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Landslides are common across Canada and they pose hazards to human safety, economic activities, and the environment. Robust risk management strategies are necessary for sustainable development. A slope risk management framework has been adopted by the geotechnical community for approximately four decades allowing a systematic, consistent and transparent framework for managing risks. Implementing this framework is associated with uncertainties embedded in our estimates of risk. This paper presents a brief summary of the sources and categories of uncertainty in geotechnical slope engineering and focuses on two topics: (1) estimates of uncertainty in risk calculations and (2) temporal changes in landslide likelihood as a function of weather and steps towards estimating landslide risk changes with climate change. The paper argues that a quantitative risk assessment should not focus on the final risk calculation, but the overall knowledge gained. This allows comprehensive documentation of sources of uncertainty and how they impact geotechnical and risk assessments. Furthermore, the paper outlines approaches to define quantitative correlations between rock fall occurrences and weather, which can be leveraged to estimate changes in rock fall risk with climate change. The paper corresponds to, and expands on, the 2021 Canadian Geotechnical Colloquium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change interacts with ecological processes leading to changes in tree and forest growth rate, biome shifts and species composition, all of which are influenced by disturbances. This study explores future overarching climate trends of eight of Canada's ecozones containing managed forests. For the 2071 to 2100 period, climate projections indicate a warming trend of up to an additional 5.5 °C and an overall increase in annual precipitation. Future trends suggest marked contrast between coastal and interior forests and polarization between western and eastern forests. Warmer temperatures, accumulating degree-days above 5 °C and frost-free days suggest longer and drier growing seasons and greater risk of drought particularly in moisture-limited areas such as montane cordillera, taiga shield and boreal shield ecozones. Warmer temperatures and rising precipitation combined with less snow suggest shorter and wetter future winters. This indicates greater risk of rain-on-snow and freeze-thaw events, flooding and landslides particularly in coastal ecozones. We discuss how these projections are likely to result in shifts in dominant species and abundance, which when coupled with the cumulative effects of future disturbances, is likely to alter future forest dynamics and impact harvestable wood volumes for Canada's forestry industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An unusually intense atmospheric river affected the southern coastal region of British Columbia in mid-November 2021. Flooding and several ground failures such as landslides and riverbank erosion caused significant damage and interrupted the main transportation corridors, including major highways and railroads, severing land connectivity between Metro Vancouver and the rest of Canada. In this short note, we summarize and describe slope and riverbank ground failures in the Lower Mainland and connecting corridors to the interior such as the Fraser Canyon and the Coquihalla Valley, with focus on those that produced damage on highways. Field observations are discussed in the context of potential future similar disasters in the region due to more frequent extreme climatic events associated with climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]