INSTITUTIONAL ADAPTATION OF WATER RESOURCE
INFRASTRUCTURES TO CLIMATE CHANGE IN EASTERN ONTARIO
P. CRABB
´
E
1
and M. ROBIN
2
1
Department of Economics, University of Ottawa, P.O. box 450, Stn A, Ottawa K1N 6N5, Canada
E-mail: crabbe@uottawa.ca
2
Department of Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa, P.O. box 450, Stn A, Ottawa K1N 6N5,
Canada
Abstract. Institutional barriers and bridges to local climate change impacts adaptation affecting
small rural municipalities and Conservation Authorities (CAs are watershed agencies) in Eastern
Ontario (Canada) are examined, and elements of a community-based adaptation strategy related
to water infrastructures are proposed as a case-study in community adaptation to climate change.
No general water scarcity is expected for the region even under unusually dry weather scenarios.
Localized quantity and quality problems are likely to occur especially in groundwater recharge areas.
Some existing institutions can be relied on by municipalities to build an effective adaptation strategy
based on a watershed/region perspective, on their credibility, and on their expertise. Windows of
opportunity or framing issues are offered at the provincial level, the most relevant one in a federal
state, by municipal emergency plan requirements and pending watershed source water protection
legislation. Voluntary and soon to be mandated climate change mitigation programs at the federal
level are other ones.
“The concept of policy networks (...) is based on the observation that policy-
making tends to be fragmented into specific issue areas, and that most issues are
dealt with by a few actors within small groups of participants from governmental
and nongovernmental agencies (...). It describes the close and consensual nature
of policymaking and the often blurred relationship ‘between the governors and
the governed’ (...) through channels that are often informal and, almost always,
extra-constitutional.” (T. O’Riordan et al., 1998)
“...risk perceived is risk acted upon.” (J. Adams, 1995)
1. Introduction
This case-studydeals with local institutional
1
adaptation to climate change of water-
related infrastructures inthe Eastern Ontario region (approximately 5,000km
2
in the
Great-Lakes Basin, at the confluence of the St. Lawrence and the Ottawa River in the
Province of Ontario, Canada and in the vicinity of Ottawa - Gatineau, a metropolitan
centre of about one million inhabitants; see Figure 1). Canada is endowed with a
federal system of government, in which provinces enjoy a large degree of autonomy
for matters of regional relevance. This means that environment is often an area of
Climatic Change (2006) 78: 103–133
DOI: 10.1007/s10584-006-9087-5
c
Springer 2006
104 ADAPTATION TO CLIMATE CHANGE IN EASTERN ONTARIO
Figure 1. Map of the Region with Watersheds.
shared and, therefore, conflictual jurisdiction. Authority in municipalities (local
government) is delegated by the province. This study has several unique features.
First, it isinterdisciplinary involvinghydro-geologists, environmental engineers,
ecologists, eco-toxicologists, geographers, public health professionals, economists,
political scientists, and lawyers working on common research and policy questions.
Second the study had partners from the community who assisted in steering the
study. These include: the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM), which re-
groups most of Canadian municipalities, has been proactive in the area of voluntary
climate change mitigation and has agreed to diffuse the results of this case-study; a
community-based environmental research and education institute
2
; and the Eastern
Ontario Water Resources Committee (EOWRC), the successor committee respon-
sible to implement the recommendations of the Eastern Ontario Water Resources
Management Study (EOWRMS) completed in 2001 (CH2M HILL, 2001). The
mission of EOWRMS was to gather information to ensure a safe, cost-effective
drinking water supply on a regional scale. EOWRC’s members include two Con-
servation Authorities or watershed agencies (South Nation Conservation (SNC),
the Raisin Region Conservation Authority (RRCA)), and two upper-tier munici-
palities (the United Counties of Prescott and Russell (P&R), the United Counties of
Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry (S, D&G)), and the City of Ottawa to the extent
of its involvement in the South-Nation watershed.
