I'm very pleased to be with you today. My name is Catherine Cobden, and I am a new board member of the Canadian Climate Forum.
I want to point out that I have Dawn Conway with me today. She's the executive director of the CCF, and she can help with answering questions if we need to.
Thank you for the opportunity to address your theme of prosperous and secure communities.
At the CCF, we believe that for communities to prosper and to be secure they must be forward looking and resilient, able to act on opportunities, and to anticipate and adapt to a changing world. Many such risks that they face are climatic or weather-related. Some are immediate, like heat waves, ice storms or coastal flooding, while others are yet longer term, like permafrost softening, melting of glaciers, or the introduction of invasive species.
The scope of climate change is of course global, but here in Canada it will impact our economy, our security, our food and water supply, our employment, and our health, and its costs will increase as productivity, jobs, and people are affected. A recent study by the Insurance Bureau of Canada demonstrated that insurance losses due to severe weather events cost the Canadian industry $3.2 billion in 2013, three times that of 2010. This is a dramatic increase. Further to that estimate, the damages from last year's Alberta flood totalled $5 billion. The last major Prairies drought saw losses topping $3.6 billion for farm communities and 41,000 Canadians were put out of work.
We now know that extreme weather events are on the upswing. As climate change strengthens its grip on the planet, there is no doubt that communities, Canadians, and our governments have a big challenge ahead. We will need to collectively rely on deep, dependable information to help us anticipate, cope with, and adapt to this change. Fundamental is up-to-date information on weather conditions, climatic trends, and their potential impacts. Businesses, municipalities, and provincial and federal decision-makers must have the critical understanding gained from real-time data and predictive capacity on changing weather patterns, return rate and severity of events, etc.
The Canadian Climate Forum has submitted a brief that proposes three key measures, which I'll quickly describe. One, increase investment in obtaining this key information through monitoring, observation, and analysis of information on weather, oceans, forests, agriculture, etc. Two, proactively adapt to different climatic futures that await us by anticipating those future infrastructure needs, for example, under extreme flooding, and establishing codes and standards geared to such a future. Three, strengthen our strategic planning frameworks to incorporate approaches that actually embed climatic resilience.
Let's get a bit more granular and consider a few steps. First of all, I'd like to congratulate the government for the five-year climate change and atmospheric research program it established in budget 2011. This program has been extremely valuable, but is unfortunately now fully subscribed two years ahead of schedule. You could consider that for extension or you could add additional funding to enable the momentum of this important work.
Second, we propose the concept of incentives to encourage communities, corporations, and departments to build climatic resilience into their strategic planning, for example, by planning now infrastructures to meet anticipated conditions, whether it be through flood management or flood response, or even possibly to actively discourage construction in vulnerable flood plains
Finally, we would welcome the opportunity to work with government to support the goal of better translation of all this complex science to high-quality, accessible results that can help citizens, communities, and businesses take action in the face of these changing conditions.
In closing, we encourage the finance committee to consider the highly compelling major issues—water scarcity, extreme weather events, coastal flooding, etc.—in its budget deliberations and to promote decisions that will prepare communities and Canadians for conditions in the longer term.
The Canadian Climate Forum promotes the use of weather and climate information and we stand ready to assist.
Thank you.