2026 CRHNet Symposium

As Canadian communities navigate rising disasters and climate impacts, limited staff capacity, and growing expectations for transparent, defensible decision making, the need for fit-for-purpose risk assessment approaches has never been more pressing. Climate and disaster risks are becoming increasingly complex and interconnected. Local governments face pressure to assess risks with accuracy and confidence yet often struggle with too much information in some areas and not enough in others. This raises a fundamental question. What type of risk assessment is appropriate for the decision context, and how much information is actually required to support responsible action.
Risk assessment methods vary widely in assumptions, data needs, and application. Some approaches emphasize local knowledge and context. Others prioritize structured analysis and precision. Each offers strengths and limitations. This ninety-minute session invites participants to explore how these methods shape understanding and decision making.
Using a fictional community, participants are divided into groups and given either a traditional or systems based assessment. Through a structured worksheet, groups examine the type and depth of questions can they can answer, the decisions it can support, and the assumptions it relies on. This creates a reflective and applied learning experience where the focus is on evaluating the method itself rather than performing technical calculations.
A comparative dialogue follows, where insights, limitations, and implications are shared across groups. Together we explore how capacity, governance, consultant involvement, and organizational culture influence the selection and effectiveness of different approaches.
The session will highlight:
• When and how qualitative and quantitative methods can be leveraged
• How capacity and process design shape assessment results
• Practical strategies for integrating risk information into plans and operations

Pre-disaster recovery planning helps communities strategically plan for recovery before a disaster occurs. These efforts facilitate timely and strategic recovery, and helps align investments made during recovery with community priorities. Further, pre-disaster recovery facilitates timely recovery that can reduce the long-term impacts of disasters, minimize costs and support more equitable recovery outcomes.
Pre-disaster recovery lays out the vision, governance and organizational structures, as well as the priorities, and roles and responsibilities for recovery.

This workshop will walk participants through the steps needed to develop a recovery plan, the partners to include, and the resources available for communities. Collectively, these steps are designed to set communities up for a more effective recovery that improves resilience and reduces risk.
Participants will be introduced to the essential components of pre-disaster recovery planning and guided through two scenario-based activities. The first interactive activity will walk participants through the process of creating a recovery vision. The second activity will help participants understand how to organize recovery into thematic sectors for a whole-of-society approach to disaster resilience. This engagement session can be brought back to communities to run in their own communities.

This session aligns with theme as throughout the session, facilitators will encourage participants to consider how the vision and proposals of recovery actors will reflect the voices of communities that may face barriers to participation, including newcomers, seniors and those experiencing homelessness – a core component of pre-disaster recovery planning.

A storytelling session centering on insights in leadership and intergenerational emergency management. In this session, participants will have the opportunity to learn from the lived experiences and intergenerational perspectives of First Nations youth, mentors, and Elders from across Turtle Island. This interactive workshop will cover topics and offer resources to support participants in their own work and leadership development within community emergency preparedness. Throughout the session, a strong focus will be placed on the importance of mentorship, as well as peer-to-peer and community-to-community learning, as means to further strengthen intergenerational emergency management.

Facilitators:
John Leonard has been fighting fires for 40 years. Through the watchfulness that he developed over the years connected to his ancestral relationship to the land, he can read the landscape and fire behaviours in a way one watches an old friend. John is actively involved with the Interior Salish Firekeepers Society, contributing to a growing movement of Indigenous Knowledge Keepers and fire ecologists who are reviving the traditional practice of cultural burning. By advocating and building support networks for cultural land management practices, the future generations of Fire Keepers will be built. John is a Mentor with Preparing Our Home.

Sheri Lysons is a Secwepemc leader, Daughter, Mother, Grandmother, and former Fire Chief, Adams Lake Indian Band. As the Fire Chief, she led a diverse Fire Department, made up of youth, women and men, Indigenous and non-Indigenous Peoples working together. The team was formed during the 2021 Sparks Lake wildfire, which coincided with the ongoing pandemic and the discovery of 215 children near the Kamloops Indian Residential School. Through her work with Elders, youth and culture, Sheri fosters reconciliation in action, advancing trauma-informed approaches to building community safety capacity across ages. In 2023, as part of the Preparing Our Home matriarch team, Sheri was announced as a recipient of the Women, Peace, and Security Civil Society Leadership Award. Sheri is a Mentor and Board Director for Preparing Our Home.

