Beyond Recreation
Trails as Climate Infrastructure for Resilience and Emergency Response
This piece was first published in the Winter 2025 issue of Plan Canada, Canada’s national planning magazine produced quarterly by the Canadian Institute of Planners. I’m sharing it here with Groundwork readers.
Summary
Across the country, trails are shifting from recreation amenities to essential infrastructure that strengthens resilience and supports emergency response. When planned intentionally, they absorb stormwater, reduce wildfire risk, and provide safe connections during crises. Many communities already show how trail networks can act as green infrastructure, helping manage runoff, limit fuel buildup, and offer evacuation routes while remaining vibrant public spaces. By recognizing trails as infrastructure rather than extras, planners can create networks that support both climate mitigation and adaptation, enhancing recreation today while protecting lives, landscapes, and communities in a changing climate.
Introduction – From Recreation to Resilience
Trails are most often recognized for getting people moving, connecting communities, and providing a conduit to in nature. Trails boost physical and mental health, support active transportation, and sustain tourism economies across Canada’s cities and towns. From urban multi-use pathways to backcountry singletrack, trails have long been viewed as amenities that enhance communities.
What if trails could do more than that? What if the same trail you bike to work on, hike with your family, or cross-country ski on in winter could also help mitigate the impacts of climate change and perhaps even save lives during an emergency?
As Canada faces increasingly frequent and severe wildfires, floods, and storms, extreme weather is testing the limits of built environments. Floods cut off transportation routes, wildfires isolate communities, and heat waves strain public spaces. Roads, bridges, and utilities tend to dominate the discussion, yet trails are low cost, low impact, already widespread, and offer a powerful and underused opportunity. Trails can quietly shoulder part of this burden when designed intentionally. They can move people efficiently, absorb water rather than amplify it, and provide green corridors that reduce heat and support ecosystems.
Accomplishing this requires a shift in thinking: viewing trails not only as recreational amenities but as dual-purpose climate infrastructure that form part of planning before disasters, support emergency response during them, and strengthen communities long after. What would it look like if we designed trail networks not just for recreation, but as resilient systems that communities can depend upon in times of disruption?
Designing Trails That Endure Every Climate
Designing a trail that can withstand all weather conditions in a country as vast and diverse as Canada is no small feat. Geography, geology, and climate vary dramatically between the Canadian Shield, prairie grasslands, Rocky Mountains, and coastal rainforests. A sustainable trail in Nova Scotia may look very different from one in the Yukon, but the design principles remain the same.
At its core, sustainable trail design follows a few golden rules. Trails should respect natural contours, manage water effectively, and use materials suited to local conditions. Concepts such as the “half rule” (keeping trail grade no more than half the side slope), grade reversals, and durable surfacing materials all help ensure water runs across, not down, the trail. The result is a surface that resists erosion, protects vegetation, and requires less maintenance in the long term.
Designing for resilience starts with thinking local. Canada’s geography offers natural solutions if planners understand how topography, soils, vegetation, and hydrology shape trail behavior. A trail that fits the land, rather than fights it, will always last longer.
Across the country, these rules are applied differently:
Coastal regions: Drainage and flood resilience are key. Trails along rivers or shorelines must handle heavy rainfall and tidal flooding without washing out. Naturally occurring rock can often be integrated as natural tread or anchors for drainage structures.
Prairies: Wind exposure, snow loads, and seasonal flooding are major factors. Coulees and river valleys provide shelter from wind and opportunities for bench-cut trails above flood levels that can also serve as emergency routes.
Mountain regions: Erosion control, slope stability, and wildfire resilience are priorities. Moraine benches, talus slopes, and ridgelines provide well-drained alignments reinforced with native vegetation and rock armouring.
Northern regions: Permafrost and freeze-thaw cycles require innovation. Aligning routes along gravel ridges and insulating moss layers preserves ground stability and extends usability.
Trails that endure all climates are more than recreation; they are lessons in how small-scale, nature-based infrastructure can thrive across Canada’s most challenging landscapes.
When Trails Become Lifelines
When disaster strikes, trails can serve as quiet heroes in emergency response. In communities where main roads are blocked by floodwaters, fallen trees, or fire, trail corridors often remain passable. Their modest scale, dispersed network, and direct links to parks and neighbourhoods make them invaluable emergency routes.
