”
Rooney notes that one of the things she’s realized through her project is that we don’t really know how much groundwater exists in Alberta’s reserves. Given that the Battle River’s headwaters are ground-fed, it’s hard to know how climate–change-related precipitation changes could impact the availability of water.
The end goal of the project is to create resources for stakeholders like farmers, municipal governments, and community groups that explain what watershed impacts they might expect from the effects of climate change.
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Hana AmburyPartner Organization: Alberta Land Institute Project: Resilience and Environmental Risk Program |
About Hana: Hana Ambury graduated from the University of Alberta’s BSc Environmental and Conservation Science program with a major in the Human Dimensions of Environmental Management.
What got her interested in sustainability? “I was always interested in the human aspect of environmental issues. I volunteered for the Sustainable Food Working Group throughout my undergrad and I also did a research project looking at environmental policy.”
About the project: When disasters hit, like the floods in Canmore or the fire in Fort McMurray, cities must rebuild. But how do those disasters influence the way cities adapt as they rebuild ?
As a project assistant to Sandeep Agrawal, Ambury is helping to research how communities approach this issue. A big part of the work involves looking at whether communities are communicating risk management plans and adaptation strategies to current and prospective residents.
The Alberta Land Institute is a research institute at the University of Alberta that works to inform public debate and decision making about land use topics.
“The project is exciting because planning is something that I'm interested in doing in the future,” said Ambury. “It's kind of just interesting to be exposed to something that's totally different than what we did in undergrad.”
Ambury says that despite the seemingly increasing number of natural disasters impacting cities, there is little recent research on how that impacts people’s decisions to buy homes.
According to her, this work will ultimately be a part of The Alberta Land Institute knowledge mobilization webinars and materials for policymakers. She hopes the information will guide how future policy makers communicate risks and adaptation strategies to their community residents.
“I think the next step is that I want to do a master's in community planning, kind of focused on climate change planning or food systems planning,” said Ambury.