Canada lacks critical data needed to mitigate extreme weather events, says Council of Canadian Academies report

Extreme weather events are increasing in Canada but the data needed to prepare for disasters and reduce or avoid costly damages is lacking, says a new report by the Council of Canadian Academies (CCA).

Given the changing climate and increase in severe weather events, there is little integration in the country of climate adaptation and disaster risk reduction, the report found. The lack of integrated data is hindering progress on enhancing resilience to the kinds of wildfire and flooding events that devastated British Columbia last year, according to the report, Building a Resilient Canada.

“An ongoing failure to fully integrate climate change adaptation into disaster risk reduction activities, policies and tools reduces the efficiency and impact of public investments in disaster resilience, leaving Canadian communities at risk,” said the CCA’s 11-member expert panel that produced the report.

The report was commissioned by Public Safety Canada. It asked the CCA to examine key opportunities to improve disaster resilience in Canada through better integration of disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation.

“The lack of a publicly available, integrated, all-hazard risk assessment in Canada makes it difficult to compare risks and be strategic about deploying resources where they could have the greatest possible benefit,” the expert panel said.

Among many problems, the panel found that:

• governments persistently under-invest in mitigation efforts;
• disciplinary and bureaucratic silos often lead to inefficient use of resources and a lack of coordination and alignment;
• flood risk maps are often out of date;
• climate models are too large a scale to be used at the local government or community level;
• Indigenous and local knowledge is often not recognized; and
• the number of weather observation stations and amount of data from remaining stations across Canada has declined since the 1990s.

Key knowledge gaps include hazard maps, downscaled climate projections, disaster data, the performance of nature-based solutions (to mitigate climate change), economic analysis and risk assessment, according to the report.

“The tragic and damaging impacts of cascading hazards are becoming increasingly apparent, as we saw in B.C., where record-breaking rainfall triggered landslides in areas where vegetation had been destroyed by wildfires just months earlier,” Scott Vaughan, chair of the expert panel, said in a statement.

“But outcomes like this are not inevitable — they are the result of choices that put people in harm’s way. There are practical measures that can be implemented to help mitigate the most damaging effects of extreme weather events,” said Vaughan, senior fellow at the International Institute for Sustainable Development based in Winnipeg.

Steps can be taken to build resilience against disasters

The expert panel noted that more than a dozen Canadian temperature records were smashed last year, with Squamish, B.C., recording temperatures over 40 C. The B.C. coroner’s office reported a 300-per-cent spike in sudden, unexpected deaths during the week of June 25, 2021, attributed to the heat waves that covered western Canada and the U.S. for days.

Extreme heat helped fuel thousands of wildfires throughout the summer, including those that destroyed the town of Lytton, B.C., and extensively damaged the town of Monte Lake, B.C. In November 2021, the same region was hit by unprecedented flooding.

Weather-related disasters resulted in $2.4 billion in insured damages in Canada last year. The Insurance Institute of Canada forecasts that annual insured losses could increase to $5 billion within 10 years.

However, funding, investment and insurance programs and policies can all be adapted to build resilience against disasters, the expert panel noted.

For example, government-insurance sector collaboration could fund a more accessible flood insurance program, such as covering overland floods for owners of high-risk properties that otherwise would not be able to purchase coverage. Revised codes and standards can make homes, commercial buildings and infrastructure more resistant to extreme weather events.

The CCA report noted that during the past few decades the number of climate-related disasters has jumped to more than 100 per decade on average, compared with fewer than 30 such disasters up to the 1960s.

The Canadian Disaster Database is supposed to track disasters of all kinds using criteria that include events where more than 10 people are killed or at least 100 people are affected.

But this database, which has data only up to 2019, is insufficient as a national resource for disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation practitioners and needs major improvements, the CCA’s expert panel said.

A highly sophisticated tracking system for climate-related events and other disasters — along the lines developed by Johns Hopkins University to track the COVID-19 pandemic — is needed, the panel said.

Federal investments in climate adaptation and disaster risk reduction

As part of its climate part, the federal government is preparing a National Adaptation Strategy, promised by the end of this year.

Budget 2021 also contained commitments to climate adaptation and disaster risk reduction, including:

• $1.9 billion over five years for Public Safety Canada to support provincial and territorial disaster response and recovery from extreme weather events;
• $1.4 billion over 11 years for the Disaster Mitigation and Adaptation Fund to make infrastructure more climate-resilient;
• $200 million over three years for Infrastructure Canada to establish a Natural Infrastructure Fund to “support natural and hybrid infrastructure projects” aimed at mitigating climate change impacts and preventing disasters;
• $100.6 million over five years to enhance wildfire preparedness in Canada’s national parks;
• $28.7 million over five years to support wildfire risk mapping in Northern Canada;
• $68.3 million over three years to complete updated flood maps, especially for higher-risk areas;
• $60 million over two years for the new Nature Smart Climate Solutions Fund to protect existing wetlands and trees on farms; and
• $36.2 million over five years to Environment and Climate Change Canada to develop and apply a “climate lens” that ensures climate adaptation and mitigation considerations are integrated throughout federal government decision-making.

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