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IC3 members, Jason Thistlethwaite�����Ի� Daniel Henstra, are in the media for their research on floods, flood risk maps, and climate change. 

Poor flood-risk maps, or none at all, are keeping Canadian communities in flood-prone areas

Flood maps – cartographic depictions of areas that are likely to flood under certain conditions – are invaluable sources of information for homeowners and civic officials. In the United States, England and France, one can enter a postal code into a government website and quickly assess a property’s susceptibility to flooding. Had Mr. Coochey possessed such information, he could have taken steps to protect his property – or never purchased the home in the first place. Various studies have determined that every dollar spent on flood prevention is worth many times that amount in property replacement costs.

Yet the vast majority of Canadians do not have easy access to such maps. Partly due to government cutbacks – and the reluctance of municipalities to discourage development – all too often the best many homeowners can do is visit a local government office and dust off a decades-old relic intended for engineers or hydrologists.

Professor Jason Thistlethwaite and colleagues at the University of ��ݮ��Ƶ recently completed a study of almost 700 Canadian flood maps. “The results are not impressive,” he said. Many were old, few had been digitized and most were not publicly accessible.

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Is $200,000 a fair buyout price for a house in a Quebec flood zone?

“The problem is responsibility is shared between a large number of actors, but the responsibilities are ambiguous enough that it’s very difficult to hold any one party accountable,” said Daniel Henstra, a University of ��ݮ��Ƶ professor specializing in flood-management policies, and a fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation.

“Governments are increasingly getting tired of paying to repair the same houses over and over, so when it comes to fairness as a general principle, they have to also look at whether it’s fair for the public treasury — that is, taxpayers — to be repeatedly bailing out these people who have these repeated flood losses.”

'People don't like change': Why tough action on climate change is such a hard sell 

Jason Thistlethwaite on CBC's The Current with Anna Maria Tremonti discussing climate politics and climate action.