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Author: Janet Patterfung

Creston wetlands, easteighth/flickr

Climate adaptation is often framed as a technical challenge: stronger infrastructure, better climate data, resilient buildings, and emergency preparedness. But experts are calling attention to a more fundamental starting point: one that puts people, relationships, and lived experience at the centre of climate resilience.

For communities facing rising costs, insecure housing, energy or food insecurity, or inadequate access to services, climate impacts compound existing pressures. As it protects infrastructure from floods, fires, or extreme heat, adaptation also needs to strengthen the conditions that allow people and communities to thrive.

Serena Michell-Grenier, Stewardship Manager with the Kanaka Bar Indian Band, said climate change is affecting basic needs, culture, livelihoods, and her peoples’ connection to the lands they inhabit. She told participants at the Adaptation Canada 2026 conference, held in Toronto this week, that community members are facing eco-anxiety, eco-grief, and eco-guilt, with climate impacts deeply affecting those who have a close connection to the land.

Kanaka Bar has responded by combining traditional knowledge with site-specific climate and environmental data. Weather and water monitoring inform infrastructure decisions, including about housing.

Data alone is not enough, Michell-Grenier said. She gave credit to Kanaka Bar’s sustained local leadership, responsiveness, local knowledge, clear community priorities, and practice of integrating adaptation into other areas of community planning.

“It’s not about doing more with less,” she said. “Action begins when it’s possible, and action itself can teach you a lot and keep momentum.”

Weymouth Falls Community Land Trust in Nova Scotia offers another example of community-led adaptation. The Trust asked residents what they needed to feel safe and secure, which helped them identify five priorities: food security, energy security, cultural preservation, community spaces, and emergency preparedness. Each is also a climate resilience issue.

Community mapping exercises revealed knowledge that conventional climate data could not capture. When a former church was identified as important to the community, the Land Trust took steps to acquire it and has secured funding to create an energy-efficient, climate-ready community space that honours African Nova Scotian history while providing a safe location during climate emergencies.

The lesson is that trusted, community-centred engagement can allow adaptation investments to address multiple challenges at once.

Linda Swanston of Grey County told conference participants that relationships are the “secret sauce” of adaptation in small communities. Engagement, she argued, should be designed not only to produce material outputs, but to build relationships. Since no plan can anticipate every scenario, those relationships become an adaptation resource: “in small places, things happen because you know who to pick up the phone and call.”

People experience climate change and solutions differently depending on their place, relationships, identity, and circumstances, said Julius Lindsay of the Prismatic Project. His framework emphasizes embracing complexity and designing climate solutions around multiple, intersecting realities and futures.

In a Federation of Canadian Municipalities workshop based on the Green Municipal Fund’s soon-to-be-released equity toolkit for climate adaptation, participants were asked to consider how different equity-deserving groups and individuals—such as women, gender minorities, racialized communities, and Indigenous people—might experience climate adaptation projects differently. They also considered the benefits and barriers to engaging a range of equity-deserving people, and how a climate adaptation project might serve, or fail to serve, different people.

A consistent message emerged from these discussions: adaptation begins before the disaster, and it begins beyond climate policy itself, with asking people what they need to feel secure. It means recognizing the connections between climate change and housing, energy, food, health, affordability, culture, and community. It means valuing personal experience alongside technical data. And it means giving communities enough power and flexibility to shape solutions around their own realities.

The opportunity in climate adaptation is not simply to make systems more resistant to climate impacts, participants learned, but to use the transition to build communities that are more equitable, connected, and capable of meeting people’s needs in a changing world.

Janet Patterfung is Director of The Green Resilience Project, The Energy Mix’s community engagement initiative. GRP explores the connections between climate change, income security, affordability, and community resilience, and seeks solutions that meet people where they are, prioritize equity, and deliver tangible benefits.