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Building Community Resilience to Climate Change · How To Protect The Ocean

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Up until a few years ago, my community where I live, like in
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Burlington, Ontario, you know, in Southern Ontario in Canada, had
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been pretty resilient or what I thought was pretty resilient when
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it came to climate change consequences. We hadn't really had many
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huge storms. We hadn't really had, you know,
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droughts or anything like that. We were pretty resilient. And
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up until a couple of years ago, I even said that. I was like, you know, I'm surprised. I mean, we live
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in a pretty good place. You know, when you look at what's going on in the world, weather-wise,
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You know, consequence wise from climate change, we didn't have many floods, you
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know, although we did have some, but we didn't have many floods, not on an annual basis.
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We didn't have droughts or forest fires
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or things like that. A lot of other people were in much worse condition than
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we are. And to be honest, even today, you know, a lot of people feel
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the effects way more. So when I look, when I still look at things, you
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know, knock on wood, we're pretty, we're pretty decent in terms of
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what happens with climate change. However, The last two years, we've
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really noticed some vulnerabilities within
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our own community resiliency when it came to climate
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change. And I'm going to talk about what those things are, especially when
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it comes to rain in the last year and forest fires the year before.
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So we're going to talk about why I think climate change
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resiliency equals community resiliency. And
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we're going to talk about that on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. Let's
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start the show. Hey
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everybody, welcome back to another exciting episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I'm
1:33
your host, Andrew Lewin, and this is the podcast where you find out what's happening with the ocean, how
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you could speak up for the ocean, what you can do to live for a better ocean by
1:40
taking action. And today I wanted to talk about a little thing
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called a lot of rain, and just sort of vulnerability to
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climate change. Because my community, my city, was caught
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in some vulnerabilities. climate
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change consequences, rain, drought, floods,
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all those things that happen more and more with climate change, really
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highlight the vulnerabilities in our community, within our infrastructure, within
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things like that. And I find that this past couple of weeks, my
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community, Burlington, as the city of Burlington in Ontario, and
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even the region of Halton, really came into some
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cold, like flooding mess, right? And we had
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a lot of rain. And what I'm going to talk about today, what this
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does for a community, how it affects a community, and,
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you know, where we need to go from there. But first, I just want to, quick
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thing I want to do, if you want to find out more news, if you're new to this podcast, you've
2:40
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my newsletter. We also have jobs there too if you're looking for jobs. But
3:16
let's get back to the show. Because I feel like this
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is something that I've been wanting to talk about for a while because Climate
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change sucks dude, like it sucks, you know to
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be able to See communities on TV suffer
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is one thing. It's awful, you know, and people have you know,
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many people have lost their lives They lost their lost their livelihoods lost their homes We
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live in a fairly good city, you know, we're always in the top
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five cities to live in in Canada I mean we have our problems but
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For the most part, we're pretty safe. It's a nice city. It's
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great people. It's friendly. It's small. Traffic's
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getting bad, but whatever. Overall, we're doing pretty well. I'm pretty
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happy with the city that I chose to raise my family. My
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wife and I chose to raise our family. But over the past
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couple of years, we've really seen some, I would almost say
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minor in terms of what climate change can do, but we've
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seen some effects. And it's hurt some people
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more than others. And we need to talk about
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it because it really starts to talk to our resiliency
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as a community, as a city, when it comes down to climate
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change. And if we can, if we want to build climate change resiliency, we have
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to start noticing our vulnerabilities and be able to change what
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our city is going to be like in the future and how we plan for
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the future. So this is, it's going to be an interesting talk. It's gonna be a lot of
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local stuff, so I apologize if you're not in the area. But it's something that
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I've wanted to talk about for a little bit. And up until recently, we've
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never really had to talk about it because we've never really felt the effects that
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much within the city. We had a flooding about 10 years ago.
