Addressing Chronic Precarity in the Wake of Disaster: A Canadian Red Cross Perspective

Climate change has forever altered our collective risk environment, but it is not alone among threats challenging Canada’s approach to emergency management. The recent COVID-19 pandemic clearly demonstrated the destabilizing impact that catastrophic-loss events and global crises can have on individuals, communities, economies, governments, and systems of global governance—and on national security. While there are many lessons to be learned from both the pandemic and recent climate disasters, one of the most critical is that such events do not happen in isolation. In preparing for them, we must understand their secondary impacts and the underlying vulnerabilities at the individual, community, and national levels. While Canada has become adept at responding to emergencies as they happen, this chapter will argue that we can improve by adopting a more systematic, integrated, multisectoral, and beneficiary-centered response to climate change, disasters, and major health emergencies. The chapter will also discuss the experience of the Red Cross with respect to some chronic precarities that challenge disaster planning and cannot be ignored. It will close with specific recommendations to improve Canada’s response to climate-related disasters and other major emergencies, so that individuals, families, and communities are better able fully to recover and move on with their lives.