Sooner or later, we’re going to have to pay

It’s not just the sudden appearance of ticks in your dog’s ears or the razing of the once-lovely stand of trees behind your house because of foreign bug infestations.

The harsh, material effects of climate change are in our faces, taking lives, destroying livelihoods and costing us billions of dollars — and we’ve wasted 30 years in not dealing with them.

On Thursday, Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston said the most recent storm to hit his province caused $7 million worth of damage. Of course, that’s nothing compared to the multibillion-dollar wreckage that is British Columbia this week. Or the forest fires and heat blasts of last summer that left hundreds of people dead. Or the two once-in-100-year floods that sandwiched a series of tornadoes in the Ottawa area a couple of years ago.

Warnings about the disastrous real-world implications of a changing climate have been with us since the early days of global discussions about greenhouse gas emissions back in the 1990s. But even as a heightened sense of urgency has driven concrete policy action and investment in the name of cutting emissions over the coming decades, we in Canada have been excruciatingly slow to anticipate and prevent the destruction here and now.

“The commissioner’s climate audits have repeatedly found deficiencies in the federal government’s climate adaptation plans,” the federal environment auditor Jerry DeMarco said in a report published Thursday that looked at 30 years of climate policy.

The political atmosphere is full of talk about transition to a low-carbon future, net-zero emissions by 2050 and setting a cap on oil and gas emissions. At last, there is some tangible momentum.

But those plans are all about the future, and we have a very big problem right now that we’re not even close to grappling with. DeMarco’s report points out that the average cost per disaster has risen 1,250 per cent since the 1970s, and that the billions in repairs needed every year don’t even incorporate the cost to people’s health or loss of personal property.

Insured losses alone are running at about $2 billion a year in Canada these days, according to the Insurance Bureau of Canada.

This week’s throne speech gave us the promise for the “first ever” national adaptation strategy, and you’d be forgiven for thinking this is a novel idea. But in fact, we’ve been talking about adaptation for a long time. We just haven’t been acting on it with enough determination or funding to have it be effective.

The national strategy was first promised almost a year ago, and there was almost $4 billion in the last budget to help communities deal with disasters, bolster infrastructure and enhance mapping of areas susceptible to floods and fires.

Some cities and towns have done some risk assessment. Building codes and standards have improved to anticipate climate effects. And in the most recent iteration of cabinet, Bill Blair was given specific responsibility for emergency preparedness to allow a sharper focus on dealing with disasters.

But it’s a scattered approach so far. The promise of action far exceeds the delivery, and the funding is a pittance compared to the needs.

The Federation of Canadian Municipalities, in its work with the Insurance Bureau of Canada, figures we need $5 billion a year on a sustained basis from all levels of government in order to get ahead of the damage caused by the effects of a changing climate.

The increasing pace and severity of disasters suggests we need to be more creative than that, because the costs — in money, lives and livelihoods — are only going to rise until (or unless) we get emissions under control.

To be sure, taxpayers will always be left footing a large part of the bill for climate effects. But the fight against rising emissions has shown us that private investors could be a large part of the financing effort — as long as they can find a way to make money at the same time. Investors around the world are piling their money into clean energy and efforts to transition to low carbon, and momentum is building.

Similar efforts to attract investment into bolstering infrastructure and coping with floods, fires and disasters are only in their infancy. On the face of it, investment in climate-proofing now will prevent losses later on. That should make for a business case, and investors and insurance companies from around the world have been brainstorming ways to make climate resilience financially worthwhile.

“We need a colossal and rapid mobilization of investment capital to find solutions which will both mitigate climate change and increase our resilience to it,” says Carlos Sanchez, executive director of the Coalition for Climate Resilient Investment, an organization formed in parallel with the United Nations’ efforts to deal with climate change.

Canada is participating in that brainstorming effort, but we also have some tools that could be put in play to complement the more traditional funding for disaster relief and infrastructure.

The Canada Infrastructure Bank, with its $35 billion in federal funding and a mandate to pay more attention to the environment, is a natural interlocutor. Nature-based solutions — initiatives to restore and enhance the wilds in our midst — can help prevent climate catastrophes even as they cut emissions.

If there’s any benefit that can be gleaned from our growing and costly pile of climate casualties, perhaps this budding creative problemsolving is it.