OTTAWA — Canada’s federal housing agency is developing a flood and wildfire risk score for real-estate listings as natural disasters increase in the country, The Logic has learned, even as assembling the data for those estimates proves difficult.

“We have initiated work to understand and fill existing gaps in climate-related data and information,” CMHC spokesperson David Harris told The Logic. “Our aim is to support housing- and finance-sector actors to better identify, assess and quantify physical and transition risks and opportunities. We are at the early stages of this work.”

This is partly driven by an insurance industry that relies on fine-grained assessments of risk. The sector’s assumptions have been scrambled by years of severe floods in Quebec and Atlantic Canada, and especially the more recent devastation in British Columbia.

“We don’t have any consistent way across the country of measuring flood risk and disclosing flood risk, much less disclosing broader climate risks such as wind, fire, flood and hail hazard,” said Craig Stewart, vice-president of federal affairs at the Insurance Bureau of Canada.

Insurers only began offering overland flooding insurance a few years ago in response to growing demand, he said. The industry hired consultants to put together a flood model based on the available data, but it’s been imperfect, according to Stewart.

Ice jams that cause rivers to overflow are hard to model without detailed and current information, for instance. “There have been a number of cases, from our perspective as insurers, where we thought homes were low risk and they turned out to be high risk,” Stewart said. 

What insurers want is a standard like EnerGuide (probably best known for rating the efficiency of appliances, but it has other measurement schemes, including for housing) or nutrition labels, Stewart said.

“We need some sort of standardized approach to a scoring system, which could then break it down into its component parts,” he said. “So instead of carbohydrates or sugars, here’s your components—you’ve got a climate score, but here’s your flood score, your wildfire score, your hail score—where you can actually break it down and see what it is that’s mostly contributing to risk.”

There are standard methods of working out a food’s nutritional value from its ingredients. For climate risks, we don’t even have ingredient lists.

“Many barriers must be overcome to address gaps in data and information,” the CMHC’s Harris wrote in response to emailed questions. “For example, existing climate data is vast, incomplete, lacks harmonization and is subject to lags. Obtaining data to fill gaps is costly and often subject to proprietary restrictions which limits the ability to share climate-related data and metrics.”

This is part of a broader federal effort to tackle flooding across the country. The premise: better data feeds better models, which inform governments and regular people, who can buy insurance or demand berms and dikes and drainage or, in the worst cases, be compensated for leaving doomed property. It takes good information to know when adaptation is needed, to estimate how much it might cost and to decide whether it’s worth the money.

Publishing scores is part of the “informing regular people” stage, and the CMHC isn’t the only outfit trying it.

Properties for sale or rent on the Canadian Real Estate Association’s Multiple Listing Service platform now include neighbourhood data on other subjects meant to gauge the qualities of a neighbourhood, supplied by Montreal-based Local Logic (which has no relation to The Logic).

“What we currently do is look at quantifying everything outside the four walls of an asset,” Local Logic CEO Vincent-Charles Hodder said in an interview. “So things you have access to, where kids are going to go to school, noise level, things like that.”

The company is working on its own scores for climate risk, Hodder said. “What we realized is that a huge, huge risk with location was everything to do with climate. We know that this is becoming, unfortunately, more frequent. And so we want to make that data available.”

Local Logic struck a deal in October with a U.S.-based data firm, ClimateCheck, to use its risk scores for American properties. Plug in an address in, say, Terre Haute, Ind., and you can get quick summaries of that property’s propensity for storms, flooding, heat, fires and even drought or water shortages, now and projected into the future.

But similar information just isn’t to be had easily in Canada, Hodder said.

A director in the federal Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness told an insurers’ conference last summer that the government had bought three different sets of flood models to fill in mapping gaps. Details on floodplains—just one element in one dimension of risk—are kept by provinces and sometimes by individual municipalities, using varying formats.

Calgary’s real estate board has a service that makes climate-risk scores available to its members—impelled by the 2013 flooding there—but it’s proprietary, not for the public to see.

Edmonton began a multiyear project in 2016 to update and publicize flood-risk data. It was driven in part by an access-to-information campaign by Postmedia. The city government tried to argue that releasing its obsolete flood maps would be harmful to property values before eventually abandoning the position. Now Edmonton ranks among the best cities in Canada for flood preparedness.

That’s a good outcome, the insurance bureau’s Stewart said.

“We want disclosure of risk not for its own sake, but we want disclosure of risk through real estate listings in order to incent people and their local governments to protect those homes and to take action,” Stewart said.

Also on Local Logic’s to-do list is scoring properties on sustainability—how they contribute to climate change and environmental degradation.

“That decision [on] where you live—versus where you’re going to, where your kids are going to school, how you’re commuting to work—has huge implications on the sustainability of our cities and on your carbon footprint,” Hodder said. “We’re wanting to make that more available and kind of front and centre when you’re looking to relocate.”