Kimberley addresses climate change adaptation

After being selected by the Columbia Basin Trust (CBT) to be one of two participating communities in a pilot study about climate change adaptation, the City of Kimberley hosted a first workshop last Wednesday and Thursday to determine how climate change may impact Kimberley. City Planner Laurie Cordell says about 35 stakeholders from the community got together to learn about climate change adaptation and provide their views.

Firstly, participants were asked what changes they are observing in Kimberley. "People are seeing a number of changes, particularly those who have been living here for some time," Cordell states. Some of the things people have been noticing were more wind, especially large storm events and a lack of severe winters.

What is important to this project, Cordell adds, is that it deals with adaptation to climate change. "It's so much better to plan ahead," she believes, "Even if we stopped producing green house gases today, there would still be an impact of climate change on us."

On the second day of the workshop, participants were asked to identify the different areas where climate change would affect the community most. "There were certain issues that came up in every group," says Project Coordinator Ingrid Liepa. The six main priorities were Forests and Wildfire Risk, Tourism, Municipal Infrastructure, Forest and Ecosystem Health, Energy and Economy as well as Water Supply/Demand.

Cordell thinks this list of priorities will be a guideline for the rest of the project. Organizers will now take the information from the workshop and condense it into a report that will be passed on to the members of a CBT advisory council of experts. "Then we'll have enough of a focus that scientists will be able to do some more research specifically on Kimberley," Cordell says.

She expects that in the fall the project and some of the first results will be presented to the community at large for input. The CBT pilot is a one-year project that will wrap up by the end of March 2009. Once completed, the information will be shared with communities in the entire Columbia Basin, Liepa states. She hopes it will only be the beginning in a long-term process and setting the stage for an ongoing plan how we can best adapt to climate change.

For more information on climate change, mitigation and adaptation as well as the pilot projects in Kimberley and the District of Elkford, you can check www.cbt.org/climatechange/.