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And this is one in 10-year storms, one in 100-year storms,
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but they're happening more frequently. And with the
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hurricane season coming in a little early with Hurricane Beryl,
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the last couple of weeks have been really interesting. uh... starting off
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with hurricane barrel as many people know hurricane category
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five uh... coming through the caribbean ripping through islands
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destroying islands and then coming into the u s
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through houston and then up through north america up
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through the US and really into Canada, into
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Ontario. And we got a really big dump of rain. Not the
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huge high winds that you saw from Hurricane. It was down to, I think it
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was less than a tropical storm. It was just a regular, I think it was squalls,
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I think it was called. We haven't had squall warnings in a long time. We
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rarely get them. And so when we had the Hurricane
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Beryl come through, we had a lot of water in very little time. And
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we started to see some accumulation of water. My backyard flooded
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a little bit, as it always does with heavy rains, but then it goes away
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the next day or within a couple of days. We
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started to see roads get a little flooded. People were saying, just watch out. There's certain
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areas where you go underneath a bridge and the street goes
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down. That was filled with water for a while. It was just
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inaccessible for, like I said, maybe a few hours,
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maybe half a day. It wasn't as bad, and it's kind of
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like what we'd come to expect. Now, you'd think, we
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had this 10 years ago, you'd think that, you know, the city or the region
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would, or even the province would think about fixing these types of things. It
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doesn't seem like it was fixed. I don't have any reports saying that they
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were trying to fix it or they were doing anything about it, but I have a feeling our
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city, the way the planning goes for a lot of things, from what
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I understand, and I could be wrong on a lot of these things, but we plan, you
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know, with water, we plan on specific storm so one
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in every ten-year storm, one in every fifty-year storm, one in every hundred-year
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storm. We're just getting them more often, it seems, and
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it is starting to expose what we have. So we had a hurricane barrel come through a
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couple of weeks ago. Obviously not as bad
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as what other people had, but like I said, we had some vulnerabilities exposed. Then
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the rain just kept coming. It would be announced it'd be a beautiful day and
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then you'd look at your weather app, whatever weather app you had, and then all
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of a sudden it's like squall warning. And there'd be this huge, huge storm
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that would come out of nowhere, lasting for 15 to 20 minutes,
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half an hour, sometimes an hour. And then it would go away and the
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skies would just kind of like open up into sunny skies and clouds would go
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away, blue skies, and then an hour later, we'd get rain again
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and then like two hours later we'd get rain again and it would continue to happen. It
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was almost like very, you know, a lot of people were making the observation
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that it was very like Florida type weather. You know, it gets so, so hot and
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then the rain comes and then hot again and
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then the rain comes and then it kind of eventually cools off. It
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never really did cool off but we kept getting rain and like heavy rains in
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a very small period of time. And so we started to see that accumulation
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of water and accumulation of water until some neighborhoods
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in my area had so much water that fridges were
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floating in their basement. they had to
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evacuate their homes. There were some areas, one area in particular, where
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I saw pictures where the water was above the fence line, like a
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six-foot fence line. It was obviously dangerous. Nobody got hurt,
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thank God, that I know of. But, you know, people are
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affected. I've heard, you know, anecdotal stories of
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insurance companies not being, not covering the damages
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because it's a, you know, quote-unquote, act of God or natural disaster,
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and so they don't, they don't cover that, which is interesting. You
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pay all that insurance, and then there's always the fine print. But
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that's devastating. When your home is destroyed, all your personal items
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are destroyed. We're not used to this. We don't expect, and
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I think there is some sort of... assumption
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that the city is going to protect us, the region and the province
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is going to protect us from these things. We have engineers, we have a lot of great
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people, we have planners who do a lot of great work. They work their butt off.
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They can only work within the legislation, of course, but
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then there's all these vulnerabilities to these 100-year storms, the 50-year storms,
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and we plan those because, hey, you know what? They only happen
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every once in a while, and we could probably handle those
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every once in a while. I feel safe here
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in terms of when flooding happens and stuff. I
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feel like we're OK. We get a little water in our basement. Some
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people are out of pocket more than others. But for the most part,
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I think most of us before this felt safe. After
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this, when you see all the damages to homes, you see like cars being like
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in parking lots, like open parking lots where flooding is coming
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in. and we're just seeing damages to cars and cars like
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you can't even see them, you see the top of the roofs. It
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wakes you up as a city, you know, to say, hey, you know what? We're
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not immune to climate change. You know, we thought we were, we're not
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immune. Last year we had a little bit of a taste of it, literally a little bit of a taste
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of it with the smoke that was coming down from the forest fires up north in
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Northern Ontario and Northern Quebec and we got the smoke. You
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know, we're, you know, we didn't get the fires, you know, that, you
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know, thank thank the Lord, we didn't, but we, we
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felt we felt the smoke, you know, our air quality went down, we
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started to wear masks again, not because of COVID. We started wearing masks
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again, some people just because of the air people with asthma had to
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be careful. You know, we started to see those vulnerabilities in
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our society. And we had to be more careful of what we
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do because of the smoke inhalation. It's not good for you.
