This week I had the privilege of attending the Adaptation 2026 conference in Toronto, joining people from across Canada (and one lovely, thoughtful American) to explore ways to make municipalities more adaptable to our changing climate. As always, by the end of the conference I had (and currently have) a head that feels like it’s stuffed with cotton, as all of the things that inspired and informed me have been compacted into my neurons. Over this post, and the coming weeks, I hope to unpack all of those ideas and relate them to our context here in Brighton. Here I will start with general themes.
Adaptation, Not Mitigation
When discussing climate action, we talk about mitigation (not making it worse) and adaptation (adjusting to the warming world). There was a time when total mitigation was still possible, and I remember feeling like even talking about adaptation was a sign of giving up on mitigation: let’s just avoid the catastrophe, rather than learning to live with it! But those days are long past, and we need to learn to live with the climate change that’s already happening, and the changes that are sure to come, even as we continue to work to reduce our impacts on the atmosphere. That’s why Brighton’s Integrated Community Sustainability Plan includes measures that aim to reduce our collective greenhouse gas emissions by 2,300 tons annually, doing our part to avoid the worst.
But while adaptation and mitigation go together, the theme of the conference was adaptation, and the deep dive on what that looks like was overwhelming. I am reminded of the title of Naomi Klein’s 2014 book, This Changes Everything. Sometimes the changes needed to live well in a warming world are small, like installing a backwater valve in your plumbing to prevent backups during high water events; sometimes they are large, with a few presenters saying things like “we need to get more comfortable talking about managed retreat,” the intentional abandonment of entire areas that are increasingly flood-prone as the world warms.
The good news is that this is relatively gradual: we don’t need to change everything everywhere all at once. But it is nonetheless urgent, as the cost of being unprepared is going up and up and up. One of the groups that is speaking most urgently about adaptation is insurance companies: I saw many slides this week showing just how much insurable losses are escalating due to increasing fires and floods. But as one presenter pointed out, it isn’t a given that this has to happen. Most of the projected increase in insurable losses is associated with projected future development in fire- and flood-prone areas – which is to say, people continue to spread out into, or rebuild in, places that are no longer friendly to human habitation. There’s only so long that the insurance system will still work in such places.
So while the conference’s theme of adaptation was all-encompassing and urgent, mitigation still echoed in the background in a melancholy, minor key. At least for me.
Relationships
Over and over again, presenters shared just how important relationships were for adaptation and resilience. Some did talk about this in the form of institutional partnerships–there was a whole plenary session about engaging with the military on climate adaptation work, and insurance companies and banks present their services as partnerships–but especially in sessions about small towns and rural areas, the emphasis was on relationships and networks between people.
A few sessions described people as infrastructure, not to depersonalize them but simply to point out that not everything that we need to build is made of metal or concrete. Building relationships with our neighbours, and building trust, and building places of safety, so that when there’s an emergency people have someone or somewhere to go to feel (and be) safe. Building those networks of trust and knowledge have become the basis for a lot of significant climate action in small communities that lack the resources to build or re-build major infrastructure.
One of the vendors at the trade show emphasized this connection to infrastructure for me in a different way: the service is called Switch Together, and it leverages group rates for climate adaptation technologies like solar panels and heat pumps. I immediately started to think about all of my friends who want solar panels, and how we might go in together, before realizing that we need to scale this up to maybe include collecting people from across our region to really benefit. Our relationships matter, and building a stronger network will not only help us in an emergency, it will help us prepare for and avoid those emergencies.
(Sooo…does anyone want to switch together and get some solar panels? Let me know!)
Money, Money, Money
The question of “who pays for it” was repeated over and over and over again, but as politicians like to say, “there’s only one taxpayer,” which is to say, ultimately we all pay for everything. The way that we do it, though, really does matter.
