Due North: Facing the costs of climate change for northern infrastructure

Due North, is an assessment of the costs of climate change to infrastructure across all of Northern Canada. Northern Canada faces a double threat of already- inadequate infrastructure in a rapidly warming climate. Northerners currently lack access to safe and reliable infrastructure that people in the rest of Canada take for granted. The warming climate creates both a need and an opportunity to fundamentally rethink how infrastructure  is built in the North, for Northerners. 

This study recommends four types of actions that can not only reduce climate change costs and impacts on Northern infrastructure but can also lay a path to more functional, appropriate, and resilient infrastructure.

• Funding: The federal government should dedicate new financial resources for Northern infrastructure and should restructure existing accessibility and usefulness to Northern governments.
• Information: The federal government should support provincial, territorial, and Indigenous governments in developing and maintaining accurate and practical information about Northern-relevant climate risks to infrastructure. This data should prioritize information that is important to Northern decision makers and Indigenous communities.
• Innovation: All orders of government should prioritize infrastructure replacement and transformative leapfrogging over repair and protection wherever this is found to be a more effective, efficient, and sustainable way to safeguard services.
• Regulation: Federal, provincial, and territorial governments should update infrastructure policies, regulations, standards, and codes to explicitly account for the more complex and severe impacts of climate change in the North and to ensure that new infrastructure is resilient.