From National Climate Strategies to Local Response: Governance and Financial Unsustainabilities in Community Climate Resilience Under Canada’s 2023 National Adaptation Strategy

National adaptation strategies have become the principal instrument through which governments organize their response to climate risk, yet their effectiveness ultimately depends on delivery at the local level. This article examines whether Canada’s 2023 National Adaptation Strategy (NAS) and its accompanying federal action plan truly prepare municipalities to adapt to climate change in a timely and sustainable manner. Drawing on publicly available policy documents, academic literature, and international reports, it analyzes how responsibilities, financial resources, and decision-making authority are distributed across the federal, provincial, territorial, and municipal orders of government. The analysis identifies structural misalignments in vertical and horizontal governance, and a municipal fiscal position that is poorly suited to financing long-term adaptation. These misalignments are treated as a form of unseen unsustainability: an architecture in which ambitions are set nationally, implementation burdens are carried locally, and financial capacity is concentrated elsewhere. The experience of three flood-affected British Columbia (BC) municipalities, Abbotsford, Princeton, and Merritt, illustrates how competitive, merit-based funding can leave high-risk communities without a realistic pathway to implementation. These three were selected because their parallel rejections from the same competitive fund, despite recent and well-documented flood exposure, offer a natural comparison across a range of municipal sizes and capacities. The City of Coquitlam, also in BC, secured funding from the same program. It is used as a contrasting successful case. The article concludes that closing the implementation gap requires treating governance and finance as core components of the adaptation system rather than as secondary implementation details.