Right now, a lot of climate adaptation is paid for through insurance: something gets flooded out or burned down, and we “build back better.” That’s well and good, to a point; building back better is a form of incremental development that benefits from having very recent data about what kind of resilience measures are needed–i.e., we know that a building in this place needs to be flood-proofed, etc. But as I said above, at a certain point we need to acknowledge when something shouldn’t be built back at all, and if we’re wise we will do that before the insurance system leaves people unprotected by determining that they will no longer insure high-risk properties. And in the meantime, insurance costs continue to skyrocket for all of us as some of us repeatedly experience insurable losses. We can’t rely on insurance companies to force us into climate adaptation, it’s not an equitable or strategic approach.
On the first day of the conference I attended a session on “the cost of doing nothing”, which coincidentally is one of my favourite questions to ask in budget meetings. We have a tendency to see climate adaptation as a distinct project of its own, added on top of our infrastructure and operational costs, and usually as a “nice to have” that we would have to spend extra money on. But the cost of doing nothing is very often the cost of having to build something twice, while the cost of adaptation is often a small addition to a project we needed to do anyway. Sometimes it doesn’t even cost more, it just requires us to learn a different approach or design. The panel in that session was made up of people who calculate the cost of doing nothing in different sectors: climate scientists, consultants, a municipality, and even an investment firm calculating how to protect their assets. At the root of this is a psychological bias that we humans are prone to: we give more weight to present costs than to future losses, and more weight to losses than to missed gains. But in hindsight, the money saved on costs is rarely even close to the value of the losses we experience from under-investing, and the missed gains are often the most valuable of all. To put a dollar figure on it, the estimated return on investment over a few decades is somewhere between 1:9 and 1:15, which is to say, we save up to $15 for every $1 we invest in resilience, and that’s not even counting the new opportunities we have to reinvest those savings in other cost-saving changes. When it comes to the rising cost of living, we can’t afford not to make these kinds of investments.
Another psychological bias struck me yesterday morning in one of the final sessions of the conference. Well, two biases. The first was my own: I had a very hard time paying attention to the presentation from the Royal Bank of Canada (about why it’s so hard to find private financing for climate adaptation because adaptation projects are inherently risky), because my blood was boiling. My outrage prevented me from fully understanding the financial technologies he was describing. My blood was boiling because the Royal Bank of Canada continues to be one of the world’s largest funders of fossil fuels, and fossil fuels are one of the key reasons the climate is changing in the first place, which points to the second bias. The second bias was the cognitive dissonance that this man must have been suffering from, and that the whole room just seemed to accept: how else can a bank that continues to directly fund the problem come to try to offer solutions to that problem, but only if we can reduce the risk for them? They’re profiting from creating the risk, and they’ll only help with the solution if we can de-risk it enough for them to profit from that side as well. My head nearly exploded.
The best thing to come out of that session was that I learned about a way that many municipalities across the country help residents to invest in climate adaptation through low-interest loans tied to our properties. So imagine you need upgrades to your plumbing and building envelope to avoid flood damage, or a heat pump to avoid high temperatures, or solar panels with battery backups to avoid power outages, but you don’t have thousands of dollars under your mattress; what if you could get those upgrades now, and pay them back through a charge attached to your property taxes? One of the reasons people often don’t get these upgrades is because they don’t intend to live in a place long enough to see the investment paid off, and since few of us live in the same place for very long anymore, that often means that existing building stock doesn’t get these upgrades at all. But with the cost of the upgrades paid off over time and attached to the property itself, you can get the upgrade and enjoy the benefits, and leave the remainder of the cost with the house for the next owner, who benefits from you having made that choice to make the property more resilient. It’s a win/win, and all municipalities need to do is be a (nonprofit) middleman.
Leadership
An unofficial theme that I picked up on at the conference was the lack of political leadership. Nobody talked about it directly, but it was everywhere I looked. I saw it in the surprise that inevitably followed when others would find out that I was an elected official; aside from one MP (who was one of the speakers), I think I was the only elected official there. I saw it in the jokes and quips, where panel members would comment about the lack of support from their municipality, or from higher levels of government, and the whole room would laugh. I saw it in the sheer number of conversations about how to pay for adaptation to a warming world, and the fact that every one of those conversations assumed (rather than questioned) that adaptation would never be paid for through taxes, because politicians would never support that.
