Planning for Extreme Weather -

To date, planning protocol has been to consider weather in a short-term way. The time has come for a shift in thinking about climate risk much earlier in the event-planning process.

Sustainability consultant Shawna McKinley, an instructor at the British Columbia Institute of Technology, began collecting data about extreme weather and its impact on events in response to the questions that her students were asking about how climate change would affect events. To help answer them, McKinley, principal at Clear Current Consulting in Vancouver, Canada, began building her own database of event case studies, and in 2023, embarked on an in-depth analysis of Canadian events disrupted by extreme weather that calendar year. “It was a way of trying to put some quantitative data and impact behind how this is affecting us,” she told Convene. Last year, McKinley released a report based on her analysis, “Extreme Weather and Event Planning Risks in Canada,” which looked at 72 events disrupted by extreme weather in Canada in 2023 and how event organizers coped with them.

Shawna McKinley, principal at Clear Current Consulting

Soon after the report’s publication, McKinley read an article about the rise of weather-related disruptions in the live music and festival industry by Milad Haghani, an associate professor and principal research fellow in resilience and mobility in the University of Melbourne’s department of Infrastructure Engineering. McKinley reached out to Haghani to ask if he would like to collaborate on an article using an expanded data set, which led to an interdisciplinary collaboration between McKinley and Haghani, as well as Paul Geoerg, a professor at Akkon University of Applied Sciences in Berlin, and Claudio Feliciani, Ph.D., a professor from the University of Tokyo.

McKinley is the lead author of their article, “Mapping the impact of extreme weather on global events and mass gatherings: Trends and adaptive strategies,” which appears in the September 2025 issue of International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction. The article analyzes how extreme weather has impacted global events between 2004 and 2024, based on 2,091 events in 54 countries disrupted by severe weather, wildfire, or other climate-related impacts. The article also investigates the impact of climate change and the high costs associated with event disruptions.

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The article is a “bit long” and dense, McKinley said, and she and her co-authors created a one-page summary for event professionals, outlining key takeaways from the research. Among them is the researchers’ conclusion that most weather events disrupting gatherings were intensified by human-caused climate change, “underscoring the urgency to reduce emissions and plan for future, rather than past, weather risks.” The summary also offers examples of how event organizers are adapting to extreme weather by shifting dates and locations, investing in weather monitoring, altering venues, and redesigning event formats.

‘We need a much more holistic approach’

The researchers’ monitoring of events disrupted by extreme weather continues — as of July, they had documented just over 500 weather-disrupted events in 2025, she said. On Aug. 14, McKinley was interviewed by Gloria Macarenko, host of a Vancouver-based radio program, about the effect of heavy rains on Crankworx, a two-decades-old global mountain biking competition and festival, scheduled for Aug. 8-17 in nearby Whistler, and how destinations and event organizers can respond to extreme weather.

“As long as we’ve had events, we’ve had weather, and we have always been planning for it to an extent,” McKinley told Macarenko. But the planning protocol has been to consider weather in a short-term way, “taking stock maybe the month around the event, and then we plan accordingly,” she said. “But when we start to think of this as an issue connected to climate change, the weather that we’ve had in the past isn’t necessarily the weather that we should be planning for in the future — or even what we are experiencing now.”

It’s become important to look at climate risk much earlier, when making decisions on siting and scheduling and budgeting for an event, McKinley said. “We need a much more holistic approach.” It also is important that destinations and event organizers look at events as a partnership, McKinley added, because many events’ organizing hosts aren’t local to where events will take place, like FIFA, which will hold matches in Vancouver during the World Cup next year. “It requires destination managers and people who are hosting local activities to prepare organizers for what to expect and to pay attention — again, not to what’s happened in the past, but to climate projections,” she said. Many destinations have prepared climate plans and projections to anticipate things like severe urban rainfall at unusual times of year and are familiar with weather-related emergency preparedness and alert systems and protocols around things like wildfires, McKinley said. “I think the destination-host partnership is going to become even more critical.”

Barbara Palmer is deputy editor of Convene.