IBC Asks BC to Fund Flood and Wildfire Resilience in 2027 Budget Submission as Disaster Losses Climb

The Four Resilience Pillars

The submission's resilience asks are tightly scoped. IBC is requesting that the province fully fund B.C.'s adaptation and flood strategies (not propose new ones — fund the ones that exist), improve hazard mapping and building codes, encourage FireSmart wildfire resilience practices in high-risk communities, and ensure new homes are not built in areas vulnerable to flooding and wildfire.

That structure matters because each pillar maps to an existing provincial program or regulatory lever. This isn't a wishlist of new initiatives; it's a request that the province accelerate, fund, and enforce what's already on the books. From a policy-process perspective, that's the version of an industry ask most likely to land — there's no new architecture to build, only existing architecture to staff and finance.

The Funding Pillar: What "Fully Fund" Means

B.C.'s Climate Preparedness and Adaptation Strategy (CPAS) is a named provincial plan covering 2022–2025, backed by more than $500 million in initial investments and informed by more than $2.1 billion in additional funding committed after the 2021 extreme weather events. The B.C. Flood Strategy is a separate, finalised provincial framework that lays out a long-term vision for integrated flood-risk management — understanding flood risk, strengthening governance, and investing for flood resilience.

When IBC says "fully fund," it's referencing those documents. The implied question for Budget 2027 is whether the province will continue and expand the post-2021 funding posture or let it taper as the disaster headlines fade. That's a routine budget question with non-routine consequences: a sub-fully-funded adaptation strategy is, in practice, an exposure that will eventually show up in claims experience and, downstream, in homeowner premiums.

The Hazard Mapping and Building Codes Pillar

Improved hazard mapping is the pillar with the most direct connection to homeowner pricing and decision-making. Hazard maps determine which postal codes get flagged as flood-prone or wildfire-prone, which feeds underwriting decisions, mortgage product availability, and the cost of overland flood endorsements. Better mapping doesn't change physical risk, but it changes how that risk is priced and to whom it's communicated.

Through the Community Emergency Preparedness Fund and Disaster Resilience and Innovation Fund, B.C. reports providing more than $410 million since 2017 for approximately 600 flood-risk-reduction projects with First Nations and local governments, including foundational work like risk mapping, hazard and vulnerability assessments, flood-plain mapping, non-structural land-use planning measures, and small-scale structural upgrades. The infrastructure for hazard-mapping expansion already exists. What IBC is asking for is more of it, better integrated with building-code modernisation.

The Community Resiliency Investment Program

The FireSmart recommendation is the one with the clearest existing funding architecture. B.C.'s Community Resiliency Investment (CRI) program, introduced in 2018 and delivered by the BC Wildfire Service, funds communities to carry out FireSmart initiatives on both provincial Crown land and private land. The program runs through two main streams: FireSmart Community Funding and Supports (FCFS), and Crown Land Wildfire Risk Reduction.

Within the CRI program, the FCFS stream can provide up to $300,000 per year to high-risk local governments and First Nations and has distributed about $71 million to 265 communities since 2019. Eligible activities include FireSmart staffing, public education, Community Wildfire Resiliency Plans, fuel-management treatments, FireSmart development permit areas, and — most consequentially for homeowners — local rebate programs for property owners who complete eligible FireSmart assessments and mitigation work.

The Homeowner-Level Rebate

A July 2025 BC Wildfire Service bulletin spelled out the homeowner-level math: homeowners in participating B.C. communities can receive up to $5,000 — typically covering up to 50% of costs — in rebates for undertaking FireSmart measures on their properties, funded through the FCFS program, after completing a free FireSmart home assessment. Eligible measures include vegetation removal, fire-resistant material upgrades, and similar mitigations specific to the property's assessed risk profile.

That's the lever existing B.C. homeowners can engage with directly, not theoretically. It exists today, it has rebate dollars attached, and it's tied to a free assessment that produces a property-specific action list. When IBC asks the province to "encourage FireSmart wildfire resilience practices in high-risk communities," what it's asking for in practical terms is expanded funding and broader community participation in the program that already delivers these rebates.

What the Recommendation Implies

The fourth pillar — ensuring new homes are not built in areas vulnerable to flooding and wildfire — is structurally different from the other three. The first three involve funding and program expansion. The fourth involves the province either using its own powers or directing local governments to restrict where new residential construction is permitted, and by extension, what happens when existing homes in those areas are destroyed and rebuilt.

