“We plan cities around one-in-a-hundred-year floods. We should now be planning for one-in-a-thousand-year floods,” said David Schindler, noted ecologist at the University of Edmonton.
Heavy rains in mid-June caused water levels in the Bow, Elbow and South Saskatchewan Rivers to rise to record-breaking levels. More than 100,000 people were evacuated in Calgary, and 10,000 people were evacuated in Medicine Hat. The flooding began on June 20, and waters began to subside across the province on June 24.
Until the June floods, the largest number of people evacuated in Canada was due to a 1950 flood of the Red River in Winnipeg, Man., which saw 107,000 people relocated.
While the most expensive and fatal weather event in Canadian history remains the North American Ice Storm of 1998 in eastern Ontario, southern Quebec, Nova Scotia, northern New York and central Maine, which injured 945, killed 28 in Canada and caused an estimated $4,635,720,433 in damages, most of Canada’s costliest natural disasters have been prairie flooding, according to the Canadian Disaster Database, which is maintained by Public Safety.
Flooding in Alberta in 2005 caused an estimated $142-million in damage and two deaths. Parts of the province were also flooded last year.
“In 2005 there was a one-in-one-hundred year flood, now here we are eight years later, and we have a second flood that’s even bigger,” noted Prof. Schindler.
While prominent environmentalists, like David Suzuki, have attributed the recent flooding to climate change, Prof. Schindler said it’s hard to blame any one specific event to climate change.
University of Western Ontario climatologist Gordon McBean, who was one of the recipients of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate change, explained that climate change allows the atmosphere to hold more water vapour, meaning more rain.
“We are seeing already that there is more heavy precipitation occurring in those parts of Canada than there used to be, and that difference is largely attributable to the extra carbon dioxide and greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere,” he explained. Prof. McBean is also policy chair of the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction.
“As we project ahead, say 20, 30, 40 years from now, to mid-century, we expect the number of heavy precipitation events to roughly double,” he said.
Alberta Premier Alison Redford has committed the province to spending $1-billion on the recovery, and she said last week it could take as long as 10 years for the province to completely get back on its feet. She also said the province would not stick to plans to balance the budget in light of the flooding.
The Bank of Montreal estimates it may cost as much as $5-billion for Alberta to clean up after the floods
Since 1970, the government has paid out more than $2-billion for disaster relief, according to Public Safety.
Under the Federal Disaster Assistance Program, the federal government will reimburse Alberta for recovery expenses that are beyond the reasonable amount it can be expected to cover itself, according to Public Safety.
A range of expenses are eligible, including the cost of evacuation, restoring public works, and repairing the basic personal property of people, small businesses and farms, explained department spokesperson Jean Paul Duval in an email.
The federal government could ultimately pay for as much as 90 per cent of recovery costs that aren’t covered by insurance. The money goes to the province, and not to individuals.
If past recovery efforts are any indication, it could take years before Alberta sees any federal money. The province just received a cheque for damage from the 2005 flooding in April of this year.
Ms. Redford said the province is aware of the lag and is prepared to deal with it.
The Insurance Bureau of Canada finds that often infrastructure failure is to blame for much of the damage caused by severe weather events, and that Canada’s municipal infrastructure needs at least $31-billion in upgrades.
Most insurance policies in Canada don’t cover overland flooding, which is water that comes in through doors and windows. Albertans hoping to make claims for their flooded homes will only be successful if their homes were damaged by sewage backup, according to the Insurance Board of Canada, the reasoning being that premiums for overland flooding insurance would be exorbitant.
Last year, severe weather in Canada caused about $1.2-billion in insured damage and the related costs of settling claims alone. This figure was $1.7-billion in 2011, and $915-million in 2010, according to the IBC.
“Water is our biggest problem, and adaptation is our solution,” said IBC President and CEO Don Forgeron in a statement on the bureau’s website.
“The word that they should think about before adaptation is prevention. We’re going to go through adaptation in Calgary right now. A lot of the houses and other infrastructure that was damaged simply will not be rebuilt—or shouldn’t be rebuilt—where it is. But it was an expensive lesson to learn. I know a half-dozen really good hydrologists who live in southern Alberta. This could have been planned for,” said Prof. Schindler.
“We need national strategies that factor in that we are going to have these more heavy-rain events, heavy-wind events, flooding, etc., so that we put in an infrastructure policy that first of all renews our existing infrastructure, which is decaying rapidly,” said Prof. McBean.
“Canadian investments in our infrastructure, both public and private, are, as a percentage of the GDP, way down from what they were only a decade or so ago. They are only half of what they used to be,” he added.
It could be as simple as improving the building code, but also involves major rethinking of how Canadian cities plan, said the scientists.
“They had a study done of the Bow after the 2005 flood event that told them, don’t build on the flood plain any more. Like most reports, they didn’t take any action on it,” said Prof. Schindler.
The poor planning is deeply engrained in many municipalities.
“The costs of the flooding, the exposed infrastructure, are decisions that go back decades,” said Prof. McBean.
He said the consensus among experts is North America isn’t ready for climate change.
“This event was entirely forecast. It was not a case of if, but when,” he said of the Alberta flooding.
