Video—Mitigating the Impacts of Severe Weather

Video Transcript

This chapter’s important because climate scientists are telling us that with climate change, we are going to experience an increase in the severity and frequency of severe weather events. I’m talking about rainfall, snow, droughts, wildfires, tornadoes. All of those weather events, natural events, are going to increase in severity and frequency.

As an example: the federal government, in the last 6 years, has spent more on helping communities recover from disasters than it has in the previous 39 years.

What we found was that the federal government is not providing enough information to urban planners and engineers at the community level in order for them to properly plan where their communities are going to be built. They’re no longer providing floodplain mapping, for example. They’re no longer providing curves on the intensity, duration, and frequency of precipitation. So those… That information is required by urban planners in order to build strong communities that will be able to mitigate this adverse weather.

The second thing that we found was that the funds that were provided by the federal government are not designed in such a way to encourage municipalities and provinces to apply for that funding.