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Resilience Hubs and Evacuations: Preparing Edmonton for Extreme Events and Climate Change
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- Author(s) / Creator(s)
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A changing climate is placing significant strain on urban environments as communities are contending with intensifying and more frequent hazards. Communities are simultaneously facing ongoing and new societal challenges that centre around a need for critical services and resources. To help people not just survive but also thrive, resilience hubs have emerged as a possible solution. These hubs are locations that provide information, resources, and temporary shelter during a range of disasters, but also function in an equally important, everyday role in providing services or programs for the community. Existing guidance, recommendations, and lessons learned from existing resilience hubs offer strong design, programmatic, and development examples. However, transportation has not yet been thoroughly considered, which affects hub placement, infrastructure, and associated evacuation plans. Moreover, choice-making for urban evacuations within the Canadian context is generally sparse, which can inhibit the development of needs-centred evacuation plans and response strategies.
This research aims to provide an early exploration in both of these areas — transportation to/from resilience hubs and urban evacuation choice-making — using Edmonton, Alberta as a case study. To gain the perspective of residents, the research employed a mixed-method approach that collected data via two literature reviews, a large region-wide survey (n=950 people) and focus groups with underserved populations (n=52 people). Using these data, analyses were conducted to provide a holistic overview of transportation needs, behaviour, and guidance related to resilience hubs and urban evacuations.
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- Date created
- 2024-04-10
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- Type of Item
- Report