Virden - Wallace-Woodworth Green Infrastructure and Flood Adaptation Plan

The Town of Virden and the Rural Municipality of Wallace-Woodworth will develop a climate change adaptation plan. The main goal of this initiative is to create a document for the region that will be used to guide the planning and development of local resources, determine concrete actions to adapt - and mitigate - to the risks of climate change, provide the communities with roadmaps for strategies for climate change preparedness, and identify green infrastructure projects tailored to suit each community's particular resilience/sustainability needs. Long-term adaptation strategies for reducing the risks related to the effects of climate change will also be identified.The plan will include a regional analysis of candidate retention storage sites within the Scallion, Bosshill and Gopher watersheds and develop the environmental and economic case for large-scale investment in natural infrastructure on the agricultural landscape as a key adaptation to the elevated risk of both flood and drought. This will enable provincial and municipal governments to attract multi-functional adaptation investments for the Virden region. Also, the plan will establish the technological base and institutionalize capacity in the easternmost Canadian Prairies for leading edge hydrologic systems design with best-in-class modelling and full climate risk analytics for large system investment planning. Future potential follow-up to this plan will be to develop a feasibility study for specific identified locations in the Virden and Wallace-Woodworth areas: Hydrodynamic and simulation modelling of the Scallion, Bosshill and Gopher watersheds (Virden) to develop a comprehensive benefit-cost analysis of retention storage with climate change sensitivity. This future Manitoba case study will apply the Prairie Climate Atlas data to demonstrate full climate risk analytics consistent with emerging best practices for climate resilient infrastructure investment planning. This study will be a follow-up to the recommendations of the Manitoba Climate and Green Plan and the Roseau River Study by building the investment case for multi-functional storage (MFS) in the Assiniboine River Basin using leading-edge geospatial and hydrological analysis and best-in-class climate risk analytics for investment planning.