Local Actions: The City of Saskatoon's Adaptation Strategy

The City of Saskatoon (City) is proactively preparing itself to face impacts and mitigate risks to key infrastructure, programs and services posed by a warming climate and more frequent and intense storms. In other municipalities’ actions and initiatives proposed through adaptation planning range from relatively small administrative projects such as adding cooling stations in urban centres during heat waves to large scale infrastructure projects such as building naturalized storm water retention ponds. 

Local Actions: The City of Saskatoon’s Adaptation Strategy is a vital component of the City’s overarching Climate Action Plan, and has strong links to other strategic initiatives such as risk management, asset management planning, the Green Strategy, and the forthcoming Urban Forestry Management Plan. Initiatives recommended from this work will cover a wide range of topics and support the Strategic Goals of Environmental Leadership, Quality of Life, Sustainable Growth, and Asset and Financial Sustainability in order to build resiliency in all aspects of city life.

Over the next 80 years, global climate models project that Saskatoon can expect: warmer overall temperatures; more hot days; increased precipitation; changes in precipitation timing; increasingly variable seasons and more intense storms. To learn about projected climate changes for Saskatoon and their possible impacts, see the report here.

Strategy development timeline follows the ICELI Local Governments for Sustainability “5 Milestone Approach”.

Adaptation Methodology, The Milestones, is licensed under ICLEI Canada.