The Cascadia Climate Resilience Society (CCRS) supports the BC Climate Resilience Summit (BCCRS), a summit series that convenes an interdisciplinary group of practitioners to share knowledge and advance collective actions to reduce risk and build resilience given the impacts of and increasing risks from climate change and natural hazard events in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia, Canada.

 

The BCCRS series builds off the history of Understanding Risk BC (URBC), which was hosted as a local spinoff event of the global Understanding Risk (UR) Forum and Community of Practice (COP), which are initiatives of the Global Facility for Disaster Risk Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR). The UR global community consists of over 13,000 professionals across industries and sectors actively involved in disaster risk identification and management.

 

Established in 2016, the local BC symposiums emerged in response to the increasing demands from practitioners for actionable and open risk assessment information for the major hazards of concern in the region (e.g. seismic, coastal, and riverine flooding) and a collaborative that would help collectively solve for the needed risk reduction and resilience building actions and associated funding/finance. The establishment of the symposiums coincided with the federal and BC government’s adoption of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction’s Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (2015-2030) in 2015 and 2018, respectively.