Scenario-Based Climate Change Adaptation Plan for the Town of Halton Hills

The Town of Halton Hills is developing a Climate Change Adaptation Plan. Building on ICLEI’s Building Adaptive & Resilient Communities (BARC) framework, the Town will complete a natural capital assessment and a geospatial exercise to model the projected impacts of climate change on the Town’s environmental, social, and economic systems. These two additional steps will enhance the Town’s resilience to climate change by generating information required to develop a scenario-based climate adaptation plan that can better account for the uncertainty of future GHG atmospheric concentrations and related climate impacts on the Town.The Town will develop three climate change scenarios based on the IPCC Assessment Report’s Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) by modeling the projected effects of each RCP on the Town’s various community systems. The Town will then assess whether different priority issues rise to the top under each scenario and identify appropriate actions for each scenario. In addition, Halton Hills will undertake a Town-wide natural capital assessment to identify environmental features and natural areas which will enhance the Town’s resilience to climate change if conserved, enhanced, or restored. The additional steps will enhance the empirical strength of the BARC Research Milestone and enable the Town to apply the proven scenario-based planning framework to municipal climate change adaptation. A scenario-based climate change adaptation plan includes a number of actions for each climate change scenario as well as triggers to enable the selection of a set of actions if a condition is met. A scenario-based climate change adaptation plan can also contain universal actions that would be implemented no matter which scenario arises, and is therefore also able to include effective aspects of a conventional plan.