Astokomii Smith is from the Siksika First Nation. Her Blackfoot name means “Calling Thunder.” In 2018, she attended the Preparing Our Home program herself. Following which, Astokomii took the knowledge and skills in emergency preparedness and disaster resilience that she had gained from the program, and together with her grandmother, Elder Darlene Yellow Old Woman-Munro, planned and facilitated a Preparing Our Home workshop for youth in their home community of Siksika First Nation rooted in intergenerational emergency management. As the Indigenous Liaison for the Town of Strathmore, she has been helping build bridges and break down the barriers between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Peoples. Astokomii was the 2019 Calgary Stampede First Nations Princess, and she used her platform to raise awareness for mental health, specifically anxiety. From being scared to speak in front of a classroom to speaking in front of 30,000 people during the Grand Stand Show, she is showing others that it is okay to have difficult feelings, mental health issues are not a weakness, and that she is happy to share her coping mechanisms. Astokomii is a youth mentor with Preparing Our Home.

Aaliyah Calliou is an artist, hockey fan, and Youth Leader from Whitefish Lake First Nation #459. They have represented Preparing Our Home during previous conference workshops as a facilitator, including at the 2024 Assembly of First Nations Emergency Management Forum, where they shared stories and advice for intergenerational emergency management. Drawing on their lived experience with evacuations, they have been involved in the Preparing Our Home projects, such as the development “Aunties’ advice for safer evacuations”. Aaliyah is a 2023 Preparing Our Home graduate.

Lily Yumagulova is a Bashkir woman and an immigrant and settler in Canada. Lily’s academic and professional background includes emergency management, risk analysis, and a PhD in resilience planning. Within emergency management, Lily brings over 20 years of experience in government, NGOs, media, Indigenous communities, and international organizations in Europe and North America. She is the Program Director for the Preparing Our Home Program. 

Networking and refreshments 

The session will be structured as a 60-minute interactive workshop in which participants actively play a shortened version of the 'Just' Flood Resilience Co-op (JFRC) serious game. The session will begin with a brief introduction outlining the need for more inclusive and culturally grounded approaches in flood governance, particularly in relation to minoritized ethnic communities. This short framing will introduce the concept of serious games (games with an objective more than mere entertainment)  as participatory tools that can support learning, dialogue, and reflection on complex disaster risk reduction challenges.

Participants will then be organized into small groups and guided through a facilitated gameplay session using selected scenarios from the JFRC game. Through gameplay, participants will take on decision-making roles and engage with governance dilemmas, resource constraints, and justice trade-offs commonly encountered in urban flood resilience planning. The game mechanics encourage discussion, negotiation, and collaborative problem-solving as players respond to evolving flood risk scenarios.

During the activity, the facilitator will periodically pause gameplay to prompt brief reflections and highlight how the scenarios mirror real governance tensions around participation, resource allocation, and recognition of diverse community needs. This allows participants to connect the game experience with broader questions about equity, resilience, and decision-making in flood risk management.

The session will conclude with a short group reflection and discussion, where participants share insights from the gameplay and consider how serious games could be used in their own professional or community contexts. This format emphasizes experiential learning, peer exchange, and critical reflection, offering participants a practical introduction to serious gaming as a tool for engaging diverse stakeholders in conversations about flood resilience and justice.

Day after day, emergency managers in Canada prepare for, respond to, and help communities recover from and mitigate various types of hazards, some of which overlap or require long-term activation of emergency operation centres. This group of practitioners experience varying types and degrees of stress, require extraordinary coping skills as well as access to enabling systems and helpful interventions to perform their duties in ways that maintain their own well-being. Unsurprisingly, stress, including harmful outcomes such as trauma, burnout and compassion fatigue are common in the emergency management profession and can result in significant health consequences, early or premature departure from the job, and as a result, a potential reduction in community safety. Despite this, little attention has been paid to date in research on the experiences of stress (acute and chronic) in the Canadian emergency management context, or how, for example, demands of work, role structure and extra-organizational factors contribute to individual pressures and strain.
 
This session aims to initiate conversations with EM representatives / stakeholders from across the country about stress and its related features. The goal is to help normalize occupational stress as a shared human experience, to reflect on personal stress experiences in anonymized ways and without oversharing, and to learn about different strategies in place for coping, or helpful resources from peers (in the room). 