3
Third, the study isfocusedon institutional barriers andbridgesto local adaptation
affecting small rural municipalities (a total population of about 140,000 inhabitants)
P. CRABB
´
E AND M. ROBIN 105
and Conservation Authorities (CA), i.e. watershed agencies, and proposes ele-
ments of a community-based adaptation strategy related to water infrastructures.
Water-related infrastructures are broadly defined to include engineering structures,
watersheds and pertinent human and social resources such as health, climate-
and water-related expertise and institutions. The study developed from EOWRMS
(CH2M HILL, 2001), which did not address climate change or institutional change,
and from climate change projections for the Great-Lakes Basin over this century
identified in publications from the last ten years as well as from original physical
climate scenarios based on experienced weather events in Eastern Ontario.
This study utilizes both a top down scenario-based approach and a bottom-up
vulnerability approach (Smit, 2003; Adger et al., 1999). It takes the vulnerability
approach to the extent that all its physical scenarios are historical analogues and that
the study focuses on current adaptation needs and opportunities in a cost-effective
perspective. It takes the top down approach to the extent that the stakeholders
have not been the driver for this study and that published future scenarios and
thus long-term impacts have been taken into consideration as well (Smit, 2003;
Adger et al., 1999).
For most people, in their every day life, local government is the most salient
political actor. It implements and enforces national and provincial policies through
its police force (e.g. vehicle emissions), inspectors, medical officer of health (e.g.
beach closure), and supplies essential services such as drinking water, garbage col-
lection, etc. Local government plays a fundamental role in land - use, urban density,
etc. Climate change impacts will be felt and differentiated mainly at the local level.
If climate change policies are to be effective at the individual and household level,
local government will have to play a key role to foster informal networks of exper-
tise and cooperation among local businesses, local schools, colleges, universities,
libraries, NGOs, churches, and other social groups, that is policy networks (O’
Riordan et al., 1998).
The smallest region relevant to this study, for which impacts have been pro-
jected, is the Great-Lakes Basin. Differentiated impacts and vulnerabilities may
exist at a much smaller spatial scale than the Basin. As governments closest to
the people, municipalities may be the ones to act on adaptation, either because of
the subsidiarity principle, which delegates the more local issues to the lower level
of government capable of handling them, or because of residual responsibilities
(Tindall et al., 2000). Different instruments and uses of those instruments are likely
to be appropriate depending upon whether the climate scenarios are in some way
locally distinctive rather than uniform across the Province of Ontario. A locally
distinctive scenario rather than a widespread one is more likely to place particular
demands on local authority.
Invoking the principle of subsidiarity and local public finance principles, all
local issues should be steered by municipal governments which are more attuned
to local citizens’ preferences unless the services they require generate substan-
tial spillovers or demand income redistribution. If municipal adaptation initiatives
106 ADAPTATION TO CLIMATE CHANGE IN EASTERN ONTARIO
generate major spillovers, either positive or negative even on a regional basis, then
the Province should intervene possibly to set up some regional governing structure
and adopt financing measures to internalize these spillovers or externalities and
facilitate regional adaptation. If on the other hand, impacts are expected to be more
localized and random in nature, senior governments may be less willing to facili-
tate preventative and adaptive strategies and more inclined to rely on responsive or
emergency measures.
4
A municipality’s ability to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy
towards climate change may be called its adaptive capacity or resilience. Mu-
nicipal adaptive capacity is a function of various factors: the range of available
technological options; the available resources and their distribution across the mu-
nicipal population; the structure of critical institutions and the criteria for decision-
making; the human and social infrastructures; the access to risk-spreading mech-
anisms; the ability of decision-makers to manage credible information and their
own credibility; the public’s perception of both the source of the impact and its
significance to its local manifestations (Yohe et al., 2002). The greater the adap-
tive capacity, the larger is the set of adaptation options. This is why this study
deals with planned anticipatory institutional adaptation that, for short, we call
planned adaptation. It does not deal with simply reactive adaptation whose op-
tions are much more restricted. The lower the adaptive capacity, the higher is the
vulnerability.