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We don't want to see this. And so, you know, you have, last
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year, you have this year, what's happened so far this year, there's something
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that tells me we're just starting this, especially if we're starting to get more
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hurricane weather that comes up. I think Ontario has only had one
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hurricane, I think it was in the 1950s, and it devastated us,
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because obviously we're not built for hurricanes or storms.
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We get tornadoes in certain parts of Ontario, but not where
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I live, it's very rare that we get them. But the thing is, is
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climate change is bringing this type of weather. And it's erratic. We
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don't know when it's going to happen. And we don't know how it's going to happen. But
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people are still fighting it politically. And
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that'll be for next episode. I want to talk more about that in terms of the communication.
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But my concern is for the people who
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are in vulnerable spots in their homes, where
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they were prone to flooding here, like in the
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last couple of weeks. How do they go forward? They
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could fix their house up again, but to what avail? Do they have
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to make certain adaptations to be able to stop
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the water from coming into their place? Do they have to make a
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large investment in their home to ensure that there's enough
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drainage around them to not only Get rid of the water, but
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not flood the area. How is the city going to help? We
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have an organization called Conservation Halden, which
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is a great organization. I'm trying to get an interview with them about this
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soon, just to be able to talk about it. Because when
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it comes to cities, we have to
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make sure that we are resilient. I've
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had interviews. Just the other day, I had an interview with Rocky from Rare,
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who's in the Philippines, talking about how Rare and
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other partners are working with fishing communities to make sure
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that they're resilient. Not only can they continue to fish after big storms,
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but how do they get back up and running if they can't fish right
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away? Like their marine protected areas have to be protected and
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they have to be sort of filled back up again and allowed to
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recoup after a storm. They may not be able to fish again. Well, they have
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a savings account, a community savings account where they put money in
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and they put that together. I guess for us, That's taxes, like
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here in Canada, like we'd have to have, like we'd have to rely on our city to
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make the right infrastructure plans and to
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make sure that we're adaptable and we're resilient to these types of
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storms in the future. From what I gather, you
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know, on some of the comments on social media within the city is, do
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we feel confident that our politicians can do that? I
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feel right now that there's some problems there because we weren't
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resilient according to what I've seen, and
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this is anecdotal, we aren't resilient now. So
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how are we going to be resilient in the future? I feel like this is a bit of
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a wake-up call. When you look at climate resiliency, you
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look at community resiliency. This is something that we
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have to ensure we are resilient to
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these types of storms. We're going to see these types of storms more often.
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I know we're in an El Nino year. It's the last year. There's going to be an El Nino year
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next year. How does that work? I don't really
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know off the bat. I have to do some research on that. But there's obviously
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things are going to change. El Nino is going to come back at some point quicker and
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maybe even worse than before. We're seeing record high
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ocean temperatures, which is affecting hurricane season. We don't know what hurricane season
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is going to be like. It's already started apparently. Normally they
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say, oh, after June 30 to November 30 or October
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30 is the hurricane season. But we never see a category 5 in
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July or at the end of June. That's sort of new to us.
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It hasn't happened in a long time. And it seems like it's going to happen more
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often now. That's worrisome for Caribbean nations
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and people in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea,
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Central America, Southern US. But it's also now
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we have to worry about here in Ontario because that water's coming.
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That system could come right up the
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US and right up to Central Ontario. So
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this makes it, it's a wake up call. And I think it's a wake up call to
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us a little bit late for us here in
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Southern Ontario, from what I gather. But
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we are also seeing changes locally that worry me. We're
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starting to see in Ontario more development, more pressure
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being put on development, and people need more housing. So
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where do politicians go when they need more housing? They need to build more houses. So where do
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they go? They go to green spaces. In the province
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of Ontario, just north of Toronto, there's the green belt. It's a green belt
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that's protected on purpose. Same with the escarpment. It's a huge,
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I guess, feature. Those are both huge
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features in Ontario that we've decided to protect as a people and we love so
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much and we've protected them pretty well so far, but it seems like more pressure to
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build homes seems like there's going to alleviate some of those protections and
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put homes in there. There's a big scandal that's been going on for the
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last couple of years with the Ontario government and a little bit of
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like, you scratch my back, I scratch yours, you help me get elected,
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I'll help you provide some space for you to
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make billions of dollars on homes. That allegedly
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happened. And there's no recourse, it seems like.
