Crises and Their Impacts
Parks and recreation (provide) essential and adaptable infrastructure that makes our communities resilient in the face of natural disasters and climate change.
(National Recreation and Parks Association)
In this article, we are referring to crises that are health-related (COVID-19), natural (wildfires, flooding), and policy-based (housing). This section provides a few examples of how each of those crises has impacted the recreation and parks sector. To some extent, the crises and the impacts will be different from community to community. As stated in the Chief Public Health Officer of Canada’s Report on the State of Public Health in Canada 2023,
…some communities have less access to key conditions that enable resilience. This is due to the inequitable distribution of power and resources in society. During an emergency, some communities are more likely to be exposed to hazards and risk. These same communities may also have less access to the resources needed to respond to and recover from emergencies. This can create compounding and inequitable negative health, social, and economic effects on individuals and their communities.
The COVID pandemic called upon recreation and parks to provide ongoing opportunities for physical activity and outdoor recreation during a period when most outdoor and all indoor facilities were closed. New and innovative initiatives were developed across the province to address those needs. It has been observed that there was more energy and greater imagination than usual within the sector during the pandemic. Conversely, it has also been noted that senior recreation officials were often not offered appropriate levels of engagement in decision-making about the use of the resources that they were responsible for.
Pandemic Impacts on Rural Recreation in the Yukon Territory (PIRRYT) research project drew specific attention to programming that meets the needs of people across the lifespan as being vital for recovery of physical and social well-being.
During the COVID pandemic, the needs for active, outdoor physical activity and for social connection were sometimes at odds with each other. The term “social distancing” eventually came to be used less frequently in favour of “physical distancing” in recognition that people needed to be physically but not socially distanced to prevent the spread of the virus.