Previously hazard, risk and vulnerability analyses (HRVA) were primarily focused on the hazards, calculating some sort of probability, and the risk to buildings and infrastructure. As the concept of community resiliency has reached greater acceptance, the need to address the vulnerability of community residents and visitors has also gained prominence.
Recent "Requests for Proposals" have stressed the need to consider the vulnerability of people and there are numerous checklists for identifying vulnerability pre-, during and post-disaster. Today, someone may not be considered vulnerable, but if tomorrow they break their leg, they would be classified as medically vulnerable. Clearly, some people are more likely to be severely impacted than others, but is not anyone who is exposed to a hazard, at some point, vulnerable to its impact?
If someone has a strong support network, regardless of whether they are medically compromised, if English/French is a secondary language, are female, young, or older, they may really be quite resilient. Vulnerability, by definition focuses on the weaknesses, resiliency, or an asset-based approach leads us to focus on the strengths. Is it time to replace "vulnerability" with "resiliency" and focus on identifying community strengths, ways to build social networks, and address the root causes of community deficits that lead to some being disproportionately impacted by disasters?
This interactive, and intentionally provocative, presentation introduces examples of how vulnerability is presented in requests for HRVA proposals, reports and findings and will challenge participants to consider and discuss how shifting the focus to a strength-based approach can better support a stronger disaster and emergency management program.

This session examines how meteorologists collect, interpret, and translate weather and impact information into actionable insights for emergency managers, municipalities, and the public—supporting disaster risk reduction today and into the future. Through recent examples of weather‑related emergencies, including flooding, extreme heat, and potential wildfire events, we will explore how data and meteorological intelligence has been communicated, adapted, and operationalized.
 
As social science increasingly shapes how risk and uncertainty are understood, and as global practice shifts toward impact‑informed alerting, we will discuss the evolving role of Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) in communicating weather risk. The session will outline ECCC’s future direction, emphasizing strengthened partnerships, improved communication pathways, and a growing focus on emergency preparedness to enhance resilience across Canada’s diverse communities.

This series of lightning talks explores how we understand the systems, structures, and risk perceptions that shape disaster risk reduction. Across two parallel themes, the talks examine both the architecture of disaster risk reduction systems and the ways emergency managers transform information into meaningful action.

Theme A: Exploring Disaster Risk Reduction Systems
Theme B: Turning Insight into Action

The lightning talks will be followed by roundtable discussions, where participants and speakers will gather in small groups to explore the provocative questions raised in the lightning talks. These conversations offer space for exploration, dialogue, and deeping deeper into the systems and decision‑making processes that shape disaster risk reduction.

In Theme A: Exploring DRR Systems, speakers look at how disaster risk reduction systems function in practice, from legislation and municipal barriers to command structures and cascading hazards. These talks surface the challenges embedded in disaster risk reduction systems and consider how deeper understanding can drive more effective outcomes.

In Theme B: Turning Insight Into Action, speakers focus on how emergency managers convert information into impact. Through AI‑driven intelligence, risk visualization, operational learning, and hazard‑specific education, these talks explore how insight becomes better decisions, stronger programs, and more effective preparedness.

Under the Accessible Canada Act of 2019, Accessibility Standards Canada was created as a national accredited standards council recognized by National Standards of Canada. The organization develops and implements accessibility standards and provides grants for research studies to assist with making Canada barrier-free by 2040. The main standard of discussion will be on the federal standards on emergency measures.

This lightning talk explores the Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) system as a value chain, visualized as a landscape of “mountains of expertise” (such as EMOs, academia, private sector, and community organizations). Each mountain represents significant value … knowledge, capacity, and experience. However, between these peaks are “valleys of death” where value and innovation are often lost if there are no strong connections between organizations.


The talk will focus on the importance of building “bridges” across these valleys … developing effective partnerships and working relationships that enable the flow of knowledge, resources, and innovation across the DRR value chain.

This tech demo will showcase how modern data tools can help departments move from reactive response to proactive risk reduction—supporting decisions about prevention programs, resource allocation, and community safety initiatives. By making risk visible and defensible, platforms like Darkhorse Risk can help Canadian communities align stakeholders, prioritize investments in prevention, and build more resilient systems for disaster risk reduction.

Using extreme heat as an example of a climate impact that often intersects with other hazards (e.g., wildfires), this presentation will provide an overview of the scenario-based stress-testing method, supporting evidence, practical examples, and tools and guidance available to support its use.
 
Scenario-based stress-testing is an emerging evidence-based method that allows health authorities and others to consider future impacts of climate change to health, health systems and health supporting systems (e.g., energy and transportation). The method builds on established table-top exercise approaches by incorporating climate change and socio-economic data and projections. This allows users to consider both short-term impacts and long-term stressors. The method can also play a valuable role in identifying adaptation options, particularly when adaptation needs span across multiple sectors and time spans. The method is flexible and can be used by both low and high-capacity organizations.
 
The presentation will illustrate how scenario-based stress-testing can support users in preparing for cascading, compounding and combined hazards. It will discuss how these risks intersect with local contexts, and how the method can support broader adaptation efforts (e.g., climate change and health vulnerability and adaptation assessments, adaptation planning and efforts to assess adaptation effectiveness). 

