North Shore Sea Level Rise Adaptive Management Strategy

Project Highlights

KWL was retained by the North Shore Steering Committee to lead analysis and strategic planning to establish a shared understanding and define adaptation measures to address sea level rise across Vancouver’s North Shore.

The project represented a unique regional collaborative approach, guided through the direction of Steering Committee members representing the District of North Vancouver, District of West Vancouver, City of North Vancouver, Squamish Nation, Port of Vancouver, and North Shore Emergency Management.

The project involves five major phases:

1. context development and objective setting;
2. coastal flood hazard assessment;
3. risk assessment of flood consequences on North Shore environments, infrastructure, businesses, and communities;
4. adaptation measures development in an “adaptation toolkit”; and
5. development of a regional strategy to support local-level planning.

KWL’s scope also includes supporting a public and stakeholder engagement program for the Squamish Nation.

The project takes a multi-hazard, multi-sectoral approach to understand interdependencies between sea level rise consequences.  Hazards assessed included coastal flooding and changing intertidal area.  Consequences to social, environmental, and economic elements were assessed using a combination of analytical approaches, including HAZUS building damage and population displacement modelling and innovative business disruption modelling which considers power outages due to flooding of electrical substations.

Results from the hazard and consequence assessment fed into the final risk assessment, which used a workshop-based approach to get input from each project partner to evaluate risk and identify existing controls.  Risk assessment results identified high risk focus areas for adaptation measures which will be developed across multiple scales (spatial, temporal, and governance) to address social, environmental, and economic consequences.  The resulting strategy will outline short-term and long-term actions for the project partners to advance adaptation implementation.

More information about the project can be found at the project website at: https://www.dnv.org/sea-level-rise-strategy