Presentation Discription
Towns and municipalities in Canada are realizing the need to integrate climate change into levels of service decision making for infrastructure assets. These assets provide day to day services like transportation, recreation and utilities but were designed long before climate change was identified as a threat. With climate change impacts getting more frequent and severe, infrastructure owners and operators cannot ignore the resulting safety and service interruption risks. Town of Halton Hills (population: 61,672), in Ontario Canada, declared a climate change emergency in May 2019 for taking concrete steps towards climate change resiliency. In 2020, the town published a 30-year Climate Change Adaptation Plan (CCAP) that states it strategy for climate change resiliency and provides overarching guidance to implement them. In addition to this high-level plan, detailed vulnerability assessments were carried out on select infrastructure assets to identify risks resulting from climate change and corresponding mitigating actions. Since assets exists to provide services (or value) to citizens and stakeholders, the Town’s Asset Management team felt the need for a more practical approach that could clearly identify what services are at the risk of being interrupted due to climate change. Such an approach will directly connect service delivery goals to climate change impacts and provide clear line of sight between climate change adaptation strategies (capital and O&M) and town’s service objectives. This paper describes such an approach taken by Town of Halton Hills and Jacobs to integrate climate change considerations into asset management for key municipal assets such as recreation facilities, roads, bridges, parks & open spaces, and storm water facilities. The paper will describe the process Jacobs and the Town undertook to: - Identify levels of service for different infrastructure assets - Identify climate change exposures on service delivery and identification of vulnerabilities (defined as a gap that exists if existing processes/asset systems are not able to adapt to the climate change events) - Identify strategies to close the gaps resulting from climate change and prioritization of these strategies An overview of the lessons learnt while applying the process, summary of key outcomes from each part of the process and examples of suggested adaptation strategies will be provided
Speaker Bio
Jerry Joseph, Director, Asset Management, Jacobs
Jerry is a Director for the Strategic Consulting Practice in Jacobs Canada. He started the Asset Management consulting business for Jacobs in Canada in 2017. Jerry specializes in asset management consulting and brings significant expertise in risk management and enterprise management and system implementation.
Co-Presenters:
Catherine Simpson, Asset Management Technical Lead, Jacobs
Bio coming...
Dharmen Dhaliah, Senior Manager Climate Change and Asset Management, Town of Halton Hills
Dharmen Dhaliah is the author of Physical Asset Management — An Organizational Challenge and Organization-Wide Physical Asset Management — A Systems Approach and developer of the HPAM Planning Tool. He has more than 28 years of working experience in the private and public sectors, where he has held various positions in physical asset management, maintenance management, reliability engineering, and project management in a wide range of industries. Dharmen currently works for the Town of Halton Hills as Senior Manager, Climate Change and Asset Management. He is a registered professional mechanical engineer, a Certified Asset Management Assessor, a Certified ISO 55001 Provisional Auditor, a Project Management Professional, a Maintenance Management Professional, and a Certified Maintenance and Reliability Professional.
Dharmen is a member of the Technical Committee 251 for the ISO 55000 standards, and a member of CNAM (Canadian Network of Asset Managers), and he has served for several years on the Board of Directors of PEMAC. He is also an online instructor of the Maintenance Management Program, the “Planification et gestion de la maintenance” program, and the Asset Management Professional Certificate program.