Considering recent natural disasters across the nation, the president of the Construction Association of Nova Scotia is talking about updating building codes and regulations to better consider the need for resilience. Says Duncan Williams, when speaking of more frequent and higher intensity storms and wildfires to The CBC, “How we manage those things are going to be critical in terms of how we interact with our environment over the next coming decades.”
The province of Nova Scotia is looking to help with this by adopting the 2020 National Building Code, which notes that “many regions of the country have, on average … been tending towards wetter conditions”. Comparatively, guidance from the National Research Council in 2021 observed that for wildfires, “The impacts of climate change are expected to contribute to … increased wildland fire risk in areas that have not historically experienced significant wildland fire hazards.”
As for the importance of building codes on resilience to these sorts of natural disasters, a study of California building codes for homes building in areas at risk of wildfires by Patrick Baylis, assistant professor at the University of British Columbia found a significant effect. Said Baylis to The CBC, “We find these pretty substantial effects, like almost a 50 per cent reduction in the probability of a given home burning between … one that’s built like let’s say in the 1970s versus one that was built in the 2010s.”
Source:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/disasters-can-inform-building-code-updates-1.6919042
