With severe storms, drought and intense heat waves happening more often, historical climate data is losing relevance in Canada’s model national building, energy, fire and plumbing codes.

As a result, the National Research Council, which sets model codes for the country are beginning to update some or all of its work to reflect this new reality.

“What we want to do is take the latest research, innovation and products that are in the market and introduce those into the codes so that our buildings will be designed to account for climate change,” NRC program director Philip Rizcallah told the Global News last month.

The NRC’s model codes aren’t the law of the land. But they do provide a common blueprint on which local building codes are modeled, and then adopted into law by provinces and individual municipalities.

The NRC has received $40 million from Infrastructure Canada to make updates to its model codes. The money is also being used to improve the resilience of core public infrastructure (like bridges, sewage systems and roadways) by developing new guides, risk-assessment tools and life-cycle modelling tools.

More details here.

Source: Global News