2026 CRHNet Symposium

Building resilience to flooding begins with the communities who experience these impacts most directly. As cities face mounting pressures from climate change, urbanization, and increasing impervious surfaces, sustainable stormwater management has become crucial for reducing flood risk and safeguarding community well-being. Green infrastructure (GI) has proven effective as a nature-based approach, yet its adoption has often been limited by social, technical, and institutional challenges. Understanding the factors that supported successful implementation in past projects is therefore essential. This study employs a fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) across 16 GI case studies to identify the combinations of factors that enable successful adoption and implementation. The analysis showed that stakeholder engagement was a central driver, encompassing public participation by government and public agencies, interagency collaboration among diverse organizations, contributions from private-sector partners, and most notably community involvement. Although each form of engagement played a role, community involvement stood out across cases, as many projects actively included residents in planning and decision-making or were implemented specifically to address community needs. The study also found that Regulatory Policies and Regulations consistently operated alongside engagement, reinforcing their importance in supporting GI adoption. The findings reveal that strong regulatory frameworks paired with inclusive stakeholder engagement, especially community participation are the key factors underpinning successful and sustainable green infrastructure implementation for flood-risk reduction.

Resilience in emergency management is often described as something communities build from within through preparedness, relationships, and adaptive capacity. However, many communities, especially those in northern and remote regions, experience resilience as something shaped, enabled, or withdrawn by decisions made far beyond their control. This presentation examines how external power dynamics, including political, economic, and infrastructural factors, actively create or erode community resilience. It argues that emergency management must broaden its understanding of what truly determines a community’s ability to withstand and recover from disruption.

Using the recent cancellation of Starlink connectivity expansion in northern Ontario, which was connected to Canada and United States trade tensions, I explore how a decision unrelated to hazards had significant implications for emergency communication, digital inclusion, and community well-being. This case illustrates that resilience is not only a local outcome but also a product of dependencies on infrastructure providers, regulatory decisions, global supply chains, and policy environments.

The presentation introduces the idea of “externalized resilience,” which refers to resilience that depends on systems and actors outside community control. I discuss the implications for risk reduction, planning assumptions, northern and Indigenous communities, and the need to account for structural dependencies in resilience strategies. By examining resilience through the lens of power, the session encourages participants to rethink where vulnerability originates and how it can be addressed.

Canada’s disaster risk environment is evolving faster than many of our governance structures, planning models, and communication systems were designed to handle. Wildfires, floods, cyber incidents, public health emergencies, infrastructure disruptions, and societal pressures increasingly intersect to create compounding and cascading impacts across communities. In this context, communication must be understood as a core operational capacity within disaster risk reduction.

Internal information coordination impacts external communication, and when it is delayed, fragmented, or inconsistent, it results in heightened risk, making it difficult to establish and sustain public trust.

This session draws on recent Canadian and international events to explore the interconnected nature of contemporary emergencies and the role of communication in shaping risk perception, decision-making, and collective action. It also examines misinformation and digital disruption as emerging hazards that directly influence vulnerability and resilience.

Grounded in the theme of “Living the Lessons: From Impact to Insight,” this presentation synthesizes evidence, practitioner experience, and behavioural research to outline a forward-looking framework for 2026 and beyond. Participants will gain practical, scalable approaches they can adapt to their own organizations, including methods to strengthen internal information flow, improve cross-system message alignment, pre-bunk misinformation, and activate trusted networks to support community-level resilience. The session aims to strengthen linkages among research, policy, and practice to advance DRR outcomes across Canada.

As Alberta faces compounding disasters, we must move beyond standard ideas of emergency responders and recognize the important role of community organizations, Friendship Centres, as frontline emergency responders.

A facilitated question and answer session with the Insight Talk presenters on a different take on what resilient infrastructure and institutions mean.