5
The unexpected 1998 Ice Storm which caused about Can $5 billion damage
in Eastern Canada is an extreme event, which, according to the literature on cli-
mate change, is expected to become more frequent and more intense in the future
(IPCC, 2001). It was vividly experienced in the region. The 2001 and 2002 Eastern
Ontario droughts were milder forms of extreme events. The May 2000 Walkerton
(Ontario) water quality crisis in which 7 residents of this Ontario village died and
113 others fell seriously ill from E. coli contamination had circumstantial ties to
climate changes in that contamination occurred after an excessively wet period
succeeded a dry one coupled with contaminated run-off from agricultural lands
entering the community well (O’Connor, 2002). The July 2004 Peterborough (On-
tario) flood is yet another instance of extreme event, though not experienced in
Eastern Ontario.
Emergency plans offer the opportunity to take climate change risks into consid-
eration, such as those resulting from extreme events. However, emergency plans
do not suffice. Risk assessment/management requires long-term strategies to be in-
cluded in the planning process of municipalities and risk-reducing measures to be
taken in its everyday operations; it goes well beyond the design of purely reactive
emergency responses (Bruce et al., 1999).
This climate change adaptation case-study, after looking carefully at water
quantity impacts on groundwater resources (the major source of drinking water
in the region) under various climate scenarios, concludes that negative impacts
are highly localized at least for unusual scenarios of temperature, precipitation
P. CRABB
´
E AND M. ROBIN 107
and their combination, whenever historically experienced (see section 3). More-
over, the majority of the recent literature indicates that climate change is rather
favorable to North-American agriculture (e.g. Weber et al., 2003 and the litera-
ture cited; Reilly et al., 2003; Mendelsohn, 2001). These are no excuse for policy
inaction, however.
First of all, these highly localized areas of water quantity vulnerability deserve
precautionary measures.
Second, as climate change comes on top of demographic, economic devel-
opment pressures and environmental degradation, all of which affect both water
quantity and quality, it may push water resources to a state which may require
more resources for rehabilitation than needed for their protection (Carpenter et
al., 1999).
6
In other words, there may exist currently robust no-regret measures,
i.e. measures worth adopting whether or not climate impacts occur, e.g. water use
efficiency.
Third, adaptive management to climate change is part and parcel of sustainable
management of all natural infrastructures to which many Canadian municipalities
subscribe.
7
Fourth, in the knowledge economy, human infrastructure is the best guarantor
against vulnerability; household income and individualhealth will allow individuals
to shield themselves to some extent from climate change impacts.
Fifth, communities can shelter themselves by educating their members, by pro-
tecting the most vulnerable, by taking adequate adaptive measures, and by building
social resilience, i.e. theability tocope withgenerally unanticipatedand undesirable
events.
Sixth, there is an a priori argument that early planned adaptation, facing a wider
choice of feasible options, will be more flexible and cost-effective than late reactive
measures.
Seventh, municipalities will be mandated sooner or later by the Federal Gov-
ernment to mitigate against climate change. Actual measures to be adopted may
be largely discretionary (Government of Canada, 2002). Mitigation and adaptation
are two policy instruments, or rather sets of instruments, which are generally not
independent of each other (Kane et al., 2000). “Adaptation is a necessary strategy
at all scales to complement climate change mitigation efforts” (IPCC, TAR, WG II,
Summary for Policy Makers, 2001, section 2.7). In other words, municipalities need
to develop a comprehensive strategy towards climate change, for both adaptation
and mitigation, taking their particular circumstances into account. This strategy
may enable one to identify business opportunities resulting from climate change
(such as agriculture for ethanol or bio - diesel, a shift to more valuable cash crops
and increased tourism, etc.).
Finally, there is evidence that the institutional set-up is a key factor against
vulnerability. Institutions are persistent, sustainable and resilient social arrange-
ments depending on legitimacy, agenda setting, and the environmental risks, which
resonate with the institution’s agenda, and social capital or infrastructure (see
