Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation — Treading Water: Impact of Catastrophic Flooding on Canada’s Housing Market
Click here to read the report.
The Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation at the University of Waterloo has released an important report detailing the major financial risks posed by catastrophic flooding to Canada’s real estate sector. Analysis of data from the real-estate and mortgage markets in five flood-impacted cities across Canada demonstrate major financial impacts, with “an average 8.2 per cent reduction in the final sale price of houses, 44.3 per cent reduction in the number of houses listed for sale, and 19.8 per cent more days on market to sell a house” in the 6-month period following a catastrophic flood event.
Fortunately the report includes a variety of recommendations to mitigate the impacts of flooding on the housing market, including the development of:
Home Flood Protection Guidance
Climate Adaptation Home Rating Program (CAHRP)
Flood risk maps
Residential flood risk scores
Natural infrastructure
Community flood risk mitigation
The Canada 1 Water program will provide an excellent resource to inform the development of all these mitigating efforts! By forecasting climate change impacts on Canada’s hydrologic systems C1W can help to develop evolving flood risk maps and residential flood risk scores out to the end the century. C1W will also provide a crucial tool to evaluate the need for natural infrastructure and community flood risk mitigation plans, ensuring that we apply these mitigating/adaptive measure to the places that need them the most.
“The “bad news” regarding the impact of flooding on residential housing is that climate change and extreme weather-related flood risk, at times combined with poor land-use planning, will get more challenging across many regions of Canada (IPCC 2021), and if left unchecked, will increasingly distress the residential housing market. The “good news” is that Canada has developed, or is in the process of developing, a wealth of guidance to help homeowners and communities to mitigate flood risk.”