Calgary floods spotlight cities' costly failure to plan for climate change

Amber Hildebrandt in CBC News (Canada): Many Canadian cities and towns are ill-prepared for the rising frequency of catastrophic weather events like the southern Alberta floods, and it’s a problem that taxpayers will ultimately end up paying for, climate change experts say. "There are other disasters waiting to happen in other parts of Canada, but Calgary is a good poster child for inaction on warnings they received not too long ago," said James P. Bruce, former Environment Canada assistant deputy minister.

Many have heaped praise on southern Alberta's emergency response after extremely heavy rain pummelled communities, with several months’ worth of rain falling in the span of hours for some areas. "From a disaster response point of view, the Calgary mayor did a fantastic job in running the whole show," said Kaz Higuchi, a York University professor in environmental studies and former Environment Canada scientist.

But a community's ability to react during a disaster is one thing. Minimizing the impact of a flood is another. Now, the province faces a potentially decade-long cleanup effort that could cost $5 billion by BMO Nesbitt Burns estimates.

Disaster risk management experts say the Alberta situation should serve as a wake-up call to municipalities across the country of the need to spend money and time mitigating the risks before disaster strikes, especially as climate change is predicted to bring bigger and more frequent severe weather events....

Flooded Calgary on June 25, 2013. Shot by Ryan L. C. Quan, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license