Considering climate change in remediation

Last updated on February 24, 2025

Remediation should be resilient to potential climate change effects to protect human health and the environment for future generations.

Qualified professionals can use their knowledge of predicted climate change hazards in an area to evaluate the risk of those hazards affecting contamination. This includes understanding how climate change can alter exposure pathways and receptors.

Learn about climate change hazards

The Province completed a Preliminary Strategic Climate Risk Assessment for B.C. in 2019. The most important climate change hazards identified for B.C. include increased temperatures, extreme storms and precipitation, drought, sea level rise, flooding, erosion and landslides, and severe wildfires.

Climate change hazards create risks for the long-term management of contaminated sites. Shifts in climate parameters, such as temperature and precipitation, can make some remediation strategies less effective, or cause contaminants to spread.

These changes can have significant environmental, operational, and financial consequences for site owners. Qualified professionals can help site owners determine which hazards are present at their site and plan for the future.

What is risk?

Risk is the effect of uncertainty on objectives, typically characterized by the likelihood and consequences of different events. Once risks are known, they can be addressed in several ways: by avoiding or eliminating the cause of the risk, by mitigating it (lowering its impact), or by accepting the risk and developing a contingency plan to deal with it if it happens.

Conduct a vulnerability assessment

A vulnerability assessment will identify climate change hazards that have the highest risk to adversely affect a contaminated site. It involves evaluating:

exposure of the site to one or more climate change hazard(s)
effects these hazards may have on site contamination and remediation options
existing adaptive capacity (ability of a system to adjust to climate change) of the site

The outcomes of the vulnerability assessment will help qualified professionals:

understand a site’s vulnerability to climate change hazard(s)
select the most resilient remediation method
plan for site risk management, including long-term monitoring
identify necessary adaptation measures

How to complete a vulnerability assessment

1. Identify climate change hazard risks at a site

Use ClimateReadyBC to identify the disaster and climate change hazard risks for a site. Note: If a hazard is listed near a contaminated site, it doesn't automatically mean the site is vulnerable to, or will be affected by, that hazard.

2. Determine climate projections for specific hazards

Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) and Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs) describe different possible futures based on atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases associated with likely combinations of projected population growth, economic activity, energy intensity, and socio-economic development. The climate change projections that result under these scenarios describe a range of plausible future climates, from a pessimistic high-carbon scenario to a low-carbon scenario that meets the ambitions of the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Use climate change modelling in Pacific Climate Impact Consortium or ClimateData.ca to project potential future climate change hazards that may affect your contaminated site (e.g. degree of sea level rise).
Evaluate multiple time horizons to ensure the worst-case scenario (e.g., RCP8.5 or SSP5-8.5) is captured, for example:
- short-term (e.g. up to 2040)
- mid-term (2041 to 2070)
- long-term (2071 to 2100)
The selected time horizon may be adapted depending on the available data for the various climate variables associated with the different climate change hazards, and the lifecycle of the contaminated site (FCSAP, 2022). Other aspects that should be considered when deciding on a time horizon include the remedial time target and foreseeable changes in future land use.

3. Determine how these hazards may affect contamination at the site over different time horizons

The effect climate change hazards may have on contamination will depend on site-specific characteristics and aspects of the contamination such as:

contaminant type (For example, metals vs petroleum hydrocarbons)
contaminant’s phase (NAPL, solid, aqueous, vapour)
biological and physicochemical properties of the contaminants of concern (often in relation with the soil lithology)
toxicity of the constituents of concern
affected media (groundwater, vapour, sediment, surface water, soil)
location of contamination (For example, depth, location relative to water table, water bodies and surrounding terrain)
extent of the contaminant in affected media

For an extensive list of examples, see:

Contaminated Sites Approved Professional Society: A Framework to Assess Climate Change Impacts on Contaminated Sites in British Columbia, Table 3 (PDF, 17.7MB)

It is recommended to develop future state conceptual site models (CSM) that incorporate climate change hazards under different climate scenarios and show how those hazards may influence contaminant distribution, exposure, pathways and receptors. The future CSM can help decision makers plan additional site investigation, choose a timeframe for remediation, assess any risks and determine the need for long-term monitoring.

Adapt remediation to account for climate change hazard risks

Adaptation is any initiative or action in response to actual or projected climate change impacts that reduces the effects of climate change on built, natural and social systems (CCME, 2021a).

Where applicable, municipal or regional climate adaptation plans should be reviewed and considered as part of evaluating adaptation options.

Examples of adaptations that reduce identified climate change hazard risks include:

Designing waste management areas away from projected future flood zones or unstable terrain
Completing wells above future expected flood stage and adding well-head housing
Procuring a backup power supply and remote access to groundwater treatment systems
Adding capacity to storm water management structures
Implementing additional monitoring of protective caps after extreme events
Maximizing thickness of the gravel layer in sediment cap to prevent water-related erosion associated with increased flood events

Monitoring the performance of the remediation strategy and reassessing its vulnerability to future climate change should be performed periodically to ensure the long-term resilience of the remediation that is protective into the future.

Find more guidance about considering climate change effects on remediation of contaminated sites:

Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment (CCME): Guidance on Good Practices in Climate Change Risk Assessment (PDF, 626KB)
CLU-IN: Conducting Climate Vulnerability Assessments at Superfund Sites: Lessons Learned
Government of Canada: Federal Contaminated Sites Action Plan (FCSAP) : integrating climate change adaptation considerations into federal contaminated sites management.: En14-487/2022E-PDF
Trainex: Regional Climate Training for RCRA Permitting and Hazardous Waste Cleanup: Northeast/Mid-Atlantic Regions
United States Environmental Protection Agency: Superfund Climate Resilience | US EPA
Washington State Department of Ecology: Sustainable Remediation: Climate Change Resiliency and Green Remediation (PDF, 8.87MB)

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