Waterloo opens climate adaptation centre

Thestar.com
Nov. 30, 2015
By Tyler Hamilton

Government leaders attending the first day of Paris climate talks urged the world to do a better job of slowing down climate change, but also warned that adapting to that change will be just as crucial.

Here at home, we’re already feeling the effects, most notably from flooding caused by extreme weather - the kind that Torontonians experienced in the summer of 2013.

A new climate adaptation centre launched Monday out of the University of Waterloo wants to help Canadians reduce those risks. One of its first initiatives aims to create a national auditing program to helps homeowners lower their exposure to flood damage.

Similar to a home energy audit, the program would send a certified auditor to examine more than 40 points of vulnerability outside and inside the average house. The resulting audit would recommend actions homeowners could take to make flood damage less likely.

“This is an extremely cost-effective way to rake risk out of the system,” said Waterloo U professor Blair Feltmate, who will lead the new centre.

Feltmate said audits have been done on 400 homes already in Kitchener and Waterloo, Ont., and Calgary, and in most cases the risks can be reduced dramatically through a few inexpensive fixes tackled over a weekend.

Research from that pilot program showed that, within less than eight weeks, people voluntarily made three-quarters of the recommended fixes. “In other words, it works,” said Feltmate. “Now we’re looking at deploying it at the level of a city.”

He couldn’t disclose which city, but said it would be in Ontario. Based on results there, the program would be expanded throughout the rest of the province and ideally across Canada.

Intact Financial, the largest provider of property and casualty insurance in Canada, contributed $4.25 million toward creation of the new centre, which is called the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation.

Intact chief executive Charles Brindamour said his company - and the entire industry - is on the front lines of climate change and that Canadians need to start adapting to “changes that are very real.”

Insurance coverage is protecting some people from these climate effects but he pointed out that, for every insured dollar, another $3 to $4 of damage is uninsured.

“What we’ve observed in the past 10 years is that the frequency and severity of natural occurrences has changed dramatically,” said Brindamour, a former chair of the Insurance Bureau of Canada. “Water and rain are certainly a big part of it, but so are wind and hail, and extreme variations in temperature.”

He said flooding carries the biggest urgency today, as it has replaced fire damage as the most common form of weather-related damage. “The insurance industry has been caught off guard by the change,” he admitted.

The Intact centre also plans to help the mining, forestry, petroleum and utility sectors adapt to climate change by identifying their top three to five risks and coming up with a set of actions they can take. Another area of focus will be the promotion of wetlands that can help protect cities and suburbs from flooding.

But for the average Canadian, the home-auditing program could have the biggest impact. Feltmate envisions a day when two checkboxes are added to online real-estate listings: one related to whether a home has a backwater value that prevents sewer backups and another that shows whether an adaptation audit has been completed.

“When you put those two little boxes on a listing, right away it gets picked up by all home inspectors,” he explained. “Once you start down this path, eventually whether you like or not everyone will have to do it.”

But that’s not a bad thing, he emphasized. “For just a tiny increment in extra spending, you can save a tremendous amount down the road. There’s this misnomer out there that adaptation is expensive. It can be, but it doesn’t have to be.”