The rise of climate-resilient construction in Canada

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When it’s completed, St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver’s False Creek Flats neighbourhood will be a marvel of climate-resilient design.

The hospital’s entrances will have barriers at flood level and its mechanical and electrical services will be situated more than five metres above ground level – a height that has been identified as the highest likely flood level up to the year 2100.

The hospital will be equipped with two power feeds and backup boilers, chillers and air handling units for extended power failures; pervious ground within the hospital’s green spaces to absorb excess rainfall and prevent flooding; and a tree canopy to reduce the heat-island effect during heat waves.

For the first time in Vancouver, the roads abutting the hospital’s emergency department are designed as “resilient” roads, with stone columns underneath to maintain their structural integrity in the event of an earthquake.

These adaptations came from a climate-risk assessment by builder PCL Construction and environmental consultants at Stantec, which identified coastal flooding, intense and more frequent rainfall, heat domes and poor air quality as the risks the hospital campus was most likely to face.

“We do definitely design differently, more robustly, as our offering to resiliency,” says Bruce Norman, project director for PCL Construction. “The way we planned the building … we don’t typically do that, or we haven’t done that before. All these forward-thinking initiatives are parts of future design.”

St. Paul’s is a unique design case: condo towers, office buildings and single-family homes don’t have quite the same weather-resistance needs as a health facility. But it represents a move in recent years among commercial builders and property and casualty insurers to build climate adaptation and resilience into new builds and rebuilds, in the face of more frequent, and more extreme, weather events.

The past few years have only underscored the need for this work. Last summer’s flash floods in Toronto and wildfires that destroyed one third of Jasper, Alta., followed the previous year’s record-breaking wildfire season across the country, the 2021 wildfire that destroyed Lytton, B.C., and the EF-2 tornado that caused $100-million worth of insured losses in Barrie, Ont.

Combined damages from summer 2024 extreme-weather events amounted to more than $7-billion in insured losses, according to the Insurance Bureau of Canada – more than the $6.2-billion cost of the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire.

“This trend is very alarming and it’s very clear, we can see it increase year over year in the approximate cost of loss we’re seeing across the industry,” says Michelle Laidlaw, associate vice-president of the national home and auto product portfolio at the Co-operators Group and lead of the insurer’s resiliency and sustainability program. “The risk we see is, if we don’t act to change how we rebuild homes, settle losses and build new homes, with the climate we’re facing today, we’ll continue to have this problem.”

Historically, when a policyholder’s home sustained damage from extreme weather, Co-operators would finance it to be rebuilt with like materials and to a similar quality; its new approach is to finance the rebuilding of homes with more resilient materials after weather damage, for roofing, for example, and specific loss-prevention measures like backwater valves and sump-pump battery backups.

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Insurance coverage, available for eligible farm and home policies with no additional premiums, offers up to $3,000 in reimbursement for weather-resistant roofing upgrades and $1,000 for preventative measures, including security systems and surge protectors. (To find out what their flood risk is, homeowners can visit water.cooperators.ca.)

Advanced climate risk modelling is aiding resilience and adaptation efforts. The climate hazards and advanced risk modelling team at Co-operators has developed sophisticated risk models that identify overland flood risks down to the household level. Ms. Laidlaw says this allows the insurer to offer flood insurance, regardless of a homeowner’s risk level, with a risk-based pricing model and incentives for policyholders who implement loss-prevention and risk-mitigation strategies.

When designing St. Paul’s, Mr. Norman says PCL relied on publicly available climate risk modelling data and tools, including the Public Infrastructure Engineering Vulnerability Committee protocol, the federal government’s Climate Lens assessment, and ICLEI Canada’s Building Adaptive and Resilient Communities online tool as part of its assessment.

Building in climate resilience without making those homes overly costly for Canadians is a challenge, says Kevin Lee, chief executive officer of the Canadian Home Builders’ Association (CHBA). The association has been engaging in federal building code updates, aimed at making the built environment more resistant to extreme weather, to suggest which adaptation measures should be codified versus voluntary for homeowners.

“We used to build codes [based] on the past 30 years of data, but now we’re starting to look at what the future conditions are going to be like,” he explains. “There’s a whole element of work going on now, in terms of … what are the loads – be it wind, snow, rain – going to be like in the future?

“We’ve never had to do that before,” he says, adding that “invariably, unfortunately, changes to code end up costing more, so that’s always the juggle.”

Last year, the CHBA also announced a partnership with the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, a research institute for disaster prevention affiliated with the University of Western Ontario, to conduct pilot field trials for resilient home-building practices for basement flooding, wildfire, hail and high wind.

The pilot is testing materials, technologies and building practices that have been proven out in other geographies that are used to the extreme weather Canada is beginning to experience more, such as long screws to secure a home’s roof structure, trusses to the top of a wall, which assist during hurricanes and tornadoes and fire-resistant exterior sidings and roof materials.

“What we’re really looking at is what you can do to renovate an existing home and what do you want to do in new construction and when repairing a home that’s been through an extreme-weather event,” says Mr. Lee.