By Isabeaux Graham & Jeff Allen
Across Canada, climate change rarely hits as a single, isolated disaster. No region faces just one or two isolated risks; instead, vulnerabilities overlap, mix, and concentrate in different ways.
In December, 2025, the School of Cities published Learning from What Works, an initiative identifying effective, locally driven solutions to the complex challenges communities are facing across Canada. To support a chapter on climate change and mitigation, we created the following set of maps using data from the Climate Conflict Vulnerability Index (CCVI), showing how risks vary across the country.
These maps visualize environmental vulnerabilities – biodiversity loss, water stress, soil degradation, and deforestation – alongside accumulated climate events from the past several years – including floods, wildfires, long-term sea level rise, and droughts.
Click on the maps to view at a higher resolution.
According to the CCVI, climate hazards capture extreme events and long-term changes in climate conditions that could harm communities, while environmental vulnerabilities measure degrading ecosystems due to human activity and the potential for further decline. All categories are ranked on the CCVI’s global vulnerability scale from 0 (minimal risk) to 10 (maximum).
Each data point sits on a 0.5 by 0.5 degree grid. While the north-south spacing (latitude) remains constant at about 55km, the east-west distance (longitude) decreases closer to the poles. Therefore, a 0.5 degree grid spans about 55 km at the equator, ~36 km at the 49th parallel (Canada–U.S. border) and ~27 km near Whitehorse.
We recently explored how these risks could be shown together, layering them onto a single map of Canada. On this map, every point appears as a small pie chart showing the relative contribution of each risk in that region. The overall size of the pie reflects the combined total of the risk values for that point.
To bring these patterns closer to home, we zoomed in on a few Canadian cities. Specifically, we drew a 100 km radius around each city centre and captured summary statistics of surrounding grid points (the minimum, median, and maximum values for each risk). In the chart below, lines show the full range of risk in the area, while circle sizes represent greater risk for each component.
There are limits to this approach, however. The grid and buffer simplify the complex landscapes and the CCVI’s global scale means Canadian “low” scores can still represent significant local vulnerabilities.
Overall, this was a fun experiment in exploring ways to visualize this climate data and localize it for urban contexts. The CCVI offers a rich trove of information on climate vulnerabilities and conflict risks, with great potential for global mapping and further experimentation.