Are you struggling with engagement in emergency preparedness?  This presentation will share lessons learned from earthquake and tsunami preparedness education during times of continual change.  The presentation will provide visual examples of what we have learned through listening, and how the delivery of new education programs, tools and  messaging and has deepened engagement.  We will share the role of multidisciplinary collaboration, blended methodologies and a ‘Connectivist” approach to learning in increased capacity.  We will explore how we can increase preparedness for ‘all’ people within a shifting set of resources.

During the discussions, participants and speakers gather in small groups to explore the provocative questions raised in each theme, including:

• Is a federal standard the right approach to ensure the diverse needs of people with disabilities are being met before, during and after a disaster?
• When it comes to the evolving field of EM and DRR: What are the strengths (roots) that we are building on? What carries us through our work today (trunk)? What is emergent that we need to build more on or let go of (leaves)? 
• What are the biggest ‘valleys of death’ you’ve encountered between mountains of expertise in the DRR value chain, and what creative strategies or partnerships could help build bridges to overcome them?
  
  

During the discussions, participants and speakers gather in small groups to explore the provocative questions raised in each theme, including:

• Do you know how to safety integrate AI into your workflows?
• How much risk reduction opportunity is being missed simply because the data exists but isn’t accessible or usable by decision-makers?
• How can serious games move beyond engagement to influence actual decision-making in flood governance and related disaster contexts?
• When you conduct a risk assessment, what questions are you trying to answer and how do you ensure that the methods you use are built to answer them?
  
  

Connect and network with your peers over poster presentations in this casual yet high energy cafe pop-up in NAIT’s beautiful atrium. Explore new ideas, emerging research, and creative approaches across the emergency management field. Enjoy iced coffees while browsing at your own pace, connecting with colleagues, and engaging with the work on display. Poster presenters and the cold brew coffee bar will be available during this time.

This series of lightning talks explores how communities experience, shape, and are impacted by emergencies. Across two parallel themes, the talks examine both the people‑powered foundations of resilience and the societal, often overlooked, consequences that unfold beyond the immediate hazard zone.

Theme C: Community‑Powered Resilience 
Theme D: Beyond the Yellow Tape — The Societal Impacts of Disasters

The lightning talks will be followed by roundtable discussions, where participants and speakers will gather in small groups to explore the provocative questions raised in the lightning talks. These conversations offer space for exploration, dialogue, and deeper insight into the community dynamics, human impacts, and lived experiences that shape resilience and disaster recovery.

In Theme C: Community‑Powered Resilience, speakers explore how resilience emerges from the strengths, knowledge, and relationships within communities. These talks highlight the shared capacities, cultural intelligence, and people‑first approaches that shape how communities prepare for, respond to, and recover from emergencies. Together, they reveal how centering community experience can transform our understanding of what truly drives resilience.

In Theme D: Beyond the Yellow Tape, speakers examine the human and social dimensions of emergencies that unfold outside the immediate hazard zone. These talks surface the often‑overlooked impacts of disasters on people, communities, and social systems. Together, they invite us to look beyond response operations and consider the broader societal realities that inform disaster risk reduction.

Researchers: Dr. Aaida Mamuji, James Wheeler-Hebert and Cheryl Rogers

Despite animal welfare being tied to human safety, livelihoods, and recovery, animals are often overlooked in disaster planning and response efforts in Canada.  And, while the wellbeing of many animals is dependent on human action and inaction, there is currently no formal structure or approach to addressing animal needs in disaster management in Canada, with only sparse mention for the inclusion of animals in disaster management frameworks and legislation. Drawing from interviews (2025) with over twenty representatives of non-governmental organizations, charities, and humane societies that address the needs of animals experiencing disasters across Canada, this presentation provides a snapshot of gains and gaps in animal disaster management overtime, as well as provides perspectives on possible paths forward.

While recognizing great variance across provinces and territories, our findings reveal that the infrastructure and organization of animal emergency response have advanced considerably over the past three decades, with notable momentum in the last ten years. In many jurisdictions, the absence of essential resources - such as trained staff, formal plans, and memorandums of understanding - undermines overall preparedness. Systemic challenges also remain, such as limited political buy-in, overlapping agency mandates, coordination challenges, and efforts that rely on a few key individuals, which adversely affects program longevity. Recommendations for improvement include efforts to bolster training, addressing root causes, and to provide resources to support relationship-building, after-action reviews, and policy change.
By mapping current practices across the country, this research not only captures where we are now, but also identifies opportunities for building a more cohesive, sustainable, and nationally supported system of animal disaster response in Canada.

