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Rural areas
28% of Manitobans live in rural communities.
In general, rural communities are more sensitive to climate change impacts than cities, largely due to their economic dependence on natural-resource sectors and lack of opportunities for economic diversification.
Also, few rural communities have access to the same level of disaster management resources (e.g. emergency response and health care programs) as larger cities. In a small town, even a modest hazardous event can be locally disastrous, simply because it is likely to affect a greater proportion of the population. (1)
Flooding
Winnipeg is well-protected within the Red River Floodway. However other centres are located in flood-prone areas and existing risk management approaches are often inadequate. Existing water management infrastructure (storage and drainage systems) may not be suited to projected future changes in precipitation, snowmelt, and drainage schemes. (2)
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Agricultural-based communities
More than 25% of the jobs in rural communities in Canada are in resource-based industries, and a far greater proportion of employment is indirectly dependent upon these sectors. In the Prairies region, 78% of resource-related jobs are in agriculture. (3) The risks and opportunities for agricultural communities are strongly tied to climate change impacts on agriculture, as described in agriculture.
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Northern and remote communities
Many northern, mining, and forest-based communities are located in remote regions with limited transportation access. Therefore their emergency response capacity may be severely constrained especially if extreme weather or forest fires compromise the primary transportation routes.
Forest-based communities make up a small proportion of rural communities; the forest sector accounts for less than 2% of employment in Manitoba. Forest-based communities will be greatly affected by changes in commercial forestry. Overall, communities that are forest depend appear to be associated with lower educational attainment and higher rates of family poverty and unemployment. (4) This indicates that they would have a low adaptive capacity to climate change.
Some Prairie communities have strong economic reliance on tourism and nature-based recreation activities. Nature-based tourism, and the communities that depend on this industry, face several challenges as climate change impacts ecosystems. The parks most severely affected, with local economic impacts, are the island forests and small recreation areas of the southern Prairies, where the water and trees that draw visitors are particularly sensitive to changing climate.
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Aboriginal communities (5)
Approximately half the Aboriginal population of the Prairies lives in cities; the remainder live in or near their traditional territories, which are directly exposed to the impacts of changing climate on ecosystems, water management and forestry.
Aboriginal communities have the highest rates of poverty and unemployment throughout the Prairies. This dramatically reduces their adaptive capacity.
Many Aboriginal communities are also at least partly dependent on subsistence activities for their livelihood, with local food supplies supplementing their diets to a far greater extent than for non-Aboriginal people. Impacts of climate change have implications for flora and fauna, and declines or annual uncertainties in the availability of moose, caribou, deer, fish and wild rice will increase dependence on imported foods, with both economic and health implications for residents.
Unsuitable snow and ground conditions greatly hamper travel, by foot or by snowmobile, to trap lines, hunting grounds and fishing areas. Communities report decreased levels of these traditional activities due to concerns about personal safety.
In Aboriginal communities, the adoption of non-traditional lifestyles in recent years has eroded local knowledge and practices, while growing dependence on waged labour and external assistance have served to undermine local adaptive capacity. (6) Traditional knowledge and land management systems served as a source of resiliency in the past, and could play an important role in restoring and strengthening adaptive capacity in the future.
