Your next budget cycle may be under pressure from decisions that were made 20, or even 40, years ago. This workshop is about making sure decisions today don't become emergency spending in 2045.

Land Use Planning, Asset Management & Adaptation is a three-session workshop series that puts municipal CAOs, planners, engineers, and infrastructure staff in the same room, working through real trade-offs in municipal planning and infrastructure management.

You'll be running a live decision simulation throughout where you choose land use and asset management policies and see how your choices play out across 1, 5, 20, and 50-year timeframes. You'll see exactly how a decision that looks reasonable in year one can lock in a liability that arrives in year 30, and how to demonstrate this to councils on four-year terms.

Between rounds, you'll work with leading edge approaches to municipal climate practice that don't require an engineering degree to apply them.

You will work on practical skills:

• Score highest risk assets and planning areas by climate exposure and build a prioritized list you can defend to council and funders without needing to commission an expensive study first. 
• Understand what to do with aging infrastructure and what it means if the next major storm happens before you can replace them. 
• Translate climate projection uncertainty into a simple three-category decision tool - Restrict, Condition, Promote - that turns development reviews into a risk-informed choice, not a gut call.

On the political and governance side, the workshop names the forces that make good decisions structurally hard and shows how to work around the constraints:

• The political timescale mismatch. Infrastructure lasts 50–80 years. Election cycles last four. The workshop shows how to make the cost of inaction concrete and politically legible so adaptation doesn't keep losing to the next budget pressure.
• Grant deadline distortion. Examine what happens when funding urgency drives the decision and how to make the best decisions under funding deadlines.
• The Maladaptation Test. Four questions to ask before approving any adaptation measure: who bears the risk, who was consulted, what's driving the timeline, and were nature-based alternatives evaluated?
• Path lock-in.Every decision narrows future options. The workshop shows how graduated planning controls can prevent irreversible commitments in high-risk areas to keep flexibility open.
  
  

You'll also explore innovative approaches that are changing how municipalities manage risk without blowing capital budgets: sustainable drainage systems that turn stormwater into greenspace; steering growth away from hazard zones without public subsidy; and approaches from Halifax, Victoriaville, and post-Fiona communities that show what locally-adapted regulation looks like in practice.

Session 3 is a hands on workshop. In structured stages, you'll build a draft municipal planning roadmap tailored to your community with a risk profile of some priority assets, a proposal of where to restrict, condition, or promote development, a selection of tools most relevant to your gaps, a map of which existing plans to embed climate risk into first, and "right-away" actions to see immediate progress.

You'll leave with a roadmap that's ready to go back to your CAO, your council, or your next capital planning cycle. If you participate or advise on land use, infrastructure, or capital decisions, this is for you.