That's a land-use policy intervention dressed as a resilience recommendation, and it deserves to be read that way. It implies a different posture on greenfield development in flood- and wildfire-exposed areas. It implies a different posture on rebuilding in those same areas after a disaster event. And it carries property-value implications for current owners in high-risk postal codes, because a development restriction in one direction tends to influence valuations in another.

The recommendation does not include detail on enforcement mechanisms, geographic thresholds, or transition arrangements for in-flight projects. The submission asks for the principle; the operationalisation would be a separate provincial conversation. But the principle alone is consequential enough that homeowners in flood-plain and interface areas should treat this as the part of the submission most worth tracking through the Budget 2027 process.

Greg Moy on the Cost Logic

Greg Moy, IBC's Manager of Government Relations (Pacific), is the named spokesperson on the submission. His framing positions all four pillars as cost-saving measures: investing in severe-weather prevention is far more effective than paying for recovery, and governments can take practical steps that both make communities safer and reduce the long-term cost of disasters for governments and residents.

That cost framing is the through-line linking the four pillars together. The funding pillar is about avoided losses; the hazard-mapping pillar is about avoided losses; the FireSmart pillar is about avoided losses; the new-builds restriction is about avoided losses. All four are constructed around the same logic: prevention is cheaper than recovery, and the costs of recovery are increasingly being absorbed by both the provincial fisc and homeowners' premiums.

The Disaster-Loss Backdrop

IBC's submission states explicitly that disaster-related losses have been rising sharply over the years, and frames that trend as creating an urgent need to strengthen community resilience in British Columbia. The numbers behind that framing come from the bureau's own national analysis. IBC reports that insured losses from severe weather in Canada reached $8.5 billion in 2024, surpassing the previous record of $6 billion (2016) and amounting to nearly three times the 2023 total — about 12 times the 2001–2010 annual average of $701 million.

Four catastrophic events in July and August 2024 alone caused more than $7 billion in insured losses and generated over 250,000 insurance claims — roughly 50% more claims than Canadian insurers typically receive in an entire year. Since 2019, the country has seen a 115% increase in the number of personal property damage claims and a 485% increase in the cost of repairing and replacing personal property.

Those numbers are the "why now" for IBC's submission. The 2027 budget is the next big provincial fiscal lever; the disaster losses driving the industry's repricing decisions are not slowing; and the gap between what existing provincial strategies are funded to do and what they would need to do to materially reduce risk is widening rather than narrowing.

The Premium-Pressure Backdrop

Environmental Defence Canada's research released the same day as IBC's submission found that climate impacts have added about $533 to the average Canadian homeowner's annual insurance premium since 2008, and that weather-related home-insurance claims in Canada have grown at an average rate of 11.9% per year since 2008, compared with only 1.97% annual growth for non-weather routine claims. That's the consumer-affordability evidence base that pairs with IBC's policy ask.

The two releases reinforce each other in framing terms. Environmental Defence quantifies the cost to homeowners of inaction; IBC quantifies the policy levers it believes the province should fund to reduce future loss costs. For B.C. homeowners, the practical read is that climate-driven repricing is already in the renewal cycle, and the four resilience pillars are the industry's argument for which provincial levers would slow that repricing over time.

Near-Term Personal Action

The two pillars with the most immediate homeowner relevance are FireSmart and hazard mapping. FireSmart has rebate dollars attached today, accessible through participating communities after a free home assessment. Hazard mapping is where to look for provincial communications about updated flood- and wildfire-risk designations, which can change underwriting and pricing for individual postal codes.

The land-use restriction on new builds will play out over years, not months. Existing owners in high-risk areas should treat it as a multi-year policy conversation worth tracking — particularly if rebuilding rights after a future disaster event become part of the discussion.

Budget 2027 Process Markers

A few specific signals will tell you whether the resilience pillars are landing or being deferred:

• Funding line items for CPAS and the B.C. Flood Strategy in Budget 2027 documents. Are they being topped up, held flat, or quietly tapered? "Fully funded" is a budget number, not a press release.
• Expansion or stagnation of the Community Resiliency Investment program. Watch the annual per-community caps, the participating-community count, and the homeowner rebate ceiling. Stagnation signals deferral; expansion signals the FireSmart pillar is landing.
• Provincial guidance on hazard mapping and building codes. New mapping releases or building-code amendments for high-risk zones are the operational form of the second pillar. Their absence is informative.
• Language on land-use restrictions in high-risk areas. Whether the province engages with or sidesteps the fourth pillar in its budget response will tell you how seriously the development-restriction principle is being treated.

The submission itself is one document filed into one budget cycle. The follow-through is where the homeowner-relevant story will be written — and where the practical difference between rising and stabilising premium pressure in B.C. over the rest of the decade will be decided.