Snuneymuxw - City of Nanaimo Climate Hazard Assessment and Mapping

Client:

City of Nanaimo and Snuneymuxw First Nation

Timing:

February 2024 to December 2025

Location:

Vancouver Island, British Columbia

Their challenge

The City of Nanaimo and Snuneymuxw First Nation, like communities around the world, face a number of climate hazards. To better prepare for this, in a changing climate, they needed a rigorous, up-to-date picture of the climate hazards affecting their shared territory — extreme heat, extreme cold, extreme precipitation, riverine flood, coastal flood, stormwater flood, drought, windstorm, wildfire, and mass movement geohazards. Each hazard has its own drivers, its own data gaps, and its own decision-relevant thresholds.

The City and Snuneymuxw First Nation needed more than a hazard-by-hazard inventory. They needed to understand how these ten hazards interact, where they overlap on the ground and how that picture will shift as the climate changes over the next 5 to 10 years and out to 2100. And they needed it delivered in a way that emergency managers, planners, and the public could actually use: clear summaries, simple maps, and a shared understanding of what’s coming.

Our solution

We worked with the City of Nanaimo and Snuneymuxw First Nation to build a Climate Hazard Assessment that treats climate risk as a system, not a checklist. Further, working with expert partners, we applied scientific rigour and specific hazard expertise to our work as well as drawing in place-based knowledge from Snuneymuxw First Nation members.

For each of ten priority hazards — extreme heat, extreme cold, extreme precipitation, riverine flood, coastal flood, stormwater flood, drought, windstorm, wildfire, and mass movement geohazards — we assessed current and future frequency, severity, and duration using historical climate data (1981–2010) against projections for the 2050s and, for flood and coastal hazards, out to 2100.

We mapped where hazards are most likely to occur today and how that footprint changes over time, including a combined view of individual and cumulative hazard timing across the local and regional study areas.
We explicitly assessed hazard interactions — how heat feeds drought and wildfire, how wildfire and drought precondition slopes for landslide, how river and coastal flooding compound in the estuary, and how windstorms and precipitation arrive together — so emergency managers can plan for cascading events, not just isolated ones.
We built the assessment around the Snuneymuxw Territory and First Nation Reserve boundaries alongside the City’s local and regional study areas, so risk to reserve lands and the Nanaimo River estuary — among the areas most exposed to both river and coastal flooding — is visible rather than folded into a generic municipal picture.
We translated technical findings into a public-facing overview report and simplified hazard graphics and maps, so the assessment supports both emergency management planning and community understanding.

The result is a shared, climate-informed foundation the City and Snuneymuxw First Nation can use to prioritize mitigation, refine emergency plans, and anticipate — rather than just react to — the hazards reshaping the region.

Having worked with Ebbwater Consulting on a multi-year project to assess and map climate hazards in our local area, I can confidently say that we picked the right team to work with. Their ability to manage our project, provide detailed subject matter expertise while also presenting the data and findings in a publicly-accessible way has been invaluable. They also stewarded our project in a culturally-sensitive way that I believe was well received by our partnering local First Nation, thereby enabling the project to incorporate important insights. This project will allow our City and the wider local community, including our neighbouring First Nations community, to move forward with confidence in our knowledge of downscaled climate hazards in our region.

– Evan Lloyd
Emergency Manager, City of Nanaimo