‘Before the flood’: The growing urgency of adapting to the climate crisis

The world is rapidly moving towards climate change tipping points. Floods, fires and heat waves strike with increasing ferocity. There is, in Canada as elsewhere, a growing reality that adaptation is urgent and necessary.

With that knowledge growing, the federal government announced a $1.6 billion spending package Thursday to help provinces, municipalities and First Nations cope with the effects already being seen across the country.

The thinking, says Federal Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair, is that it is much more cost-effective to deal with climate-related adaptation measures first, as opposed to opening the purse strings after tragedy strikes.

“For every dollar we spend on prevention, on stronger infrastructure, we can save as much as ten dollars on recovery,” Blair said at a news conference in Prince Edward Island.

2:02
More climate change adaptation needed after storm Fiona: expert

The adaptation measures, he says, include looking at “building codes, where we build, how we build,” as well as efforts “to develop a national flood insurance program” to better inform planning decisions. Better flood mapping is also part of the government’s strategy.

One community leading the way in that regard is Peterborough, Ont., about two hours east of Toronto. Nearly twenty years ago, it was badly affected by floods of epic proportions that any resident old enough to live through can hardly forget.

Residents described the water as “buckets coming down, not drops.” Another resident said it was “like Niagara Falls.”

More than 150 millimeters of rain fell on the city in less than an hour that day in July 2004. Since the historic event, Peterborough has worked to upgrade its infrastructure.

The city also received federal funding for flood mapping and emergency response through Ottawa’s National Disaster Mitigation Program.

“Almost 6,000 hours of work went into it,” says Senior Watershed Project Manager Ian Boland, referring to an integrated flood model his city undertook.

The goal, says Boland, is to map “every single sewer, storm drain, every single catchment, watercourse” and create a model for both predicting and responding to flood events, regardless of where they occur in and around the city.

Advanced flood mapping

Sandbags, dikes and pumping stations are what usually come to mind when thinking about community flood response. But these tend to be reactive measures.

In contrast, cities are increasingly taking innovative and proactive approaches, born of the fact that climate risk is here now and growing.

4:42
Heavy rain across southern Alberta sparks flood concerns, flashbacks to 2013 disaster

This is where data and mapping can play a big role.

Officials in Peterborough have been working with a company called Ecopia AI for the past five years to collect raw data on various surfaces across the city. This includes impervious areas such as parking lots as well as water absorbing areas such as parks and grass areas.

The high-resolution maps generated are then used to create a “hydraulic” model of the city. This approach allows planners to create real-time scenarios that show water flowing over an impervious surface and to calculate what impact that will have on the rest of the city’s storm management system.

This is a more comprehensive approach than the traditional way of simply studying water flow in, for example, a river. The more advanced mapping enables them to generate scenarios and to plan adequately for them.

But even then there are uncertainties.

The need for adaptation

Planet Earth is rapidly moving toward 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, an average global temperature that, if crossed, spells devastating climate impacts. What’s more, echoes are growing that the 1.5 C target simply won’t be met, given how much fossil fuel the world continues to burn.

Enter the need to not only mitigate climate change – namely to reduce emissions – but also to adapt to the stark realities of the here and now.

The shift to more adaptation is starting to pick up steam, including when it comes to flooding.

Last August, the federal government published one of its most comprehensive reports on flood risk in Canada.

Western University climate adaptation expert Jason Thistlethwaite, who is working closely with Ottawa on its flood management response, was a lead contributor to the report. Cities, he says, are often on the front lines of climate risk, and point the way forward.

“Municipalities take this very seriously, because they are the ones on the front lines. They are the ones who suffer the most physical risk, yet have the least amount of resources to do anything about it.”

There are, he adds, real benefits to taking this job seriously.

“In the future, we will look at municipalities that are recognized for being climate-resistant, and their property values ​​will increase because people will want to live there.”

Solutions needed now

For those affected by these disasters, the money needed to adapt to the growing problem of climate change cannot come fast enough.

In BC’s Fraser Valley, farmers whose land was flooded by a series of atmospheric rivers last fall are in some cases still waiting for compensation. This includes dairy farmer Philip Graham.

“It’s quite frustrating,” he told Global BC about the uncertainty surrounding compensation. “You do all this paperwork, and you hear on the news, ‘Oh yeah, we’re covering, we’re helping people out, we’re doing all this stuff for everybody.’

“They tell me they haven’t forgotten about me.”

4:20
Comprehensive plan needed to prevent future flooding in Fraser Valley

Ottawa has promised $5 billion in flood relief for British Columbia, but that money isn’t going to come overnight. So, many flood-prone parts of the province are left with a patchwork system of temporary flood barriers known as orphan dikes.

In other words, the changes can’t come fast enough, because no one knows what the next storm or heat event will bring.

And while it is impossible to ‘block’ a flood like the one that hit Peterborough in 2004, or the floods that hit Calgary in 2013, there is a growing sense that more money is needed to deal with new and ever-evolving climate realities to deal with.

In Peterborough, that stronger offensive line is already taking shape, and better mapping, Boland says, shows it can be done.

“We didn’t want it to be something,” he says, “that just sits on the shelf.”