Some familiar — and surprising — resilient home construction measures

The Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction (ICLR), in collaboration with the Canadian Home Builders’ Association (CHBA), has released the first version of tiered resilience guidelines designed to support implementation of climate adaptation measures in Canadian residential construction.

Many measures may be familiar to Canadian Underwriter readers, but others may come as a surprise, Dan Sandink, ICLR’s senior director of resilience programs, tells CU.

The guidelines cover four hazards: basement flooding, hail, high wind, and wildfire. Guidance is organized into a clear ‘Good, Better, Best’ tiered framework, providing graduated entry points for resilience investments.

Each hazard-specific guideline includes standalone checklists, detailed technical sheets with installation guidance, high-level cost and difficulty indicators, and information on potential insurance incentives, ICLR says in a press release.

For example, a ‘Best’ hail measure for new construction would be fibre-cement, brick, stone, brick or stone veneer, steel siding, or products warrantied for resistance to damaging hail size installed. A ‘Better’ measure for wildfire ensures there are no 3 mm (or larger) openings or gaps in walls.

Surprising measures

While Sandink says a lot of the ‘Good’ measures would be familiar to CU readers, some important measures may come as a surprise.

For example, hail impact-resistant solar panels are not on everyone’s radar.

“We are pushing for impact-resistant solar panels that at least match Class 4 impact resistance for roof cover,” Sandink tells CU. “These types of products are manufactured but are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to access in the Canadian market for residential applications.

“We are working with two major installers/suppliers in Ontario and Calgary, and neither has been able to source these products.”

For wildfire, it’s important to consider both landscaping and building materials/design when applying wildfire protection options. “If you have excellent landscaping/fuel management practices, and keep fuel well maintained, you can relax building-level interventions, and vice-versa,” Sandink says.

When it comes to sump pumps for basement flooding, introducing them unnecessarily may actually increase flood risk, Sandink notes.

“There are a large list of items in our guidance documents that are intended to protect homes from sump pump failure,” he says. “I think it’s not well understood in the industry that it’s better if your home is designed in a way that it does not require a sump pump,” such as having a storm sewer connection that allows for passive draining of weeping tile water to a municipal system.

“There is a conception that sump pumps are meant to pump floodwaters out of homes if they flood, but sump pits are actually supposed to be sealed/airtight, so they usually don’t work this way.”

As well, Sandink says ICLR has been told by builders that homeowners’ primary concern is month-to-month ownership costs of their homes.

“Builders often have no difficulty applying energy efficiency measures, because they can demonstrate that homeowners will see month-to-month savings in their electricity and gas bills,” he says. “They would like to show a similar type of benefit when a home buyer chooses to invest in resilience measures.”

Multi-year collaboration

The guidelines are the primary output of the ICLR/CHBA Resilient Homes Task Force (RHTF). This multi-year collaboration was launched in January 2024 to address the persistent gap between technical knowledge and on-the-ground implementation of resilience measures in new construction, renovation, and post-disaster rebuilding, ICLR reports.

Although Canada has strong technical standards addressing the four hazards, uptake of resilience measures has remained limited. Builders have cited cost, constructability and consumer demand as barriers, while insurers have noted challenges in tracking and recognizing resilience features within underwriting systems, ICLR says.

RHTF was established to overcome these barriers. The initiative involved numerous phases including:

• Translating existing technical guidance into prioritized, buildable, and market-ready solutions that could be voluntarily adopted by industry.
• Reviewing existing Canadian and international standards and guidance documents across the four focus hazards. Where gaps were identified — particularly in relation to hail resilience beyond roofing materials — new recommendations were developed in collaboration with research partners and insurance loss specialists.
• Conducting national surveys of builders and insurers in 2024 and 2025 to identify measures that were both practical for builders and meaningful for loss reduction.
• Launching field trails in Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia to test the guidelines in live projects.

ICLR and CHBA have committed to continued collaboration to expand field trials, update guidance as new evidence emerges, enhance builder and insurer education, engage manufacturers, and support tools that allow insurers to recognize and price resilience features appropriately.