Alberta Community Resilience Program (ACRP)

Grants to Alberta municipalities, First Nations, Metis Settlements, improvement districts, and special areas for projects that protect critical infrastructure, promote long-term community viability, and mitigate safety hazards. Funding is intended to develop long-term resilience to flood and drought events.

The delivery of this program is guided by the following three principles: Respecting the Rivers; Community-driven Solutions; and Collaboration.

Eligible projects under the Alberta Community Resilience Program include, but are not limited to the following:
- Structural measures such as berms, dykes, flood walls, bank protection and stabilization works, retention ponds, and diversion structures to protect critical infrastructure and ensure public safety;
- Purchase of property where mitigation is inappropriate, or not economically or technically feasible;
- Purchase of property for the purposes of access and/or construction of a project;
- Flood proofing/relocation of critical infrastructure (water, wastewater, stormwater works, and infrastructure to access those services). For example, access roads and transportation corridors;
- Bio-retention infrastructure designed to increase flood attenuation and reduce the impacts of drought. For example, incorporating new stormwater management facilities, low impact development, and/or projects that incorporate wetland features.

The Alberta Community Resilience Program will support projects that have clear and demonstrable benefits to a community’s level of resilience. The program will focus on mitigation efforts that promote one or more of the following outcomes:
- Mitigation to Protect Critical Facilities: Projects that help ensure critical services are resilient and access and egress routes are maintained.
- Ecosystem and Waterway Restoration: Projects that ensure obstructive work is not built in the floodway, and that berms/dykes are built with appropriate setbacks and buffers. Projects that use materials and techniques which provide additional benefit to the aquatic environment, like bioengineering, low impact development, green infrastructure and/or other non-structural options.
- Sustainable Stormwater Management: Projects that preserve or restore the landscapes natural ability to attenuate and store flood/storm flows.
- Acquisition and Relocation: Projects that remove chronically at-risk or repetitive loss infrastructure from hazard areas, including property buy-outs, or relocation of critical infrastructure.

Eligible Project Costs:
Project costs that are eligible under the program include, but are not limited to:
- Consultation and engineering fees;
- Contingency costs (up to 20% of project cost);
- Project construction and materials; and
- Costs associated with acquisition of provincial or federal regulatory authorizations