The first progress report on Canada’s climate adaptation plan reveals an urgent need to focus on actual results as climate-driven extreme weather impacts ramp up, says the Canadian Climate Institute’s director of adaptation.

Three years on from releasing the country’s first National Adaptation Strategy (NAS), billed as the “first whole-of-society framework to manage climate risks and build long-term climate resilience,” the federal government released its first progress report on its efforts.

Having committed $2.1 billion toward implementing the NAS since Fall 2022, the report says Canada “made meaningful advancements” across five systems: disaster resilience, health and well-being, nature and biodiversity, infrastructure, and economy and workers.

“We are controlling what we can,” the federal government writes in the report.

But Ryan Ness, director of adaptation at the Canadian Climate Institute, suggests the government needs to redouble its efforts.

“Ottawa’s update on its National Adaptation Strategy documents a good deal of activity—but little sign that any of it is actually reducing the escalating climate and extreme weather risks that Canadians face,” Ness wrote in a statement. While there has been “important forward movement, including a wide range of federal programs, tools, funding, and coordination efforts under way across the country,” the progress report’s focus on “tracking programs rather than results” leaves it presenting “an overly-optimistic picture of success.”

“What’s missing is clear evidence that these initiatives are reducing climate risk in a meaningful way at a national level.”

Adaptation efforts are lagging by the report’s own admission, Ness writes. That Indigenous communities “remain among the most exposed to climate-driven extreme weather risks,” three years after the federal government pledged to support Indigenous-led climate adaptation action, makes this failure clear, he says.

Meanwhile, up to 1.5 million Canadian households remain effectively uninsurable in the face of flood risk, another sign that Ottawa’s efforts are lagging, Ness says. Moreover, “only a third of Canadians have taken steps to prepare for climate risks—short of the strategy’s 50% target for 2025.”

Housing is among the “emerging and developing issues” included in the progress report.

“As climate-related disasters drive record-breaking losses, securing adequate and affordable housing insurance has become increasingly difficult, exacerbating household risk and affordability challenges,” the authors write. “Further, limited supports and services exist to help retrofit Canada’s aging housing stock, highlighting a significant gap in households’ ability to proactively build resilience.”

In February, Kevin Lockhart, director of buildings at the Pembina Institute, urged Ottawa to include long-term retrofit planning in the mandate of the new Build Canada Homes program. But it hasn’t happened yet.

Drawing on lessons learned from four whole-building retrofits in Alberta, a new report from Pembina provides detailed guidance on “conditions needed to build a strong retrofit sector, as well as gaps in support that hold projects back.” 

The NAS progress report came six weeks after James K. Stewart and Hugh O’Reilly, both members of the Advisory Committee for the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation, urged the creation of a national office on climate adaptation, in an op-ed for Corporate Knights.

“The National Adaptation Strategy may be an important foundation—but on its own it has not driven the progress Canadians need,” the Climate Institute’s Ness writes. “What’s required now is a focused set of concrete measures, targeted at the highest climate risks and backed by investment, clear timelines, and accountability to deliver real reduction in risk.”