2026 CRHNet Symposium

Opening remarks from Stephen Lacroix, the Managing Director of the Alberta Emergency Management Agency

The DRR Roundtable has long been a place for a national conversation about disaster risk in Canada. As the pace and impacts of disasters accelerate and strain our systems and coping mechanisms, that conversation is needed more than ever.

This year’s Roundtable looks ahead to 2040 and beyond, creating space to explore how the world is changing, what that means for disaster risk in Canada, and the actions we can take now to navigate uncertainty with greater confidence. The Roundtable brings people together to examine emerging trends, consider their implications, and shape pathways that can help Canada move toward a more resilient future.

The morning session focuses on identifying and exploring the forces shaping the future, the impacts they may have on disasters and resiliency, and how to keep people at the centre of our collective work as we adapt our approches and systems to a changing risk landscape. 

Networking and refreshments 

Disaster response and recovery are most effective when the people directly affected are meaningfully engaged in decision-making, planning, and implementation. Yet, across Canada and internationally, emergency management systems still struggle to operationalize community-driven approaches beyond consultation. This presentation synthesizes findings from a meta-analysis of current research, after-action reviews, and practitioner literature to answer a core question: How can emergency management organizations more effectively engage disaster-impacted individuals as partners, not recipients, in response and recovery?

Drawing from Canadian case studies, global resilience research, and contemporary participation theory, this session distills cross-cutting best practices into actionable strategies for policy and practice. Themes include: enabling survivor leadership, co-production of recovery services, supporting spontaneous volunteer structures, removing institutional barriers, and aligning funding and governance mechanisms to support community agency rather than institutional control.

This presentation will explore a research project titled "Learning from Indigenous Perspectives for Wildland Fire Management from Treaty 5 and 9 Remote First Nations"— a collaboration between Keewaytinook Okimakanak Tribal Council (KOTC), Lakehead University, and the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, aimed at understanding how to better support the values, needs, and resilience of remote First Nations community members in relation to wildfire management and evacuations.

Our goal is to present stories and lived experiences that members of KOTC member communities shared with us. Participants in the research discussed motivations for engagement in wildfire management activities; aspects of evacuations that caused stress; barriers and gaps that hindered participation in wildland firefighting and mitigation activities, and that undermined effective evacuations; and pathways to success, where activities overcame challenges and benefitted both individuals and the wider community. Through these stories, we can better understand the impacts of wildfire-related emergencies and gain insight into the preparedness that affects response and recovery, the hopes of community members, and the building of community-led resilience. The CRHNet Symposium theme "Living the Lessons: From Impact to Insight", aligns with the community-led objectives that shaped this research – to learn from the lived experiences of those who have been on the frontlines of Indigenous wildfire management and those who have lived through wildfire-related evacuations, and to find ways to integrate the lessons we learn into wiser practices and decision-making processes. We will discuss seven wise practices for wildfire management with remote First Nations that emerged from this research. For policymakers and practitioners, this presentation will offer considerations for and insights into how to translate lessons from the past into actions for building stronger, more resilient communities in the future.

We would also like to share a link to some of the work that has come out of this project, hosted by our Keewaytinook Okimakanak Tribal Council partners at https://kogeo.ca/catalogue/#/documents?filter%7Bcategory.identifier.in%7D=Wildfire .

Emergency management practitioners play a critical role in supporting communities before, during, and after major emergencies by helping ensure the continuity of essential government and community services. Yet in Canada, there are no broadly accepted educational requirements or clearly defined stages of professional development for this occupation. This creates important challenges for educators, employers, and practitioners, particularly if the preparation of new emergency managers is approached primarily through competency-based learning models.
 
This panel brings together current emergency management practitioners to reflect on the realities of entering and growing in the field. Drawing on Darren Blackburn’s five-year doctoral research into the development of professional identity in Canadian emergency managers, the discussion will explore questions such as: Who becomes an emergency manager in Canada? How do people find their way into this area of practice? What personal and professional characteristics matter most in the role? And to what extent can these be intentionally developed through education, rather than learned only through experience?
 
Through a discussion grounded in both research and practice, panelists will consider:

• How the interdisciplinary nature of emergency management shapes the experiences of new professionals;
• The elements that make up professional identity in emergency managers;
• The pathways newcomers follow as they grow into the role; and
• How experiential and situated learning approaches can support the purposeful development of future emergency managers within post-secondary education.

In an era of cascading crises, interconnected risks, and workforce fatigue, the next frontier of continuity and resilience is not built on plans, policies, or technology alone — it’s built on people. Human-Centered Continuity Planning reframes the traditional business continuity and emergency management lens by putting individuals — employees, students, communities, and leaders — at the heart of preparedness, response, and recovery efforts.

This presentation explores how leaders and practitioners can design continuity strategies that reflect human realities, emotional capacity, and adaptive potential. Drawing on real-world examples and emerging best practices, it argues that resilience is not just an organizational attribute; it’s a culture — one grounded in empathy, communication, inclusion, and trust.

Traditional continuity planning has long focused on assets, operations, and technology. We map our systems, document our processes, and create redundancy for infrastructure and data. But disruptions — whether a cyber breach, weather-related hazard, or organizational crisis — inevitably impact people first.

The COVID-19 pandemic made this truth impossible to ignore. When supply chains fractured, offices closed, and families juggled remote work and caregiving, the greatest determinant of continuity wasn’t the robustness of IT systems — it was the resilience, adaptability, and well-being of people. Employees became emergency responders, communicators, and problem-solvers in their own right.

