Lunenburg Part 1 - Introduction and Background August 30.pdf

a questionnaire-based survey of residents’ valuing of social assets (ranking social
assets);
interviews with professionals, municipal officials, and representatives of community,
business, industry, and social service organizations (perspectives on asset value,
municipal adaptive capacity; knowledge of social vulnerability);
naturalistic observation of community life (places that people frequent, places where
people are active);
observation of the condition or state of repair of infrastructure and of environmental
processes (areas of flooding and erosion);
statistical analysis of Statistics Canada 2006 Census data of population demographic
and social characteristics (determinants of social vulnerability); and
content analysis of municipal policy and plan documents and regulations (existing
planning tools for adaptation).
We conducted three site visits between May and August. We used our first visit to familiarize
ourselves with the landscape, the community form and land use; to establish contacts that would
later assist us in our primary data collection; and to arrange the transfer from the municipal data
bases of digital data for mapping infrastructure. We used our second and third site visits to field
check physical infrastructure mapping in Project 1, and to collect primary data for Projects 2
(social studies) and 3 (municipal capacity study).
Background - Climate Change, Adaptation and the
Lunenburg Study Area Context
The following section provides an overview of coastal climate change impacts in Nova Scotia, a
primer on adaptation planning, and an introduction to the settlement patterns and environments
of the Lunenburg study area. More comprehensive information on climate change impacts in the
region is available from the ACASA website atlanticadaptation.ca. Part 2, Section 1 of this report
series details sea level rise and storm surge scenarios for the Lunenburg District coastline.
A description of the Lunenburg study area establishes the local environmental, social, economic
and political context for the projects. This description of human and physical geography provides
a framework for understanding the modern land use patterns, the natural environment and the
vulnerabilities of the coastal landscape to climate change impacts.
The Municipality of the District of Lunenburg undertook a self-study as part of its participation in
the ACAS projects. This self-study provides additional information on the economic, social and
natural environment and governance and administration of the municipality 3
Coastal Climate Change Impacts in Nova Scotia
The ACAS initiative aims to develop the capacity of Atlantic Canada communities to adapt to
global warming induced environmental changes that scientists and most national governments
now believe are imminent because of centuries of burning fossil fuels. These environmental
changes – rising atmospheric and ocean temperatures and the consequent melting of glaciers
and ice caps, shifts in global, regional and local hydrologic cycles, biome shifts, and sea level
3 Municipality of the District of Lunenburg, 2012.
7