Rebuild or retreat? Repeat flooding forces tough decisions on homeowners, governments
Managed retreat can be a safer, cheaper option as flood risk grows
Spain, the south coast of B.C. and the southeastern U.S. are all cleaning up after torrential flooding this past month. Rebuilding will be difficult and costly.
As of last week, Florida's back-to-back hurricanes had racked up $2.13 billion in insured losses from Hurricane Milton and $3 billion from Hurricane Helene, local media reported, citing the state government.
That led some Florida residents, including a local meteorologist, to raise another option — managed retreat.
That can mean buyouts so homeowners can move somewhere safer, as has happened after repeat flooding in a number of Canadian provinces. Or it can mean moving infrastructure to higher ground, as is happening with Lawrencetown Road in Nova Scotia. A stretch of the highway is being relocated 40 metres inland, after coastal erosion ate away the headland it crosses, and big storms have often left it covered in water and debris, forcing it to close.
In an extreme case, the entire Kashechewan First Nation in Ontario reached an agreement with the federal government in 2019 to move the community's buildings 30 kilometres away within 10 years. Its current flood-prone location on the Albany River forces 2,500 people to fly out and flee the community each spring to escape rising flood waters caused by the break-up of river ice.
But when is managed retreat warranted? Where and how is it happening? And what are the pros and cons?
Here's a closer look.
What is managed retreat?
Managed retreat, also called strategic relocation or strategic retreat, means moving people, buildings, assets or infrastructure away from areas where they're at risk from hazards such as flooding and wildfires.
Many of those hazards are increasing due to climate change caused primarily by burning fossil fuels. For example, that has boosted flood risks such as heavy rain, powerful storms, sea level rise and coastal erosion, expanding flood zones and causing repeat damage in certain areas with much higher frequency.
Managed retreat for homes in flood zones typically means governments buying homes from owners (either through voluntary agreements or, less commonly, expropriation), demolishing them, and turning the properties into parkland to give floods more space to expand without affecting other infrastructure.
What are the alternatives to moving or retreating?
Daniel Henstra, a professor of political science who studies climate risk at the University of Waterloo, said traditionally, Canada and other countries have mainly dealt with increasing risks through shoring up protection such as dikes and seawalls. It's also possible to adapt by doing things like flood-proofing basements or using fire-resistant building materials.
Why would you move instead of protecting homes or adapting?
Sabine Dietz is executive director of the Canadian think-tank Climatlantic, which published a report on managed retreat last year. She said some risk is growing beyond our ability to adapt, such as hurricanes getting stronger, more frequent and unexpected and bringing bigger storm surges.
"We can't fix this," she said, adding that eventually, it will no longer be possible to "rebuild" or "build better" at certain locations, such as along eroding or low-lying coastlines. "Wouldn't it be better to manage the risk … by removing some of the most valuable assets?"
Henstra said not only does managed retreat drastically reduce risk in such areas — it does so permanently.
"It's also potentially cost effective, particularly where properties are damaged repeatedly," he said, since it involves a one-time payment instead of repeated costs for repairs.
In the U.S., a government-funded study in 2020 calculated that the country could save $1 trillion over 100 years by removing a million homes from flood-prone areas. That would avert property damage that's usually paid for by federally subsidized flood insurance and disaster programs and reducing drowning deaths during floods.
In Canada, the cost of natural disasters is ballooning and insurance industry estimates suggest that up to 1 in 10 Canadian homes are uninsurable for flooding.
A 2022 federal report by Canada's Task Force on Flood Insurance and Relocation looked at options for government-backed insurance for those homes.
It calculated that relocating the riskiest 0.5 per cent of Canadian homes for flooding – about 77,000 — would cut average annual losses from flooding by $637 million a year or 21.5 per cent. Removing those homes from the insurance pool would also halve the cost of making government flood insurance affordable through premium caps and subsidies for lower-income households.
Where has managed retreat been used?
It's not a new idea — a major Canadian example happened in the wake of Hurricane Hazel, which tore through the Toronto area 70 years ago on Oct. 15, 1954. It killed 81 people, left 1,868 people homeless and destroyed or damaged more than 20 bridges. Following the hurricane, local municipalities expropriated and cleared 530 properties and some of the streets they were on in heavily flooded neighbourhoods along local rivers, and turned much of it into parkland. That allowed more space for water to spread out and get absorbed by soil and vegetation during floods, protecting surrounding areas from flooding.
More recently, there have been buyouts of flood-prone homes in places such as Grand Forks, B.C., High River and Fort McMurray, Alta., Ottawa, Quebec and New Brunswick.
It's even something that insurance companies are starting to provide as an option.
Craig Stewart, vice-president of climate change and federal issues for the Insurance Bureau of Canada, said insurers realize that if people have homes built in bad places or in a bad way "you don't necessarily want to recreate the experience."
One of the options they do offer now, he said, is funding to help people relocate in lieu of rebuilding.
What are the challenges?
Henstra said managed retreat is a hard policy to implement. "It's politically and socially contentious."
People often have strong attachments to their homes, communities and neighbours. "Leaving all that behind is difficult."
Dietz thinks some of that could be mitigated through longer-term planning to move homes and infrastructure in at-risk communities before disaster strikes. She notes that could help people maintain community ties and avert damages and even deaths.
Henstra said, "Unfortunately, the appetite for buyouts is strongest after a disaster."
While expropriations after disasters used to be more common, most recent buyouts have been voluntary.
Henstra's research has found people overwhelmingly think managed retreat should be voluntary, not mandatory.
But that means inevitably some people decline to leave, resulting in isolated homes separated by vacant lots.
"Municipalities still have to maintain these spaces, and they don't really know what to do with the vacant space," he said.
One challenge with voluntary buyouts is agreeing on fair compensation.
Ideally, for the homeowner, that would be the fair market price of their home before the disaster — but even then, said Henstra, "people always believe their home is worth more than that."
Governments sometimes cap the amount that homeowners will be offered to far below the cost of many homes in the area, or agree to pay only what the house is worth damaged.
Henstra said in some cases in the past, the amount homeowners were offered didn't even cover their mortgage.
People surveyed in his research also thought the money should include funds to help pay for relocation costs such as job searching and settlement and real estate fees, which they traditionally haven't.
In the U.S., over 40,000 flood-prone homes have been purchased by FEMA through voluntary buyouts over the past 30 years. However, a 2019 study by researchers at the University of Miami found the states that used the FEMA buyout program the most were not the ones that had the most flood damage. The researchers suggested this might mean the buyouts were resource-intensive to administer, making them less feasible in the areas that need them the most.
Despite the challenges, Henstra said his survey found Canadians are open to this as a solution when necessary.
"We generally found that this approach is socially acceptable. People understood the logic behind it," he said. "There is a growing experience and I think a growing willingness now of governments to look at this as one of their tools."
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