Yet, many continuity frameworks still treat people as an operational resource, not as the core of resilience. Human-centered continuity planning challenges that paradigm. It insists that a plan cannot succeed if the people it depends on are burnt out, unsupported, or excluded from its creation.

In other words, a resilient organization starts with a resilient workforce.

Not everyone is equally affected by wildfires. Little is known about the experiences of older adults with access and functional needs during wildfires. This study examined the needs and challenges of older adults during the 2023 wildfire evacuation in Edson, Alberta. Interviews were conducted with 21 participants, including decision-makers, service providers, older adults involved in the evacuation, and their caregivers. Nine semi-structured interviews were completed with older adults, four with their family members, and eight key informant interviews were completed with service providers, emergency first responders, and practitioners involved in carrying out the evacuation or providing support to evacuees. To recruit participants, we employed a combination of purposive, snowball, and convenience sampling to access hard-to-reach interviewees. Participants were recruited through social media, existing institutional partnerships, and using publicly available contact information. All the interviews are audio-recorded to ensure accurate data capture. Findings from this study will inform evidence-based improvement of wildfire evacuation protocols and essential services during disasters, making evacuation more sensitive to the diverse needs and challenges of older adults.

Boulder, Colo. (USA) – like much of the Rocky Mountain State – is continuing to face increased threat from wildfire.

As Colorado continues to expand its preparedness and pass new laws that mandate that insurance companies take into account mitigation measures, among other new measures, the City of Boulder is also taking critical steps to mitigate risk in their community.

Boulder has been investing in tools to help make better data-driven decisions, primarily through expanded, high-quality home assessments.

Attendees will hear directly from Danielle McNutt, Boulder Fire-Rescue’s community risk reduction senior program manager and Fire Aside’s CEO, Jason Brooks, about how her agency was inundated with Wildfire Detailed Home Assessment requests (DHA) following the Marshall Fire and scaled to meet the moment.
McNutt will hone in on a tangible and real-world example: the Wonderland Hills community in Boulder.

By collaborating with one of the United States' top minds on predicting wildfire behavior in the built environment, Dr. Hussam Mahmoud of Vanderbilt University, McNutt was able to implement very specific and impactful choices.

Wonderland Hills constitutes 15 homeowners’ associations (HOA), which means that close collaboration is required between residents, community leaders, fire officials, and numerous public agencies and other regional partners.

By leveraging regional and local grant incentives for maximum impact, the City of Boulder is ensuring vegetation work by Boulder County Parks & Open Space is matched by residents to do their part to maximize risk reduction and return on limited public funds.

As a result of this vision, Wonderland Hills and Boulder homeowners now have access to high-quality, detailed, and actionable risk assessment information about how to protect themselves.

Following the talk, attendees will be able to go to their local policymakers and make a clear and compelling case as to why their community can repeat this playbook.

When a flood, landslide, or infrastructure failure threatens a community, the decisions made in the hours and days before and after  matter enormously. But too often, the tools available to decision-makers are too slow, too siloed, or too technical to translate into action at the right moment.

This session explores how WSP Canada and UrbanLogiq are partnering to change that. Together, they're building GeoRisk: a platform that combines the hard-won knowledge of scientists and engineers with the pattern-recognition power of artificial intelligence to give communities a clearer, faster picture of environmental and infrastructure risk.
The real story here isn't the technology, it's what happens when domain experts and AI developers sit down together. Delegates will hear how that collaboration actually worked in practice: the friction, the breakthroughs, and the choices making the system trustworthy and explainable to the people who rely on it.

The result is a tool that helps governments ask — and answer — questions that were previously out of reach: Where should we invest in mitigation first? What does this policy decision mean for risk five years from now? Who in our community is most vulnerable, and how do we account for that equitably?

Attendees will leave with a practical understanding of what it takes to pair human expertise with AI in high-stakes environments, and what this new generation of tools means for how communities plan, protect, and invest.

A facilitated question and answer session with the Insight Talk presenters on human-centered disaster risk reduction.

The DRR Roundtable has long been a place for a national conversation about disaster risk in Canada. As the pace and impacts of disasters accelerate and strain our systems and coping mechanisms, that conversation is needed more than ever.

This year’s Roundtable looks ahead to 2040 and beyond, creating space to explore how the world is changing, what that means for disaster risk in Canada, and the actions we can take now to navigate uncertainty with greater confidence. The Roundtable brings people together to examine emerging trends, consider their implications, and shape pathways that can help Canada move toward a more resilient future.

The afternoon session turns future thinking into direction, mapping the transitions and innovations needed for more resilient futures and pinpointing the priorities and actions we can start advancing today.

Celebrate the emergency management sector in style at this signature evening event. Set within one of Edmonton’s most architecturally striking venues, this after-hours gathering offers a unique opportunity to connect, reflect, and engage with peers from across the field.

The evening will feature a brief presentation of CRHNet awards, followed by dinner and an opportunity to explore the gallery in an exclusive, relaxed setting. Join colleagues and leaders for a night of meaningful networking, recognition, and celebration of the work shaping our communities. 

Location: Art Gallery of Alberta, 2 Sir Winston Churchill Sq NW, Edmonton, AB T5J 2C1
Date: May 13
Time: 6:30 PM – 9:30 PM (Dinner provided)
Dress: Business casual to semi-formal