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There's no consequence for politicians who do that. And
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we're starting to see that. We've seen that for years. We're starting to see that more and more. And
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you look at some of the flooding that happened in Toronto, and you look at the lack of green
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belt in the first place. There's a reason why we protected it. And you're
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starting to see like, hey, some of these green spaces are there not only just
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for beauty and the fact that we love nature, but it's the fact
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that it helps make ourselves resilient
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against these big storms. It helps handle, and even
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though there might be some flooding, it minimizes that flooding. But
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it seems like the money and the greed outweigh the
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protections. And unless we have organizations and
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communities that step up to our leaders and say, hey, you
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know what, like, what are we going to do going forward? Like, we're
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in the situation now, you know, we're developing, City of Burlington is
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designated as a place to grow in Ontario. We're going to grow and
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we're growing. We're putting up, you know, condos left, right and center. We're
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not expanding our infrastructure in terms of roads. There's lots
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of traffic now. We have huge problems. If
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we have a bridge that's close by, if that bridge goes out because of an
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accident or high winds, the city shuts down, essentially, especially
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at rush hour. So there's a lot of problems that we have locally, and
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we need to help solve those so that when these big
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storms or these consequences from climate change come up, we're more
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resilient to them. And that's a thing for
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planners, and for engineers, and for politicians,
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and for the community itself to get involved, and no more. I'm not saying
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that the work isn't going on. We have some great
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people, I feel, in our
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city offices, and I feel like there's a lot of people who are doing some great work out
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there and trying their best. but they work within the legislation. And
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sometimes the legislation has to change for us to become more resilient. So
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it'll be interesting to see what happens to these
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plans going forward with this community, like
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my community, being so vulnerable and being identified as so vulnerable.
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I have friends, unfortunately, who are in hotels right now because their basement got flooded. It
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sucks. It sucks to see them go through that. And
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so it really sucks when you see a community who's
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not close, close, but a city that you love, that you live in, go through
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such a tough time. And obviously, I'm getting it late. I've
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been privileged to be able to live in a community where we haven't really seen
18:13
that much damage from climate change. But we just
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got exposed. And I think a lot of people do get exposed. And it's
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what we do after that will help. So
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I'm hoping to have some people on the podcast that will
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be more local. But the idea is, yes, this is like, you know,
18:29
I'm trying to get answers as well. But it's also to show you like you
18:33
can get answers, you know, and it's good to seek answers. It's good to get
18:36
educated within your own community to do things. It doesn't necessarily
18:40
mean you have to get involved in government, although it would be helpful. But
18:44
it's also just as a community member, you should know that you have the
18:47
right to understand what the plans are. to talk to your city
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councils, councillors, to talk to your mayor, to
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talk to sort of if you have a conservation authority or an organization that's
18:57
environmental like even, you know, there's people here like that
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work for non-profit organizations who know a lot about this type of stuff and why
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we're flooding and why you know, we can be vulnerable and where
19:07
we can be more resilient in certain areas and what we need to do about it and how we
19:10
can do something about it as a community. So that's sort
19:14
of what I want to kind of get out today. You know, it's been a really tough
19:17
couple of weeks for my city and here in
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the city of Burlington, and it really sucks. Luckily,
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you know, we've had minimal damage from
19:29
the storm, but, you know, We're
19:32
fine now, but you never know in the future. So this
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shows that just because I do an interview with
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somebody in the Philippines, like Rocky, who's great and doing great work there and
19:43
making sure that we're resilient in those small island states, doesn't
19:47
mean that back here in a developed
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country, we're not exposed to vulnerabilities when
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we hit some of these climate change consequences. And I feel like
19:58
that's something that we need to build on. around the world, not only in
20:01
places like the Philippines and beautiful places like that, but also here in
20:05
my city, in my country, in my province, and
20:09
go from there. So I'd love to hear if you have any, you
20:12
know, ideas of working with counselors, working with
20:15
local officials, engineers, things like that, to get
20:18
more information. I'd love to hear from you. If you can hit me up on Instagram, at
20:22
howtoprotecttheocean. I'd love to hear wherever you are in the world. I'd love to hear your
20:26
experience with trying to get answers and what kind of answers you've been
20:29
able to get or even have had struggled to get answers from. I'd love
20:32
to hear your feelings on that. Hit me up on Instagram, DM me at
20:36
howtoprotecttheocean. And of course, if you want to sign up for that newsletter to
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get more information on what's happening, updates on what I'm doing, and
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updates on the podcast, you can sign up if you just go speakupforblue.com forward
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slash newsletter. That's speakupforblue.com forward slash newsletter.
20:51
Thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. Have