He said a change would require politicians to think about long-term solutions, and he worries the federal infrastructure money spent as part of the economic action plan went mostly to hockey arenas and other high-visibility projects instead of fundamental infrastructure needs.
“We have not set or openly discussed nationally-agreed-to priorities. Unfortunately, the attitude is that disaster reduction requires thinking beyond the next election,” he said.
NDP environment critic Megan Leslie (Halifax, N.S.) also said the government should have seen this sort of flood coming.
“The Harper government has known for a long time that climate change impacts like severe weather events, they require advance planning,” she said.
Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Jason Kenney (Calgary Southeast, Alta.), who is the regional minister responsible for Calgary, said the flooding was a “once-in-a-century” event.
“The stuff that I’ve read and commentary from scientists says that there is not a connection between weather events of this nature and broader climate issues,” he stated June 23 in an interview.
Ms. Leslie took issue with this characterization.
“I saw a quote from Minister Kenney saying this is a ‘once-in-a-century’ type event. Well, not any more, my friend. Severe weather is happening all the time, and it is the result of climate change. We can’t just act like it was this freaky accident, we need to actually prepare ourselves for it,” she said.
Efforts to adapt Canadian society and its infrastructure, “absolutely” must happen at the federal level, working with other levels of government, said Ms. Leslie.
The government committed $148.8-million between 2011 and 2016 to support adaptation programs. The funding went to Environment Canada, Parks Canada, Health Canada, Public Health, Aboriginal Affairs, Industry Canada, Natural Resources and Transport Canada. Between 2007 and 2011 it also contributed $85.9-million towards climate adaptation programs in provinces, municipalities and professional organizations to encourage adaptation and assess the challenge. It also has a Federal Adaptation Policy Framework.
“We need not only an emission reduction strategy, we need an integration of climate change, adaptation and disaster risk reduction management strategies,” said Prof. McBean, who noted carbon dioxide molecules stay in the atmosphere for 100 years.
He added the federal government’s sector-by-sector regulations for emissions are complex and vulnerable to political judgment.
“The greenhouse gas emissions reduction policies that we have tend to be very complex, very specific, which quite frankly leads to political judgments as to, ‘Well we’ll do that one for reasons that are not the best, as opposed to something else,’” he said.
The federal government has taken a sector-by-sector approach to regulating emissions, drafting guidelines for transportation, coal-fired plants and other emissions-heavy sectors.
Canada has regulated emissions from light trucks and passenger vehicles until 2017. It has proposed regulations that go beyond that date that would reduce emissions by 50 per cent compared to a 2008 vehicle in 2025.
In February of this year, the government released final regulations for trucks built in 2014 or later. It estimates this will cut emissions from future vehicles by as much as 23 per cent.
In 2012, the government released coal-fired electricity plant performance regulations. Like the other regulations, they apply to newly built plants.
Canada is one of the original members of the Global Research Alliance on agricultural greenhouse gas, and is looking at ways to mitigate GHGs coming from farming. It has invested $27-million into that initiative, according to Environment Canada.
“The feeble start that we had on climate change, which you couldn’t call anything but feeble, has pretty well been taken totally apart by the Conservative government,” said Prof. Schindler.
Ms. Leslie said Canada’s commitments to reduction of greenhouse gases under the Copenhagen Accord are too low, and she is skeptical the country will meet them anyways.
Canada emitted 702 megatonnes of carbon dioxide in 2011. That’s 19 per cent above 1990s levels, which were at 591 megatonnes. Under the Copenhagen Accord, Canada is committed to bringing its emissions levels to 17 per cent below 2005 levels according to Environment Canada. In 2005, Canada emitted 737 megatonnes of GHGs, 17 per cent below that level is 611.1 megatonnes.
According to a federal report, Canadians produced an average of 20.4 tonnes of greenhouse gases per person annually between 1990 and 2011.
“Our reputation is really at the bottom of the barrel right now. We hear all of these excuses like, ‘We won’t move until the U.S. moves,’ or ‘We won’t move until China moves.’ That’s totally new,” said Prof. Schindler.
In the Mulroney years, Prof. Schindler was part of Canada’s efforts to ban detergent phosphates, and to regulate ozone-depleting chemicals and acid rain.
“We don’t produce any more stratospheric ozone consuming products relative to rest of the globe than we do greenhouse gases, yet we saw that this was necessary, and we played a leadership role in getting the world to react,” he said.
He said Canada has abdicated its role as an environmental leader.
“It seems like we no longer want to be a leader, except in having the highest per capita income, or something like that. And the reasons seem pretty silly to me,” he said.
Despite the Alberta floods taking such a toll on communities in the Conservative heartland, both scientists said they aren’t hopeful the events have sparked a re-evaulation of the government’s climate policies.
“I’m frankly not that hopeful about Calgary. We have a lot of people down there who still think that the Earth is only 6,000 years old, too. Despite lots of evidence to the contrary. It’s one thing to be misinformed people who can evaluate new evidence, but I think we have a lot of people down there who are straight ideologues,” said Prof. Schindler.
Original Article
Source: hilltimes.com
Author: JESSICA BRUNO
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