As a recent note by Ontario’s Environmental Commissioner points out, the civil engineering on which Ontario’s communities are built is based on historic weather patterns. Homes were built in areas that were believed to be safe from flooding and other natural hazards. Roads are built to withstand typical seasonal weather. Farmers plant and harvest crops based on usual growing seasons. However, past assumptions about the weather no longer hold up.
The note from the Commissioner’s office introduces a report on a roundtable hosted by the Environmental Commissioner in early 2015, dealing with needs of Ontario decision makers for detailed, reliable data on what to expect from a changing climate, in particular from increasingly unpredictable and extreme weather.
Decisions that reflect past weather patterns are no longer good enough, the Commissioner notes.
Countless business, personal and government decisions rely on assumptions about what the future climate will be. Many of these decisions are long-term; the roads, buildings, transit, sewers and power grids being built today are meant to last. But now “1-in-100 year” storms, which are often the threshold for resilient design, are occurring more frequently than in the past. If major decisions aren’t based on revised climate assumptions, communities will face significant costs in the future. Many communities are already coping with costs of unprecedented storm damage.
The roundtable sought to address issues of data quality, data access and ease of use, needed by anyone trying to evaluate risk in planting crops, building roads, siting a subdivision or a single house, from provincial down to the most local scale.
“Connecting the Dots on Climate Data in Ontario” is available at http://www.eco.on.ca/uploads/Reports-GHG/2015/2015CDRoundtableReport.pdf.