Assessing Climate Change Risk and Resilience in the Yukon
2 PROJECT OVERVIEW
This project supports the implementation of
Our Clean Future, the Yukon's climate change,
energy and green economy strategy. In Our
Clean Future, the Government of Yukon
commits to assessing climate hazards and
vulnerabilities to those hazards across Yukon
every three to four years between 2020 and
2030 to prioritize climate change adaptation
actions. The assessment provides a starting
point for informing how the Yukon can achieve
its adaptation target, as set out in Our Clean
Future: "by 2030, Yukon will be highly resilient
to the impacts of climate change."
Objectives
The risk assessment had three main
objectives:
.
•
build an understanding of climate
resilience across the Yukon;
highlight the priorities for reducing risks;
and
identify the factors that contribute to
resilience.
Method
The assessment carried out a semi-
quantitative analysis² to understand risks
and resilience. It considered the risks
stemming from climate change hazards, and
the respective actions that Yukoners are taking
to adapt to the impacts of those hazards.
The analysis considered the likelihood and
consequences of climate impacts alongside
lived experience and local knowledge.
Including perspectives from western and
Indigenous knowledge built a shared
understanding of resilience.
Project participants from across the Yukon
were vital to informing the assessment. They
included people from a variety of backgrounds
- representatives from the Government of
Yukon and Canada, Yukon First Nations and
transboundary Indigenous governments
and organizations, municipalities, academia,
non-profit organizations and sectors such as
health, food, tourism, mining, and local
business development.³ They shared how
climate change impacts are affecting
communities across the Yukon, completed a
scoring of climate risks, suggested ways to
build resilience, and confirmed the findings.
Youth from the Yukon Youth Panel on Climate
Change and the Yukon First Nation Climate
Action Fellowship also participated in the
assessment, sharing their perspectives on
how to achieve resilience.
1. This also stems from the 2017 December Report of the Auditor General of Canada to the Yukon Legislative Assembly's
Climate Change in the Yukon Report, which stated that the Government of Yukon should complete a comprehensive,
territory-wide risk assessment to prioritize commitments to manage the impacts of climate change.
2. The assessment relied on both numerical and observational and anecdotal sources of information to produce risk scores and
then categorize the risk levels.
3. The process did not engage with community members. The risk assessment followed two rounds of engagement in the fall of
2018 and 2019 to develop Our Clean Future, Yukon's clean growth and climate change strategy The input received as part
of that process informed this assessment.
2
ASSESSING CLIMATE CHANGE: RISK AND RESILIENCE IN THE YUKONView entire presentation