Billions in federal buildings, roads and other assets at risk from extreme weather

The Department of National Defence owns a lot of federal assets. Researchers are getting better and better at projecting the impacts of climate change, particularly when it comes to extreme weather events, which pose myriad risks to federal infrastructure, he said, including wildfire, flooding and heat waves. “Another of the high-confidence projections on climate change is sea level rise … and that means problems for coastal assets,” Henstra said. One is adapting to deal with the impacts of climate change and the other is slowing or stalling climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, for example, by retrofitting old buildings to be more energy efficient or building new low-emissions buildings and avoiding fossil fuel heating systems. — With files from Rochelle BakerNatasha Bulowski / Local Journalism Initiative / Canada’s National Observer