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Yet, as a country, Canada has been slow to take action. Despite recent climate change effects, there is still ongoing construction in known floodplains, and many cities are rapidly expanding into fire-prone forests. This is in part due to cities and regions being complex, siloed entities that lack coordinated and integrated resiliency planning across their physical, economic and social sectors. Political parties further complicate things with confusing strategies, which risk delay as new parties are elected. In short, for proper infrastructure resiliency to be realized, there needs to be clear leadership.

Installing a Chief Resiliency Officer (CRO) — who can work directly with municipal politicians, city staff and other levels of government to drive integrated city resiliency planning — is a solution to address that leadership gap. Partnering with urban planners, procurement, emergency response directors, scientists and engineers, CROs use tools that uncover the critical weak points of a city, and make plans to address them.

Engineers increasingly work with scientists to understand future vulnerabilities that cities face in our climate-change impacted world and build fail-safe systems into infrastructure to address them. By understanding how critical assets can be impacted by probable events, engineers can work within established protocols and procedures to build resiliency into new infrastructure, retro-fits and city projects.