ABSTRACT
Resilience is at the core of rural and remote Indigenous communities in Canada. For generations, these communities have leveraged strengths such as traditional knowledge and community cohesion to survive. The increase of occurrence and intensity of disasters due to climate change, especially in rural and remote areas where infrastructure is as isolated and at risk as the populations that it supports, necessitates adaptation and is driving attention to community resilience. Community resilience requires a strong social fabric that is made up of people, places, culture, traditions, institutions and knowledge. Over the past 15 years, DRDC CSS has made Science and Technology investments that enable rural and remote communities to adopt emergency management tools and strategies in the face of evolving public safety and security. In line with Canadian policy that has been evolving to support diversity and inclusion, and climate adaptation, the investments are also grounded in social innovation, and enable DRDC CSS to have a transformative impact that is both holistic and bottom up by increasing response efforts within the community, supporting regional and national collaboration, and equiping the communities with the capacity to influence public safety and security policy and operations. Lessons learned from the COVID-19 response have demonstrated that the act of creating an emergency response plan increases preparedness and response to emergency events, regardless of the applicability of a completed plan to a specific event, thus strengthening community resilience. © 2023, Crown.