AEMA’s Be Prepared Program uses an all-hazards approach to prepare individuals, households, and the community for disruptions and emergencies. Through a blend of original research and data-driven storytelling, this session will explore tools and tips for planning your own community preparedness programming, specifically as it relates to understanding evacuation and shelter-in-place durations and improving guidance for communities, as well as the supports Be Prepared can provide tools and supports to help you accomplish this work. You will also learn about relevant research on preparedness in the province to help inform your approach. Attendees will walk away with concrete takeaways, tools and access to support.

This lightning talk explores why resilience is not just a technical challenge—but a cultural and social one.

Using the Traverse Analytics framework, I briefly describe how climate hazards do not occur in isolation. Instead, they interact dynamically with people, culture, behaviour, and systems of decision‑making. Traditional climate risk approaches often emphasize models, forecasts, and data—important tools, but incomplete on their own.

I will highlight how integrating cultural intelligence—the understanding of how people interpret risk, act under stress, and organize collectively—transforms data into shared situational awareness. This shift enables more culturally aligned risk communication, empowers local action, and reduces cascading impacts across systems.

The talk uses the Traverse Analytics lens—drawing from sport visualization, disaster ecology, and cultural intelligence—to demonstrate how complexity can be translated into insight that communities, businesses, and institutions can actually use.

Ultimately, this is a conversation about collective resilience: how aligning data, culture, and lived experience leads to smarter decisions, stronger systems, and safer communities in a climate‑disrupted world.

Few regions have been hit by disasters as often and as hard as British Columbia’s Cariboo-Chilcotin. Since 2016, they have had over 400 wildfires, major flooding, and creeping and enormous landslides. Yet residents remain uncommitted to preparedness. Why?

Learn what they told us about mental well-being, accessibility and community preparedness.

This lightning talk explores how Artificial Intelligence can be used as a practical tool to support First Nations communities in addressing urgent socio-economic and public safety challenges such as housing shortages, unemployment, food insecurity, youth opportunities, emergency response gaps, addiction, domestic violence, and mental health crises.

I will also introduce an Indigenous-led concept for an AI anonymous reporting and crisis response platform designed for frontline workers, security, emergency responders, crisis teams, and community leadership. The platform would allow real-time anonymous reporting for incidents such as gun violence, lockdown situations, domestic violence, fires, drug overdoses, and mental health emergencies, while offering culturally grounded supports including Cree language options, Elder resources, and wellness pathways.

Community-led recovery is widely seen as best practice, but what does it actually take to make it work? This lightning talk explores the gap between the idea and reality, showing how well-intentioned support can unintentionally limit local leadership. Drawing on a wildfire recovery case study from Newfoundland and Labrador, it examines how support can be structured in a way that builds confidence, strengthens local capacity, and enables communities to lead their own recovery. It also explores when to step back and how to recognize when communities are ready to move forward independently, inviting reflection on whether we are truly enabling community-led recovery or just calling it that.

During the discussions, participants and speakers gather in small groups to explore the provocative questions raised in each theme, including:

• If 50 evacuees arrived at your Reception Centre in the next 10 minutes, what would go well - and where would your team struggle in the first 30 minutes?
• If community-led recovery is best practice, what does it actually take to make it happen?
• What are some positive recovery outcomes that would be almost impossible to achieve without pre-disaster recovery planning?
• What is more dangerous during a hospital emergency: lack of training, or training that doesn’t reflect operational reality?

During the discussions, participants and speakers gather in small groups to explore the provocative questions raised in each theme, including:

• What changes when we treat culture and local knowledge as critical infrastructure for resilience?
• What if every First Nation had access to AI tools that could help save lives, strengthen safety, create jobs, and empower communities while protecting culture and human connection?
• How can communities experiencing overlapping crises (e.g., opiooid overdoeses, mental health, housing, etc.) plan for recovery?
• What motivates people to be prepared when their region is a disaster zone?

Appetizers provided

There’s no better place to catch the NHL playoffs than in Canada’s hockey capital! Join us at one of Edmonton’s premier hockey pubs in the heart of the ICE District as we cheer on the Oilers in their quest for the Cup.
This high-energy, casual evening is the perfect opportunity to connect with fellow symposium attendees, build relationships, and unwind over great food, drinks, and playoff intensity. Come for the game, stay for the conversations.

Hockey Night Networking
Location: The Canadian Ice House, ICE District, 10332 103 St NW, Edmonton, AB T5J 0Y9
Time: 5pm-9pm. (Appetizers provided)
Dress: Pub casual