Prepare or Repair: Save $10B Per Year by Climate-Proofing Infrastructure, Institute Urges

Canada can save a bare minimum of $5 to $10 billion per year by climate-proofing its public infrastructure before heavy rains and more frequent, severe heat waves take their toll, the Canadian Climate Institute concludes, in a report this week that leads with a stark choice: Prepare or Repair.

“Decades of postponing maintenance have left vital infrastructure vulnerable,” with 14% of the country’s roads, bridges, storm sewers, and water treatment plants rated in poor or very poor condition and climate change “compounding the challenge,” the institute warns in the landing page for the report. And “the risks are more than just a question of mounting repair costs; when climate-driven pressures wreak havoc on public infrastructure, communities are stranded, supply chains are interrupted, and businesses and local economies are disrupted.”

The wider context is a national infrastructure inventory valued at $2.7 trillion, and would cost $294 billion to bring up to a state of good repair before factoring in future climate impacts, according to Statistics Canada data cited in the report. But a big part of the problem is that municipalities own more than 60% of that core public infrastructure, while collecting only 10% of the country’s tax revenues.

“This mismatch leaves local governments responsible for most infrastructure but with limited capacity to maintain or replace it,” the institute states. Yet deferring needed investments isn’t sustainable: the 2019 Canadian Infrastructure Report Card warned that, even without climate impacts, rehabilitation costs rise sharply when maintenance is postponed.

Adapting Infrastructure: $14 Billion Per Year

Using a methodology originally developed by the Financial Accountability Office of Ontario, the report modelled three possible futures where governments’ efforts to climate-proof public infrastructure are non-existent, reactive, or proactive. Without investing in adaptation, the infrastructure cost of just extreme rainfall, heat stress, and what the report calls “select flooding events” will hit $14 billion per year by the 2050s and $19 billion per year by 2085 in a medium emissions future, far more if climate pollution spirals even further out of control.

Annual savings total $4.5 billion with reactive response and $9.9 billion with proactive adaptation.

“Across all scenarios, climate change drives up future infrastructure costs and puts more pressure on public budgets,” the report states. However, “acting early prevents assets from deteriorating into costly conditions, reduces the frequency of emergency repairs, and extends the longevity of critical infrastructure systems. These results underscore that proactive adaptation is not just a defensive strategy—it’s a smart investment that reduces lifetime costs.”

The modelling also indicates that faster adaptation action delivers a lot more climate-resistant infrastructure, a lot faster: by 2050, a proactive approach would upgrade 73% of the country’s public infrastructure, compared to 31% with a reactive response and none at all if governments take no action.

Even at $10 billion per year, the savings figure in the report is a deep underestimate, Ryan Ness, the climate institute’s director of adaptation, told The Energy Mix. That’s because the analysts at consulting firm WSP who ran the model could only get firm numbers for repairing infrastructure under different conditions—not the far greater health, social, and economic cost of lost road access, flooded storm sewers, or an inundated or failing water plant.

“When public infrastructure fails, the ensuing costs extend beyond infrastructure budgets, creating broad ripple effects,” the institute writes. “Governments face emergency response and disaster assistance costs, while households and businesses experience losses that do not appear on public balance sheets, including property damage, disrupted mobility, supply-chain interruptions, and reduced economic output.”

A Humanitarian Element

The report deliberately calculated costs and benefits “very aggressively, like a hard-hearted infrastructure accountant might, and showed that there’s still a net benefit even in that most ruthless accounting scenario,” Ness explained. “It passes the test where the benefits exceed the costs, and that’s only reflecting a conservative set of benefits, not the broader economic and social benefits of having functional infrastructure.”

But those added factors show that “there’s clearly a humanitarian element to this, too,” he added. “It’s not just economic. Obviously, infrastructure that works for people to be able to access emergency services or evacuate is critical, as well. And while the problem is huge and extensive, at the very least we can start by highlighting where infrastructure is most critical from both a human and an economic perspective and focus quick-start, big-win projects there.”

Citing examples from Calgary and Montreal to the Dempster Highway in the Northwest Territories, the 40-page report calls on governments to:

• Expand infrastructure funding and “modernize financial tools” for municipalities and other infrastructure owners, including Indigenous governments;

• Bring climate adaptation into the mainstream of infrastructure asset management;

• Develop better hazard data and mapping nation-wide;

• Accelerate updates to infrastructure codes and standards to factor in climate risk;

• Consistently integrate climate resilience into public infrastructure funding;

• Direct support to vulnerable communities and critical infrastructure assets.

Keep Climate on the Radar

Ness said the report and its findings landed at an “important time to keep the stakes of climate change consequences on the radar, whether it’s the need to reduce emissions and mitigate climate change, or prepare for and build resilience to climate change through adaptation.” And the climate institute wasn’t alone in that view: funding from the Insurance Bureau of Canada, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, and Climate Proof Canada made it easier to get the modelling done.

“Any solid, quantitative evidence that can help sustain that discourse is important, particularly when there are so many competing priorities and so much noise,” he told The Mix. The modelling adds “another important data point to the conversation about where we invest, and highlights that climate adaptation of public infrastructure isn’t just a cost centre. It’s not just a drain on finances. It’s an investment that not only protects infrastructure, but protects communities and the economy over time, with dramatic cost savings.”

What Nation-Building Projects Do

That line of thinking also connects public infrastructure adaptation to the federal government’s signature interest in nation-building projects, Ness added.

“When you think of the definition of a nation-building project and what it’s intended to accomplish—protecting our economy, our competitiveness, trade, economic stability—critical infrastructure can do most if not all of those things. The money invested in infrastructure creates jobs,” and “we need to make sure the infrastructure that carries goods to market actually is functional when we need it.”

But the conversation also plays out at a more basic level—the report’s cover illustration shows a pothole that anyone in any Canadian community can identify with.

“A pothole sounds kind of trivial compared to a bridge that got washed out on the Coquihalla Highway in 2021 in British Columbia,” or the Chignecto Isthmus that connects Nova Scotia to the rest of Canada and could be swamped in the next mega-storm. But potholes “are everywhere. Every constituency can relate to these kinds of problems,” and “it’s an important way to make this issue real and concrete, no pun intended, for more people.”