The rising cost of flooding is a drain on Ontario residents and municipalities. It’s a challenging problem to solve — and one that is becoming only more difficult given the increase in extreme weather events associated with climate change.
Flooding is primarily a local issue, which means often under-resourced municipalities are left struggling to understand their risk and how to mitigate it. Enter the Intact Centre for Climate Adaptation at the University of Waterloo. On Wednesday, the centre released a new free tool intended to help municipalities assess their own preparedness — and better plan for the future.
TVO Today speaks with Joanna Eyquem, the managing director of climate-resilient infrastructure at the Intact Centre, about the province’s flood risk and why Ontarians need to change the way they think about floods.
TVO Today: Tell me about the Intact Centre and what it does.
Joanna Eyquem: The Intact Centre produces tools to help accelerate climate adaptation. We work to reduce climate risks. When we talk about climate action, we're often talking about reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, which is super-important. But we also need to be working to reduce the climate risks that are already baked into our future.
We focus on flooding, wildfires, and extreme heat. This new tool is one of our key things for the flooding file. Municipalities are at the forefront of adaptation, which is generally local. It's a free tool to just get moving. We're doing work on adaptation, but the Intact Centre's role is to accelerate that work — because we're not moving fast enough.
TVO Today: How exactly does the tool work?
Joanna Eyquem is the managing director of climate-resilient infrastructure at the University of Waterloo’s Intact Centre for Climate Adaptation. (Courtesy of Joanna Eyquem)
Eyquem: It’s divided into three sections. The first section looks at identifying risks — indicators of intense rain or river and coastal flooding. The second section looks at how the municipality is prepared. So, to what degree they've already analyzed their risks and how they've already taken action to reduce their risk. And then the third section is how to further reduce risk.
It’s an Excel tool and pretty simple to use. The user goes through the tabs and picks from a dropdown list and answers questions. It's fairly intuitive. At the end, the tool analyzes the responses and provides several different visualizations of the results so that the user can really see where there's work needed and what the risks are. We know that people work in different ways in terms of what helps them. So there are different options: icons, little pyramids, coloured lists — just to make it more readily understandable.
We recommend that people use the tool every year.
TVO Today: Why was this particular tool needed?
Eyquem: We know that many municipalities have different needs and resources, so we needed to provide a tool that everyone can use, no matter what their level of resources. It uses readily available indicators, so you don't need sophisticated data to answer the questions. We wanted people to be able to make a start, no matter where they’re coming from.
It also collates a lot of national standards and guidance, so it acts a bit like a guide to the guidance — because that can be also overwhelming, knowing what guidance you should be following. We have a lot of national standards relating to flood resilience, but people don't know they exist.
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TVO Today: This tool is designed in part to help smaller municipalities that can’t afford to manage flood risk in the same way as larger or wealthier ones. Why is this on these municipalities at all? Could the province or the federal government not step in here?
Eyquem: So, that's a great question because, in some situations, there is federal funding available for adaptation. A key driver for this tool is to help people who might want to apply for that funding. But the federal government doesn't really have the jurisdiction for flood-risk management. That's with provinces and territories, which have such different approaches to flood-risk management. Some of them have downloaded responsibilities to the municipalities.
So it depends on which province you're in as to how much support you have or what your regulatory framework is.
We feel that municipalities need to tool up in this area because most of the action is going to be at the local level. Even if it's being funded by the province or the federal government, it's going to be put into place on the ground at a municipal level.
Agenda segment, June 24, 2022: Historic flooding in Fort Frances
TVO Today: It strikes me that the effects of flooding don't always follow municipal boundaries.
Eyquem: Yeah, that's definitely part of the tool. I'm a geomorphologist, so I work at the watershed scale for river flooding. Part of the tool is help these parties see themselves as at the heart of the action — but also having a role to look up and work with other municipalities or conservation authorities or river-basin organizations to manage river or coastal flooding at that larger natural-system scale. Looking down, at a smaller scale, it’s about engaging their citizens because we need action on flood risk at different kinds of scales. Everybody in their own home, what they do on their grounds, has a cumulative impact on how we manage flood risk.
TVO Today: How big of a risk does flooding pose in Ontario right now? Obviously, the risks are multifaceted: financial, health-related, ecological, etc.
Eyquem: I see it as a financial and health risk. We’ve often seen climate risk as an environmental risk, but I think we're waking up to the fact now that it has very serious economic consequences and impacts on our physical and mental health.
In terms of ecological impacts, I always like to remind people that, when it comes to river and coastal flooding, flooding is a natural process as well. There's a problem where we've built on floodplains. The ecological risk there is less clear.
Agenda segment, August 25, 2022: How municipalities prepare for climate change
In terms of consequences for Ontarians, this province has been lucky in that it has conservation authorities that have been managing flood risk and hazard plans at that watershed scale, which has helped to limit things like placing housing development at risk. Ontario has that government structure, which has really helped. The other provinces just don't have that. It's the only province to have watershed-scale organizations with teeth, essentially.
There have been changes in the conservation-authority powers — I'm hoping that's not going to impact things like this.
TVO Today: Are there any misconceptions in the way people think about climate risk or flood planning that you think need to be addressed?
Eyquem: People expect to be protected at all costs sometimes. I'm from the United Kingdom, and I saw the terminology about flood risk go from “flood defence” to “flood risk management,” because we are not going to be able to defend everybody against flooding. Something like 10 per cent of residents in Canada are in high-risk zones or flood plains. We are not necessarily going to be able to defend those people.
One of the difficulties is that flood risk is not transparent. In Ontario, most of the mapping is with the conservation authorities, but in each province, it's with a different, body. People don't know what their flood risk is. I think there's a need for public education to help people make decisions with the information they need.
Agenda segment, June 28, 2023: Is Canada at risk of becoming uninsurable?
TVO Today: Is there anything else that we haven’t touched on today that you think is important?
Eyquem: One thing that we have very consciously put into the tool is a link between natural-asset management and managing flood risks — how we work with nature to manage flooding. That's something that the Intact Centre has been producing a lot of guidance on recently, and it’s something we really believe in. In Canada, we are often thinking of grey infrastructure first when it comes to adaptation solutions. We're really trying to shift that to thinking green first.
TVO Today: That means things like strengthening watersheds?
Eyquem: Yeah. Often we've drained agricultural land, for example, and cut trees. In the U.K., it's called natural flood management — so we're storing water on agricultural land during flood periods to save the downstream municipality.
This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
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