A homebuyer’s newest piece of intel: check the climate risk score

In Toronto, a detached home in East York recently hit the market for just shy of $2 million. It has several bedrooms and two baths and the location is highly ranked for its schools, daycares and transit friendliness. But it also comes with a “high” risk of projected heat and storms, with 31 hot days a year by 2050 and 13 significant 2-day storms.Those rankings are part of a new online real estate tool now being used in Canada that attaches climate risk scores to listings, helping owners and prospective buyers understand how the climate crisis will impact their own backyards. The U.S. online real estate climate risk calculator ClimateCheck has partnered with the Montreal-based platform Local Logic, to provide climate risk scores, now available for the first time in Canada. They are already live on Royal LePage listings and coming soon to Sotheby’s International Realty Canada, and REW.ca“We’re really trying not to tell people, ‘hey don’t move here, move here, this is a climate safe area,’ rather, information is the first step in adaptation,” said Cal Inman, founder and CEO of ClimateCheck.“Making folks aware of the risk to their individual property and then their community allows them to mitigate the risk to their home.” Maybe that’s through installing bigger rain gutters, or landscaping work for fire prevention, he added. The free climate risk scores are already available in the U.S. Offering a 1 to 100 score on the variables heat, storms, fire, flood and draught, they are based on Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) accepted academic and government models. For example, one property in Halifax’s south end has a “significant” heat score at 27/100, with a projected 30 hot days by 2050, but the storm risk is “extreme” at 91/100, and 13 significant 2-day storms by 2050.A home in St. John’s, Nfld. has a “relatively low” heat risk, but an extreme storm risk, and another in Edmonton, Alberta has a significant” risk for both heat and storms.Aside from “low-cost things” individuals can do to protect their homes, it’s also about “engagement,” Inman said.“What can you do as a community as far as adaption, because that’s a two part thing, property specific and then community level adaptation,” he added. “All of that starts with understanding and quantifying the risk in a way that’s easy to understand for everybody, all the stakeholders, whether you’re a lender, a homeowner or a government entity.” In the 2022 budget, the federal government pledged to require federally regulated financial institutions to disclose their climate risks and exposures, starting in 2024. So it makes sense that buyers should also see this kind of information, Inman said.The climate scores for Royal LePage listings across Canada for heat and storms are now live and the scores for fire, flood and draught should be soon, said Karen Yolevski, COO of Royal LePage real estate services. While she doubts the information would make or break a potential homebuyer’s decision, it is one factor to take into account.“Knowledge really helps potential home buyers, when making the biggest purchase decision of their lives, come with more knowledge about the property,” she said. It may be unwelcome news for some owners, to see an extreme storm risk alongside more benign information on parks and nightlife, and at an individual seller or agent’s request the climate risk data can be suppressed from the listing, Yolevski added.But different regions will have “different risk profiles” and “trade-offs” Inman added.“You know if you live in a wooded area, it’s exposed to wildfire risk, vs. a city centre that’s maybe on the water that’s exposed to more flooding.”“Quantifying it, and putting rails around it, and allowing folks to actually see the real data is empowering,” Inman added.May Warren is a Toronto-based housing reporter for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @maywarren11