TORONTO’S FIRST RESILIENCE STRATEGY

The six resilience challenges represent Toronto’s most pressing issues affecting our resilience and the most significant opportunities for improving resilience. They came from extensive public and stakeholder engagement that began, through the Preliminary Resilience Assessment, with identifying ten acute shocks and chronic stresses that currently affect Toronto’s resilience the most: flooding, heatwaves, blizzards and cold snaps, power outages, emergency preparedness, poverty and inequities, access to housing, ageing infrastructure, getting around, and long-term municipal financial stability.

In the next phase of the consultation process, residents told us which of these challenges affected them the most and identified additional trends and challenges that affect their resilience. This culminated in a half-day stakeholder workshop that collected hundreds of additional inputs. In total, residents brought forward 155 issues through the consultation process that influence lives in Toronto right now, from the cost of education to homelessness, data privacy, and Indigenous rights.

We categorized these 155 issues into 16 themes and ranked them by intensity, a measure of how important each was to participants in our online survey, how many times they came up at our stakeholder workshop, and how long participants spoke about them. The six highest-intensity themes were then refined through further public consultation at an Open House in December 2018. The six resilience priorities inform the Vision and Principles of the Strategy, as well as the Focus Areas and Actions.

Source:
https://www.toronto.ca/ext/digital_comm/pdfs/resilience-office/toronto-resilience-strategy.pdf