| Abstract | The National Research Council–Construction (NRC-Construction) Portfolio was awarded the Climate Resilient Core Public Infrastructure (CR-CPI) project by the government of Canada to bring resilience into buildings and CPI against recurrent floods and projected climate change by updating national codes and standards and developing related guidelines.
Public Safety of Canada’s records reveal that over the last decade, Canada has seen a notable increase in flooding, resulting in billions of dollars of damages. Therefore, the impact of floods on buildings and CPI was identified as a primary area of study within the CR-CPI project. Climate change is expected to exacerbate the severity of flooding, which in turn will worsen the impact of floods on buildings and CPI. In fact, all reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change indicate that storminess will intensify in the future as large amounts of precipitation over shorter periods will occur more frequently in many parts of the world. This includes Canada, where the impacts of climate change may even be more severe. As a result, the impact of climate change has also been identified as another major research area within the CR-CPI project.
Protecting Canadians from natural disasters, such as floods, has been the focus of the Canadian government for the last several decades. In 1976 the federal government started a nation-wide flood protection program, the Flood Damage Reduction Program (FDRP), to protect Canadian communities and their assets from flood hazards. This program was federally administered and implemented on a cost sharing basis between the provinces/territories and the federal government. The provinces and territories entered into bilateral agreements at different times, except for Prince Edward Island and Yukon Territory, where the flooding hazards were not found to be a major concern. At the time the FDRP was ended by the federal government in 1995/96, most of the flood-prone areas and vulnerable major population centers across the country were mapped. Flood maps were created for 981 communities with a total cost of $65.4 million. After the termination of the FDRP, provinces and territories took on the responsibility of updating and maintaining the existing flood maps and developing new maps for additional areas. Some of the provinces chose to define their own mapping standards and protection levels to satisfy their needs. Consequently, due to the lack of a federal level supervisory or a regulatory body, there is less consistency and coherency among flood mapping related technology and standards used across the country. Recently, some of the provinces have also started developing climate change informed flood maps for future planning purposes (e.g. British Columbia and Newfoundland and Labrador). Because of the above mentioned factors, the status of flood maps across the entire country is not clearly known.
To guide the development of flood and climate resilient national codes and standards, detailed information on the distribution of flooding depth and velocity of flood waters across the floodplain is required to identify various loads and related load combinations for design of buildings and CPI. To avoid duplication of the effort and to better understand new and existing flood maps, the first phase of this study was focused on acquiring information about existing and new flood maps and availability of supporting datasets used in creating these maps. This work was completed through contacting various provincial/territorial and municipal government offices and reviewing available technical documents. The supporting information was gathered and analyzed separately for each province and territory and will be of significant value in identifying how best the existing maps and data sources can be utilized to develop new codes and standards.
This report presents a summary of the overall findings, by highlighting the existing practices and standards and identifying the gaps between bringing “flood and climate resilience into Canadian codes and standards” and “the information available from existing and new flood maps”. Therefore, this document along with the provincial and territorial reports will help develop a future framework concerning how flood and climate resilience can be effectively incorporated into Canadian codes and standards and development of related guidelines. |
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