Waterloo opens climate adaptation centre
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 Prof. 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,” Feltmate said. “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 past10 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.”