Climate Impact Costs in Canada

The Canadian Climate Institute recently released The Damage Control: Reducing the costs of Climate Impacts in Canada – a seminal report detailing the accelerating costs of climate impacts in Canada – to the economy and to the wellbeing of Canadians. While the costs of climate impacts must be measured not only in dollars, we also know that much of what drives interest and change in policies and practices is economics. The report provides a clear picture of how climate impacts will not only affect macro economics, but also the downstream effects on individual households (increased taxes, increased cost of living, job losses) and the disproportionate impacts on low-income individuals and households. We know the latter also means that this means that single parent homes, those living with disabilities, Indigenous people and communities, and BIPOC communities are over-represented in this category of “low income” households. 

While the report paints a clear and pretty depressing picture of how climate will impact us, it also offers some concrete recommendations for action by governments that could ameliorate some of these costs – human and economic. As the report points out (diagram below), investments in proactive adaptation today will have significant cost benefits not to mention human and social benefits. It is, in many ways, a call to action for governments at all levels to understand and act on the knowledge that investing proactively in climate adaptation can not only save money, but result in a strong rate of return on those investments.

This economic argument has also been made before both in disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation. In their examination of the National Disaster Mitigation Strategy, Public Safety Canada (PSC), for example, has stated that for every $1 invested in disaster mitigation efforts, $7 to $10 can be saved in post-disaster recovery costs. Similarly, in 2019, the Global Commission on Climate Adaptation released the Adapt Now: A global call for leadership on climate resilience report. The report suggests a rate of return on climate adaptation investments that ranges from 2:1 to 10:1. Such investments can include a broad range of climate actions that include improving and making critical infrastructure more resilient to future climate; initiating nature based solutions that have the co-benefit of improving protection against impacts while also reducing GHG emissions (e.g., improved forest management practices, conserving and restoring peatlands and coastal wetlands); and restorative agriculture; and improving the climate literacy and climate action capabilities of citizens and communities. The Adapt now report proposes that investments in five key areas along (i.e., strengthening early warning systems, making new infrastructure climate resilient, improving dryland agriculture for crop production, protecting mangroves, and making water resources more resilient) could generate up to USD 7.12 trillion in net benefits.

Investing concurrently in disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation, is or should be an urgent priority for governments at every level. And as the Canadian federal government moves towards the release of the National Adaptation Strategy at the upcoming COP26 forum in Egypt, it is worth stating that the strength of that strategy must be measured in how the government resources and invests in the actions detailed in the strategy. It’s time to take investing in climate adaptation seriously, and to do so with a justice and equity lens that recognizes the disproportionate impact of climate impacts on those who will be most adversely impacted – those living in poverty, Indigenous and BIPOC communities, people living with disabilities, and others already marginalized by existing systems and economic structures.