From Risk to Resilience: Indigenous Alternatives to Climate Risk Assessment in Canada

Canada’s current provincial and national risk assessment frameworks focus predominantly on the built environment and infrastructure, neglecting the more extensive social-ecological system.

This narrow focus fails to capture the full extent of climate risks or contexts, particularly those affecting Indigenous communities, and excludes the social and political structures that compound risk within Indigenous communities. While Canada is grappling with applying a standard risk assessment framework, Indigenous communities, nationally and globally, are deeply concerned that such limited understandings of “risk” could contribute to neglecting climate impacts within the larger ecosystems. These limited risk narratives could have genuine impacts on our climate resilience and our abilities to practice our culture holistically, but they also fail to account for the interactions and interdependencies that exist within the natural world. Since Indigenous communities are socially, economically, spiritually, and culturally dependent on continued reciprocal relationships with their territories, many Indigenous people are concerned about climate risks and that “future generations will not have the same opportunities and experiences out on the Land as they had growing up” (Cameron et al., 2021). The inclusion of Indigenous knowledges and a different way of looking at risk assessments is not just a suggestion but an urgent necessity to ensure a comprehensive understanding of climate risks that builds holistic resilience to climate risks and to climate change.