Terence Corcoran's article today covers a lot of the science and engineering that cityfloodmap.com has been exploring and promoting over the past few years. It is great to see many of our findings reflected in the mainstream media now. Wow!Terence Corcoran is a National Post columnist and one of Canada's leading business writers and editors and he has been writing on the insurance industry, climate change and flooding for a couple decades. In his article today he explores the topics of:
1. Catasrophic loss trends, including flooding and the effects of GDP growth on trends as well as the influence of different data sets - we have explored that extensively in a previous post suggesting loss trends are not increasing as dramatically as the media suggests.
2. Green infrastructure implementation costs - we showed that those are prohibitive as in a previous post looking at Ontario-wide implementation city-by-city, and then again when looking at Ontario-wide lifecycle cost in another post.
3. Green infrastructure can make flooding worse - that is due to infiltration into already stressed wastewater systems as noted by the US Transportation Research Board, WEAO, and Ontario and US cities and local experts, as noted in a previous post.
4. Green infrastructure has questionable cost efficiencies as we see in a Metrolinx 'green' parking lot that is actually benefiting from a 'grey' traditional engineered stormwater detention tank- we have further shown that traditional grey engineered infrastructure has a better return on investment than green infrastructure as assessed in a detailed Class EA study and through a city-wide technology review benefit/cost analysis summarized in this post.
5. Green infrastructure and natural infrastructure does not reduce flood damages - contrary to what is promoted by the insurance industry like in the recent IBC report - it does not reduce flood damages according to the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers, and cannot cost-effectively reduce US river flood damages as described in this post.
6. Storms are not more frequent or intense due to climate change, and the insurance industry has made up "Insurance Fact" statements that has been rejected by insurance companies as reliable advertising - this was explored in a previous post and in our paper in the Journal of Water Management Modeling called "Evidence Based Policy Gaps in Water Resources: Thinking Fast and Slow on Floods and Flow"; https://www.chijournal.org/C449
