Preparing for extreme weather - Improving urban resiliency

NRU
May 6, 2015
By Leah Wong

As climate change is leading to more frequent extreme weather events and building codes lag behind recent trends, municipalities across Canada have to consider how to better prepare themselves for the impacts.

Experts at a recent Canadian Urban Institute event agreed that municipalities and the real estate industry need to ensure that infrastructure is resilient in the face of climate change and not rely on building codes that do not go far enough to protect infrastructure in extreme weather events.

“[The Building] Code is a merely minimum baseline that needs to be complied with. It’s nothing more than that,” said Southern Harbour risk, resilience and security principal Alexander Hay. “And I think developers have been forcing the use of code and nothing more to their own detriment. It requires a shift of behaviour.”

One of the challenges of building codes is that they are based on trends and retrospective statistics rather than preparing for future issues. Many municipalities in Canada consider building codes to offer a minimum standard and employ practices that are more stringent than provincial building codes.

“The process of writing [building codes] is so slow because it’s cautious,” said CUI executive director Peter Halsall. “So you get farther and farther behind the reality of which you’re trying to respond to.”

Insurance companies have acknowledged that just meeting the building code is not enough as a risk management policy. For property owners there are a number of benefits of building in a more resilient way. It not only better prepares assets for extreme events, but it also can help when insuring the asset.

“It’s really difficult to say [to insurance companies] we’re built to code and therefore we should get the best rates. Those conversations don’t happen anymore,” said Risk Nexus founder and principal Tania Caceres. She added that insurance is only meant for cases when risk management fails. The cost of insurance will go up significantly if the total payouts related to extreme weather events go up.

According to the Insurance Bureau of Canada in 2013, the year of the Alberta and Toronto floods, the total payout for claims due to catastrophic losses in Canada was $3.5-billion. Prior to 2008 the payout for catastrophic losses was, on average, between $200- and $500-million per year.

As code is written based on past events, Caceres said relying on it for risk management means you are relying on the past. Additionally, as the process for fi ling claims and receiving a payout can be timely, not building in risk management can lengthen the time it takes for an operation to get back up and running.

There is now a reduced market tolerance for business interruptions due to an emergency event said Hay. After the attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001 there was a two-week tolerance until things were back up and running. When Calgary’s downtown was flooded in 2013 this window shrunk to two-four days, and Hay predicts that tolerance is getting even smaller.

“We are advising our clients, and finding in our research, that market tolerance is around 8 a.m. the next day. Quite conceivably you could still be flooded, but you would need to have started your recovery by 8 a.m. the next business day,” said Hay. “If you haven’t you are very seriously running the risk of not maintaining your client base. They will go elsewhere.”

When it comes to assessing the risk of real estate Caceres said companies need to use location intelligence to assess sites and factor in the risks of climate change.

For municipalities, University of Waterloo School of Environment associate professor Blair Feltmate said resiliency is important to attracting new investments. He said it will be difficult to market municipalities as an attractive place to live if the people considering moving there are concerned about an area’s ability to function in an emergency.

“If we seem completely and totally incapacitated [and unable] to move traffic in and out of this city, you start to create the brand of ‘do I want to live there,’” said Feltmate.

For Waterloo Region ensuring there is an adequate water supply is important to attracting investment. The challenge in Waterloo is that it relies on ground water to supply the municipality, which can also be impacted by climate change.

“We’re aware that water is a necessity of life and you don’t want the commercial world to think that there is not enough water,” said Waterloo Region transportation and environmental services commissioner Thomas Schmidt. “Water supply tolerance is zero.”

Just as mitigating the impacts of flooding is important in cities such as Toronto, it is also important to have resilience in a system with too little water. The region has worked to protect its recharge areas and ensure that water can get back into the land to replenish the aquifers.

Schmidt said the region has been successful in reducing the demand for water by introducing a once-a-week lawn watering by-law and working with industries to reduce consumption.