In Canmore, Alberta, a multi-use trail has been designed to double as an emergency route, providing a vital connection between neighbourhoods in the event of wildfire, flooding, or other emergencies. The Silvertip and Eagle Terrace neighbourhoods are linked by a multi-use trail that functions as a daily recreation corridor for cyclists and pedestrians but is also engineered to support the weight of fire trucks and other emergency vehicles. The route features a six-metre carriageway with utilities located below the surface, ensuring both access and efficiency. When Canmore experienced significant flooding in 2013, the primary access to Eagle Terrace was destroyed and residents of Eagle Terrace were not only evacuated through this route, but also relied on it for months after as their main access was being repaired.
Similarly, in the Prairies, dike-top trails such as those along Manitoba’s Red River, have long served dual purposes as flood protection structures and emergency access routes. These elevated corridors trace the contours of engineered flood defences, offering not only recreational opportunities but also critical infrastructure in times of crisis. During spring melt or major flood events, when surrounding roads are submerged, these trails often remain passable, allowing fire crews, maintenance staff, and residents to move between neighbourhoods and reach high ground.
Designing for emergency egress requires planning: adequate width, surface stability, and integration with municipal emergency mapping. These examples reinforce a key principle - resilient communities need multiple pathways to safety.
Trails as Climate Infrastructure
Beyond aiding response, trails can actively mitigate climate impacts. They absorb water, cool cities, and protect ecosystems, performing functions often left to engineered infrastructure. When designed with intention, trails become part of the green systems that strengthen both ecological and community resilience.
An example comes from Lost Lake in Whistler, British Columbia, where a network of cross-country ski, mountain bike, and hiking trails weaves through managed forest. These trails do more than support recreation: they act as fuel breaks, disrupting continuous vegetation and slowing wildfire spread. Combined with FireSmart practices such as thinning and pruning near trail edges, they help reduce ignition risk and protect nearby neighbourhoods. In winter, the compacted ski trails further separate fuels, adding another layer of seasonal defense.
In eastern Canada, similar principles apply to urban networks such as Halifax’s Chain of Lakes Trail, which runs through natural drainage areas and connects to the city’s Blue Route cycling network. While built for recreation and commuting, it also functions as a green corridor that filters runoff, supports biodiversity, and reduces heat. When trail design aligns with natural drainage and vegetation buffers, every kilometre becomes part of climate adaptation - absorbing impacts, connecting ecosystems, and offering people greener routes through their communities.
Across Canada, trails are helping to mitigate the effects of a changing climate. In some cases, the network is intentionally designed to build resilience; in others, existing infrastructure is adapted to serve new purposes. In both, collaboration between planners, engineers, and community stewards creates systems that protect people, ecosystems, and local economies alike.
Implementation: Partners, Funding, and Governance
Turning trails into climate infrastructure requires coordination, investment, and imagination. Trails must be part of conversations about emergency management, asset management, and climate adaptation.
Governments at all levels need to be active partners in trail development and management. Municipalities, provinces, and federal agencies can set standards for sustainable design and integrate trails into infrastructure planning. Regional standards that reflect local conditions will help maintain character while ensuring durability and environmental protection.
Trail development and maintenance costs money. Most trails in Canada are publicly funded, but limited recognition of their infrastructure value restricts access to climate and emergency funding programs. To change this, governments must move beyond the “parks and recreation” mindset. The key is to stop treating trails as discretionary recreation spending and start recognizing them as infrastructure eligible for asset management, climate and emergency funding. Programs such as the Disaster Mitigation and Adaptation Fund (DMAF), provincial climate resilience grants, and tourism infrastructure programs, like BC’s Resort Municipality Initiative (RMI), can all be leveraged to support multi-purpose trail systems. Partnerships with Indigenous communities, conservation groups, and volunteer associations can also expand stewardship and reduce costs.
Recognizing trails as infrastructure is not about taking the fun out of them; it is about expanding their purpose. Trails will always be places for recreation and connection, but they can also help communities adapt to fire, flood, heat, and change.
Conclusion - A Network for the Future
Across Canada, trails are evolving from recreation amenities into essential infrastructure. Locally designed and built, they reflect the character of each landscape while strengthening resilience to fire, flood, and heat. They connect neighbourhoods safely, serve as emergency routes when other systems fail, and function as green corridors that cool cities, absorb water, and support biodiversity.
For planners and decision makers, the opportunity is clear: embed trail systems into official plans, emergency frameworks, and climate strategies. Communities can then invest in networks that serve both everyday enjoyment and long-term survival.
When designed with this intent, trails become more than pathways through nature. They become the quiet backbone of climate ready communities, linking recreation, safety, and sustainability in one continuous network.
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