How will ‘managed retreat’ fit into Canada’s climate-change adaptation plans? Communities face hard choices in any scenario
Janine Cooper travels daily from her temporary lodging outside Merritt, B.C., to her single-wide trailer in town to work at restoring her flood-damaged home. She is what the city’s mayor refers to as a climate refugee, displaced when the Coldwater River topped its banks last November in a one-in-one-thousand-year flood event. The entire town was evacuated at the time, and many homes remain uninhabitable.
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She wants to move back permanently, but the decision is not hers alone. Merritt is wrestling with a question that some other Canadian communities have already dealt with: Should it rebuild as before, or pull back from the water’s edge?
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But while these traumas are fresh, it’s hard to engage the community in the kind of conversation that Merritt’s 7,000 residents need to have about the future. City council has commissioned a study, due this summer, that will map out some options for dikes and/or retreat. Once that is done, the dialogue can start, Ms. Brown said. “It depends on the type of diking system we get engineered, to determine how many metres we need to be away from the river. In the meantime, this is creating a lot of anxiety for our citizens.”
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Although advance planning is ideal, communities can tackle post-disaster retreat successfully, says geography professor Brent Doberstein, interim director of the University of Waterloo’s climate change programs. But it requires a lot of support for those who have been flooded out while the details are sorted.
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