Expert suggests Abbotsford infrastructure be rebuilt with climate change, disaster prevention in mind
Posted November 20, 2021 10:53 am.
Last Updated November 20, 2021 10:54 am.
With early estimates of the damage in Abbotsford reaching the billion-dollar mark – there’s a push not just to rebuild, but to rebuild smarter.
Earlier this week, the city’s mayor, Henry Braun, said the estimate to rebuild the Sumas River Dike and Matsqui Dike is $400 million alone based on a study done a few years ago.
“So you add inflation to that,” he added. “When you start totalling it up, you’re going to get up to a billion dollars, I predict. Maybe I’m wrong, but time will tell.”
Sean Markey is a professor of environmental management at SFU and says rainstorms’ impacts on infrastructure clearly illustrate that the city was not well prepared.
He says this is especially significant considering the province and the world is now entering uncertain times as the weather intensifies because of climate change.
“There’s talk of this being a one to 100 or once in 500-year flood, but clearly that type of thinking is not relevant anymore. We’re going into a much more uncertain future in terms of weather patterns and the severity of weather systems associated with climate change,” Markey said.
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Markey says he’s noticed a shift over the past few years in the country reinvesting in the infrastructure, especially amid the COVID-19 pandemic. While he sees this as good news, he says there is still a long way to go.
“Overall, we haven’t done a particularly great job of directing that type of infrastructure funding towards sort of a more green and resilient future. Estimates in the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development), for example, indicates that, upwards of about only 21 per cent of COVID-related infrastructure and emergency funding went towards green infrastructure initiatives,” he said.
“Our resilience planning is not where it needs to be, our disaster management plan is clearly not where it needs to be, has to be much better coordinated across all levels of government, which this crisis really illustrated.”
The good news is, according to Markey: there are a lot of great examples to look to.
“There’s a lot of knowledge out there, both in terms of built infrastructure, but also in terms of preserving and restoring natural systems to play a much bigger role and a more climate-resilient future. So there’s a lot of knowledge out there. There’s a lot of really great examples that we can look to. And hopefully, some of the dollars are going to start to flow and are thinking about how to recover from this particular disaster. ”
On Saturday, the City of Abbotsford will be holding a press conference at 11:30 a.m. to provide an update on the flooding in the city.
