Good morning. My name is Sophie Guilbault, and I'm the director of partnerships at the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction. I also colead the Canadian Centre for Recovery and Resilience.
Thanks for the opportunity to appear in front of you today. The purpose of ICLR is to build disaster-resilient communities. We look forward to sharing our advice with you today.
ICLR recently published a database tracking the history of societal insured and uninsured losses from extreme weather damage. In 1994, Canada experienced a third of a billion dollars in losses. Last year, we experienced $13 billion in damage, which includes $7 billion paid by insurance companies. Damage increased by 9.4% a year over several decades, which I'm sure you can agree is a trend that is very much unsustainable.
The good news is that most of these $13 billion in losses last year were preventable. We know what to do. We know which locations in Canada are at high risk. We know what the three or four essential actions are that can be taken to reduce the risk of severe damage to homes from different hazards. Often, these three or four actions can be accomplished for under $15,000 per home. We know that each dollar invested in resilience likely results in five to 10 dollars or more in terms of future avoided losses.
I want to give some examples of how we know how to protect homes at risk. This is from the flooding that happened in Montreal and Toronto last year. The insurance companies paid $3.5 billion to 100,000 homeowners who had to clean up their basements of polluted water. We know that on top of the insured claims, there was likely over $1 billion of damage to homes without insurance.
Less than 10% of homes take preventative actions like putting in a backwater valve or a sump pump, or having landscaping that slopes the water away from their homes. Those are all measures that can be easily implemented and can significantly reduce these costs.
Next, in British Columbia, we see on this slide that a house was protected from wildfire by implementing things like a class A fire-resistant roof and fire-resilient cladding, as well as a 1.5-metre non-combustible zone around the property, which stood up through the fire, as opposed to the neighbouring home, which was completely destroyed. We've seen these cases in many communities in Canada when we did forensic investigations in Jasper, Kelowna and all these places.
Finally, in Calgary last summer, we had a roof that was previously rehabilitated with impact-resistant shingles following a hailstorm. The other half of the roof was not. You can see significant differences in damage. Similarly, if you look at the siding of the two homes next to each other, we see severe losses from wind-driven hail, with the house on the right having vinyl siding that was severely impacted. The one with impact-resistant siding is on the left.
There is some good news in what we're sharing. We know how to reduce damage, but we must take actions like these to reduce unsustainable trends.