The Climate Resilience Roadmap: Bridging the Gap between Design and Research

Catherine Dubois (Université Laval)

Climate change is a global matter of concern. In Canada, more intense heat waves, ice storms, wildfires, storm surges, loss of sea ice, and extreme rainfall have been reported across the country. These events have led to power outages, physical and structural damages, water shortages, road disruptions, economic losses and as such, they have compromised the health, the security and the well-being of thousands of people.

Designers working together at the regional, the urban and at the building scale (e.g. planners, landscape architects, architects, engineers…) can be pivotal actors in climate resilience. Being aware of what can be done, where, and how, thus is critical. A workshop that gathered two teams of design practitioners at Laval University provided evidence of deficiencies in this area. This situation could not be explained by a lack of information. The scientific literature on the issue of climate resilience was and still is abundant and up-to-date. Further research was conducted to identify the kinds of knowledge practitioners hold and use when designing built environments.

This communication introduces the main outcome of this research, the Climate Resilience Roadmap. This online tool was created to bridge the gap between designers and researchers aiming at increasing the resilience of cities and buildings to climate change. The roadmap builds on various studies that have characterized design both as knowledge and process to ensure that the information it contains is useful and readily usable by the practitioners. For that matter, the roadmap is a solution-oriented tool that is based on a comprehensive literature review. The solutions it comprises span from the landscape down to the building scale. Their synergies and trade-offs are detailed. So are their potential social, environmental, and economic benefits to better inform design decisions.