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Resilience is a multi-faceted concept frequently used across a wide range of disciplines, practices, and sectors. There is a growing recognition of the utility of resilience as a bridging concept that can facilitate inter-and transdisciplinary approaches to tackle complexities inherent in decision making under conditions of risk and uncertainty. Such conditions are common in urban planning, infrastructure planning, asset management, emergency planning, crisis management, and development processes where systemic interdependencies and interests at stake influence decisions and outcomes. A major challenge that can undermine the use of resilience for guiding planning activities is the value-laden and contested nature of the concept that can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Because resilience is context-specific and generally depends on local aspirations, this issue can be partially tackled by adopting participatory approaches for the conceptualization of resilience. This paper provides an example of how co-design methods can be employed for conceptualizing resilience. The Structured Interview Matrix was used as a technique to facilitate discussions among a diverse group of researchers and practitioners attending the International Workshop on Tools and Indicators for Assessing Urban Resilience. Participants deliberated on issues related to constituent elements of urban resilience, including its position vis-

This article provides an international and national overview of climate change and biodiversity frameworks and is focused on emerging evidence of Indigenous leadership and collaborations in Canada. After introducing the international context and describing the national policy landscape, we provide preliminary evidence documenting emerging national, regional, and local examples of Indigenous-led collaborative conservation projects and nature-based climate change solutions for the climate crisis. Based on our preliminary data, we suggest that Indigenous peoples and communities are well-positioned and currently have and will continue to play important roles in the protection, conservation management, and restoration of lands and waters in Canada and globally. These efforts are critical to the global mitigation, sequestration, and storage of greenhouse gases (GHGs) precipitating the climate crisis while also building adaptive resiliency to reduce impacts. Emerging Canadian evidence suggests that there are a diversity of co-benefits that Indigenous-led nature-based solutions to climate change and biodiversity protection bring, enabled by creating ethical space for reconciliation and conservation collaborations.

Drawing on Māori (Aotearoa-New Zealand), First Nations (Canada), and Navajo Nation (U.S.), case studies and practitioners’ experiences, this article addresses a gap in our understanding of the role of volunteers in emergencies and disasters in Indigenous communities. Enablers and challenges to effective volunteering in these Indigenous communities are discussed. Cultural enablers of volunteering include building capacity during non-emergency times, using all senses when volunteering, and supporting locally emergent psychosocial recovery institutions that are based on cultural understanding and trust. Resolving systemic barriers to volunteering would require institutional and organisational changes through governance, coordination and training. Practical recommendations for supporting volunteer management in Indigenous communities are made.

Climate change poses novel challenges for cities, threatening long-term sustainability objectives and necessitating investments in resilience. Climate change exacerbates the challenge of identifying the range of impacts of natural hazards in terms of scale and frequency. This study focuses on climate change adaptation responses with regard to flood management in the Metro Vancouver regional area, which is the last large non-amalgamated region in Canada. It is comprised of 24 local authorities and a regional government with delegated and distributed authority for flood management and other responsibilities. The area is subject to river flooding, intense rain storms and an increasing rate of sea level rise. The study identifies mechanisms by which the municipalities make sense of the existing hazards as well as how they design and invest into responses for future risks under conditions of uncertainty. Given the geographic, demographic and socioeconomic differences across municipalities in the region, the study found a diverse set of responses in planning regimes in regard to the long-term risks as well as the short-term political pressures that municipalities face. This resulted in a significant variability of planning policies and practices across the region, which could potentially reduce overall regional ability to adapt to change. The paper concludes with a discussion of measures that can be taken to strengthen the regional coordination process.