What's new? Indicators of Adaptive Capacity to Climate Change for Agriculture in the Prairie Region of Canada: An Analysis based on Statistics Canada's Census of Agriculture (PDF - 1.8 mb) This draft working paper documents a collaborative IISD/AAFC-PFRA effort to develop an index of adaptive capacity at the Census Division level for the Prairie Agricultural region. IISD used this index to select case study locations for farm-level analysis of adaptation responses to climate stress and shock.

Adaptation as Resilience Building

In October 2004, IISD initiated a new project in partnership with the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration (the rural extension service of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada) and the University of Manitoba's Natural Resources Institute. This two-year project funded by Canada's Climate Change Action Fund will examine the resilience of prairie communities to past climate stresses as a means of strengthening adaptation to future climate change.

The project is based on the premise that prairie agroecosystems, or the inter-relationship between social and ecological systems in the prairie region, have been continuously adapting (successfully and unsuccessfully) to historic climate variability. By examining successful examples of how agroecosystems have adapted to past climate stress, IISD and its partners believe that we learn how to promote adaptive capacity and build the resilience of prairie agroecosystems to present climate change. It is expected that the project's research findings will make an important contribution to the design of Canada's evolving Agricultural Policy Framework.

The project will undertake a series of case studies in regions of high historic climate stress. Through case studies carefully selected using GIS analysis of historic climate stresses, the project will explore:

• why some prairie agroecosystems are resilient to existing climate stress;

• which existing policies and management practices promote or impede resilience to existing climate stress;

• how climate resilience can be increased by strengthening adaptive capacity through targeted policy intervention; and

• which prairie agroecosystems may be highly vulnerable to future climate change, and which policy interventions are most important in these regions.

To reach these goals, the project will undertake three main tasks:

1. A Vulnerability Analysis that will integrate historic climate variability and socio-economic data to identify potential vulnerability "hotspots" for detailed study.

2. A Resilience Analysis at the farm and community level that will assess existing adaptive capacity and its role in building resilience to climate change, and include a synthesis of current and planned policies that will build resilience to climate change.

3. An Adaptation Priority Analysis in which future climate scenarios will be integrated with crop and land use models to identify regions where building resilience to climate change may have highest priority.

The primary outcomes of the project will be a deeper understanding of potential means for increasing resilience to climate change on the Canadian prairies and policy recommendations to support this goal.

The project is lead by Dr. Henry David Venema, Director of Sustainable Natural Resources Management at IISD, in collaboration with Dr. Fikret Berkes of the Natural Resources Institute and Dr. Harvey Hill of PFRA. For more information contact Henry Venema.