Impact of climate and climate change on the soil slopes of Canada's natural and built environment

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Canada’s coastal regions, lake shores, and river valleys have evolved with time to form the landscapes on which Canada has built its towns and cities. We have also created our own soil slopes to form our transportation networks, to provide flood protection, to manage our water resources, and to protect our environment from the waste products of our resource industries. Climate change poses a significant risk to these vital components of our natural and built environment. Climate change is expected to increase both the total amount of precipitation and the frequency and severity of extreme rainfall events in Canada. With a strong relationship between weather events and slope instability, climate change has the potential to have drastic effects on the soil slopes of our natural and built environment. Significant questions remain including: a) Will higher rainfall intensity make landslides more dangerous in addition to more frequent? How can we best quantify this effect in our models of soil behaviour and landslide triggering? b) If a landslide is triggered, how does climate influence how far the debris travels? How can we take account for this factor in our predictive tools for landslide travel distance? c) What are the best monitoring tools for observing the warning signs of future slope instability? Answers to these questions will be sought through highly instrumented landslide experiments conducted with complete control over the climatic influence to reveal the complex physics controlling the triggering and subsequent flow behaviour of these hazards and field trials of technologies for possible use in landslide early warning systems. The objective of this research program is therefore to produce the knowledge, highly qualified graduates, and practical tools that will help answer these questions and better manage the risk posed by climate change on the soil slopes of Canada’s natural and built environment. Through this research program, 11 HQP (4 at the PhD level, 7 at the MSc level) will be trained in the technical knowledge and professional skills-sets in high demand by Canada’s strong engineering services industry.