This session focuses on why climate resilience must now be treated as a core organizational strategy rather than a technical or emergency management issue.

• Explore how emerging federal direction, including Canada’s National Adaptation Strategy, is reshaping expectations for public and private sector organizations.
• Impact on governance, investment priorities, and long-term operational continuity.
• Why historical risk assumptions are no longer valid in planning and decision-making.
• How climate-driven disruption is reshaping organizational governance and accountability.
• What Canada’s National Adaptation Strategy signals for future policy and funding expectations.
• How climate risk is becoming a board-level and executive-level planning issue.
• The shift from reactive emergency response to proactive resilience investment.

Most BCPs are never properly tested. You cannot rely on a plan that hasn’t survived a rigorous, high-stress simulation.

• Moving from internal tabletop drills to large-scale, multi-agency live exercises.
• Implementing mandatory annual quality audits by critical service owners.
• Using quantitative metrics (RTO/RPO) to prove actual recovery performance.

This session moves from strategy to practice, focusing on how emergency managers, continuity planners, and risk professionals must fundamentally redesign BIA methodologies to reflect future climate conditions rather than past events.

Learn how to operationalize climate risk within continuity planning and how to identify emerging system vulnerabilities that traditional BIAs fail to capture.

Key focus areas:

• Why traditional BIA models fail under climate-driven disruption scenarios.
• Redefining critical services, dependencies, and recovery priorities under future climate conditions.
• Identifying infrastructure and supply chain failure points under projected climate stress (wildfire, flood, heat, storm)
• Incorporating climate projections, satellite data, and scenario modelling into continuity planning.
• Rethinking Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Maximum Tolerable Downtime (MTD) in a climate-volatile environment.
• Moving from static BIAs to dynamic, climate-adaptive risk assessment frameworks.

Personnel burnout and PTSI are hollowing out response teams. Your plan is only as good as the health of the people required to execute it.

• Building psychological wellness directly into the “Personnel” pillar of your BCP.
• Implementing mandatory post-event peer support and formal debriefing protocols.
• Quantifying the “human toll” in standard post-incident effectiveness reporting.

Cascading failures can overwhelm infrastructure, disrupt essential services, and expose critical gaps in preparedness. You can’t assume power, communications, transportation, and supply chains will recover quickly. Drawing on decades of research into Canada’s most significant disasters, this session will examine the lessons learned from prolonged disruptions and explore how organizations can strengthen resilience, improve decision-making, and better prepare for complex events that challenge both emergency response and business continuity capabilities.

• Lessons from Canada’s most consequential disasters that tested organizational and community resilience.
• Strategies for maintaining operations when power outages, transportation failures, telecommunications disruptions, and supply chain interruptions extend far beyond expected recovery timelines.
• Understanding cascading and interconnected risks — how failures in one critical system can rapidly create operational challenges across multiple sectors and jurisdictions.
• Establishing effective lessons-learned and post-incident review processes that transform disaster observations into measurable improvements in continuity, emergency management, and resilience planning.