Enhancing community resilience to climate change disasters: Learning experience within and from sub‐Saharan black immigrant communities in western Canada

Abstract

AbstractEnhancing community capacity towards resilience is key to reducing climate disaster risk, especially in Black immigrant communities in Canada. While there are many extreme climate change events occurring, such as hailstorms, floods, snowstorms, forest fires, droughts, and heat waves in western Canada, there is no known study that has explored resilience within sub‐Saharan African immigrant communities to climate disaster risks in western Canada. All these extreme climate change events have devastated Black populations threatening their ability to cope with disaster risks. Following a decolonial phenomenology methodological framework research approach; our study explores sub‐Saharan African immigrant communities' adaptation strategies to address climate disaster risk in western Canada. In this research, our main purpose was to investigate whether community resilience strategies implemented by the two provinces (Saskatchewan and Alberta) meet the unique needs of sub‐Saharan African Immigrants. By exploring local communities' perspectives on climate change, we highlighted the relevance of inclusivity in climate capacity building to reduce disaster risk and cope with climate change‐related disasters in the localities. Our findings revealed that personal experiences with climate change risks significantly influenced communities' strength and resilience and contributed to their resilience strategies. We view this paper as a first step in developing a community‐led climate change resilience research agenda that will have a practical application for the community in the face of climate change in Canada.