The Public Infrastructure Engineering Vulnerability Committee (PIEVC Protocol) was developed to assist engineers in factoring climate change impacts into plans for design, operation and maintenance of public infrastructure. The Protocol is free of charge for any application to public infrastructure in Canada and may also be used for private infrastructure.
Published February 2020
National Research Council Canada (NRC) commissioned this benefit-cost analysis of its Climate
Resilient Buildings and Core Public Infrastructure (CRBCPI) Initiative. CRBCPI is finishing its third year
and is now considering its next phase. The following products are considered here:
A thorough benefit-cost analysis of these products would be time consuming and would have to await closer completion of some of the products. So an approximate but well accepted economic procedure called benefit transfer is used instead. In benefit transfer, one estimates nonmarket economic values (here, the CRBCPI products) based on their similarity to something known from prior study, which here means the Natural Hazard Mitigation Saves study by the Multihazard Mitigation
Council (MMC) of the National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS) in the United States. Natural Hazard Mitigation Saves represents the most exhaustive benefit-cost analysis of natural-hazard mitigation ever performed.
The present study finds that CRBCPI will ultimately save Canada an estimated $4.7 billion per year of new construction that complies with its various guidelines, at an estimated added construction cost of $400 million per year, for a savings of almost $12 per $1 invested, as summarized in Table ES-1 of the document.
