Climate-fuelled flooding is Canada’s costliest and fastest-growing extreme-weather challenge, report says

Cities and utility providers across Canada are girding for a wetter future as rising global temperatures supercharge storms and lead to more frequent and severe flooding.

The preparation, while not entirely new, has gained urgency amid a push by major insurers, bond-rating agencies and governments to reduce the mounting financial and social costs tied to extreme weather. It aligns with an emerging consensus that worldwide efforts to curb emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases are likely to fall short of targets, necessitating costly retrofits of infrastructure to cope with the worsening effects of climate change.

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A new report from the [Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation at the University of Waterloo] pegs flooding in major urban centres as Canada’s costliest and fastest-growing extreme-weather challenge, with implications for everything from residential insurance premiums to municipal credit ratings.

It cites data from the Insurance Bureau of Canada that show payouts for catastrophic losses jumped from an average $405-million a year between 1983 and 2008 to a yearly average of $1.8-billion since 2009, with flooding accounting for more than half of the increase.

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[The report] makes the case for a national framework to limit flood risks in communities by taking into account factors such as local design standards, aging infrastructure and whether a region has a history of extensive flooding.

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