Over and over again, I saw leadership from nonprofits organizing their communities; from government staffers who were swimming upstream without sufficient resources and support; and from social entrepreneurs who are finding ways to save the world through the private sector, filling gaps left by governments who under-invest in adaptation. These people are succeeding largely in spite of government, rather than with government support, much less political leadership. Politics was barely mentioned, officially; but unofficially, it was framed as a hindrance or something to work around.
That’s devastating to me. I firmly believe that politics is about how we come together to do things that none of us could do on our own, and if ever there was a single issue that affected all of us and needed to be addressed together it would be climate change. None of us is making the climate change on our own, and none of us can fix it on our own, so we all need to work together to find solutions so that we can continue to live in peace and safety. Governments are at the same time both the most basic form of cooperation, and the most far-reaching and impactful form of cooperation, but they respond to their leaders. Our political leaders were notably absent from this conference, or worse, actively working against the success of the many groups who are trying to get us through this crisis.
This is not to say that every politician needs to be a climate nerd like me. Over this term I have accepted the mantle of being the resident climate nerd on council (or at least the most outspoken one), and I have appreciated the ways that this council has supported me when it’s clear I’ve put a lot of work into something that is outside of most of their own perspective or expertise. To their credit, council funded a climate plan several times before it was finally initiated, supporting the concept after some debate but before they knew what exactly it would look like. But I want to encourage the next council, whoever is on it, to take this issue seriously and dig into the issue of sustainability and adaptation, because it will shape the coming term whether we implement our Integrated Community Sustainability Plan or not.
If we do choose to implement the plan, it will shape the term because we will be adding a sustainability lens to the work we would otherwise be doing: our infrastructure projects would strive to incorporate climate data and plan for weather events, our tree planting will be counted as heat reduction infrastructure instead of aesthetic nice-to-haves, and our ambitions for all such projects will be designed with a longer horizon in mind. And things might end up costing more; but in so doing, we will also gain access to grant streams that are designed to build infrastructure that will last longer and be more cost-effective long-term.
If we choose not to implement the plan we will still be spending money on all of this infrastructure. We’ll just be doing it again sooner, saving some money now but passing larger costs on to our children. That’s the kind of (or rather, lack of) leadership we’ve seemingly come to expect from governments, and that’s a shame. There truly is nothing we can’t do if we work together, and government is the best way to do that, if we choose to. So any time we see huge networks of community nonprofits organizing to achieve big things together, especially on things that governments pay lip service to, we’re witnessing a failure of government leadership. The time and energy it takes to form those nonprofits and organize new structures for collaboration, while not completely wasted, are in many ways reinventing the wheel. There are times when the best thing that governments can do is recognize that they’ve ceded leadership to such groups, and then support them; I’ll be looking for ways to do that in many respects this coming term, if I am re-elected. But on climate, there is still no replacement for the central role of government, and every one of the actions in our Integrated Community Sustainability Plan will yield real benefits to our residents, both now and (especially) in the future.
Conclusion
So as usual, I came home from a conference fired up to make a positive change in my community. This time, though, I came back in the middle of an election campaign. I can’t and won’t take it for granted that I’ll be re-elected; but I also hope that I am not the token climate champion running for council. Climate adaptation is not a fringe issue or personal project of mine, it’s a matter of good planning for an uncertain future, with massive benefits to those who plan well and massive costs to those who do not. We’re on a course to good planning, thanks to the Integrated Community Sustainability Plan, but none of the items in the plan are guaranteed to be funded. And I can’t carry all of our climate aspirations on my own; I worry that at a certain point people will just say “oh, that’s just Jeff’s thing” and not give it sufficient support or debate. It deserves greater awareness and interest from all members of council, so if you find a candidate on your doorstep, please ask them about it.
There’s another sustainability-centric conference coming up in February, in Ottawa. In theory, all members of the next council could attend. I’m already looking forward to it, and I hope to not be the only person from Brighton there so that we can have a more robust discussion about sustainability at our own council table in the future. And also so that our local environmental champions and nonprofits can look to government for leadership, rather than as a barrier to their own success.