Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for inviting us today to present our perspective on risk and natural disaster.
My name is Richard Moreau. I'm the director of emergency management solutions at Calian. My work in emergency management over the years has included risk assessment, developing plans, and developing exercise and training programs to assist our first responders in their ability to manage and respond to incidents and disasters, whether they be naturally based, man-based, or large security events. The angle that my colleague and I will be providing the committee with today is from the perspective of a science-based approach to emergency management and structures.
All natural disasters generate system-based challenges—in particular, with our response capacity, an ability to sustain it through the response and full recovery period. Our current structures and systems are not optimized or designed to sustain increasingly long response and recovery periods caused by more frequent and more severe extreme weather events.
One of the best ways to reverse the trend is to focus more resources into mitigation, adaptation and preparedness. The starting point for any appreciation of the natural disaster hazards caused to communities is an all-hazards risk assessment, also know as AHRA. The AHRA process is a systematic way of identifying the hazards that could exist and then defining the risks associated with those hazards. Unfortunately, since the vast majority of communities in Canada do not have an up-to-date all-hazards risk assessment, they don't clearly comprehend the impacts of the risks that are present in their communities.
In addition to the physical hazards, there are other systemic risks and impacts generated by our built environment. I'm talking here about the vulnerability of our infrastructure in the face of the increasing risk from the impacts of climate change. We are seeing an increase in the so-called 100-year events presenting challenges to our infrastructure, most of which was built based on older risk models that no longer reflect the current reality and future trends. Using new risk assessment models and approaches, up-to-date data and modelling tools will allow our emergency planners and decision-makers at all levels to better appreciate the risks and make better-informed decisions about investing in the right areas to better mitigate, prepare for and adapt to a changing environment.
For an example of such successful investment in mitigation, we can turn to the Winnipeg floodway. When it was built in the sixties, it cost about $60 million. It was then further improved with another investment of $600 million in the nineties. Current estimates show that as a result, up to $32 billion was saved in damages, response and recovery costs for that investment—a $44 return on investment. That's pretty good when we compare it with the norm in the industry, which is that for every dollar in mitigation and preparedness, we save $6 in response and recovery.
In addition to physical mitigation efforts, there are also organizational preparedness measures, the means of preparing those who will eventually be called upon to respond. Depending on the scale of the disaster, the response might include resources from all levels of government and also a wide range of external partners. Improving preparedness by all stakeholders requires them to plan and invest time in advance to practice their response. This will allow the time to focus on the problem quickly upon activation. At the end of the day, preparedness is about taking uncertainty from the onset of the event and allowing people to quickly transit into dealing with the situation they're faced with. This is part of a broader need to better prepare Canadian communities to face disasters. To do so, we need to shift our emphasis, currently placed on response and recovery, towards mitigation, capacity, preparedness and adaptation while maintaining a strong response capability.
Investment in mitigation and preparedness will deliver two benefits to improve community resilience. First, it will reduce the impact of disasters. Second, it will reduce the time required for recovery.
As we see an increased frequency in severity of natural disasters, we see some communities that have not fully recovered before the next disaster strikes. Down the Ottawa River this spring, we're seeing all kinds of examples of communities that were barely recovering from the 2017 flood before being hit again by the 2019 flood. This is not a sustainable model.
Emergency management truly requires a whole-of-society approach, meaning that all levels of government, industry, academia, local volunteer organizations and affected residents must be involved in disaster planning, mitigation and preparedness. Building more resilient communities will require a shift from a focus on response and recovery towards one on investment in mitigation, preparedness and adaptation.
I will now turn over the remainder of my time to my colleague, Dr. Adrienne Ethier, who is an accomplished expert in science-based risk modelling, and who will quickly summarize how available models and maps can be integrated to improve our capacity to prepare for and mitigate the impacts of extreme weather events, helping us to make better decisions and to build better for the future.