Assess Vulnerability and Risk: Kimberley's Process
Small community working groups
Kimberley used small working groups composed of community volunteers and city staff to address their priority areas. They started the process with a kick-off meeting to bring all the new groups up to speed on the project information to date. This was followed by several smaller group meetings for each priority area (i.e. tourism, forests, water, municipal infrastructure).
Modify the process, simplify the templates
Existing vulnerability and risk assessment templates for climate adaptation planning can be quite detailed and complex, which is not necessarily the best fit for a community adaptation process that is largely reliant on stakeholders who are volunteers (unless there are very specific issues the community wants to look at in detail and with a lot of rigour, which was not the case for Kimberley).To better fit Kimberley’s process, it was necessary to simplify the templates and modify the process to better accommodate the participants. In general this approach worked well, although there is a risk of over-simplification and losing valuable nuances if terms like vulnerability, sensitivity and adaptive capacity are not well understood by the participants.
Assessment tools
Each priority area used a different assessment tool for their vulnerability and risk assessment. This was to accomodate the fact that Kimberley was assessing three very different areas: built environment (tourism), socio-economic environment (tourism), and natural environment (forests and water). This was seen as important because the questions around tourism are very different than the questions about water.
In general Kimberley had a very qualitative assessment that merged the vulnerability tables and worked back to front in the vulnerability assessment process.
Note, CBT's technical advisory committee suggests using one assessment tool across the board to ensure rigour in the vulnerability and risk assessment process.
Comment from Kimberley's Coordinator, Ingrid Liepa
"I would say that Elkford's assessment took a more rigourous, quantitative approach compared to Kimberley, going through the sensitivity analysis and adapative capacity analysis step-by-step to establish vulnerability ratings, and then going through the risk assessment process which also used numerical ratings (more true to CIG). In Kimberley we were much more free-wheeling and qualitative in our approach, and looked at an issue's sensitivity/adaptive capacity to "ground truth" our conclusions more so after the fact than up front. I think our approach was more accessible/appropriate to the people we had involved . . . but [our approach] is also perhaps more open to criticism because it was not as consistent/rigourous as Elkford's. Nonetheless, I don't think we would have arrived at different conclusions 9 times out of 10 using a more rigorous process."
Click here for more resources and templates used by Kimberley's working groups for water, forests, municipal infrastructure and tourism.
Hiking St. Mary's, Kimberley, B.C.