As climate-related risks accelerate in both frequency and severity across Canada, building resiliency has become a national imperative. But despite clear urgency, efforts to implement scalable, data-driven climate resiliency measures still face significant structural challenges.
According to Puneet Chattree (pictured), insurance industry lead at Accenture Canada, some of the biggest barriers stem not from lack of awareness, but from fragmentation across sectors, regulatory misalignment, and legacy infrastructure.
When it comes to regulatory coordination, Chattree emphasized that Canada's climate resiliency efforts often suffer from a lack of connectivity between critical stakeholders. While national organizations like the Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC) and the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction (ICLR) have mandates focused on protecting Canadians and expanding access to risk mitigation tools, those efforts don’t always align with governmental decision-making.
“We’ve got Canadian government agencies... working hard to provide access and intervene where it makes sense to achieve resiliency,” Chattree said, referencing examples like flood reinsurance programs.
“The challenge has really been the connection between the resiliency mandates of non-for-profit, government, regulatory and private sector organizations.”
That disconnect becomes more complicated when building standards and real estate regulations are added to the equation. As Chattree noted, the lack of cross-sector collaboration between insurance, government, and construction-related regulators is one of the biggest gaps slowing down meaningful climate resilience strategies.
For much of the past decade, the Canadian insurance sector has been reacting to climate-related risks rather than anticipating them. According to Chattree, industry responses have often lagged behind the growing severity and frequency of catastrophic events.
“I believe that for the last five years, the industry has been playing catch up,” he said. “If we look at the velocity of insurable losses from CAT events... from five years ago to now, it’s been accelerating, with a huge jump in 2024 to the highest on record.”
That rapid increase in insurable losses has made climate risk a central concern – not only for underwriting and operations, but for the long-term viability of insurers themselves. Chattree noted that conversations in boardrooms across the industry are increasingly focused on one core question: Will we be able to fulfill our protection mandate 10 years from now?
“It has become the number one area of focus for most of our top carriers in the country,” he said.
This shift is visible in how insurers are beginning to embed prevention strategies into their core operations. Beyond offering financial protection, many are now collecting data on risk mitigation, developing partnerships focused on prevention, and integrating these efforts into underwriting, claims handling, and customer service.
“Prevention has become almost foundational in the operating model of carriers and brokers in many ways,” Chattree said, highlighting its evolution from a value-add to an expectation.
While awareness and prioritization have improved, the next frontier for climate resilience lies in better data access and predictive modeling. Canadian insurers, Chattree said, have historically lagged behind in data collection and sharing, but that is starting to change.
“We have become smarter on the data we need to start collecting,” Chattree said. “The challenge we’re working through now is, how do we access more of that data? How do we enable sharing of some of that data?”
This includes building infrastructure for collaboration – not just within the insurance sector, but also across government, academia, and private industry. One of the biggest gaps Chattree sees is the absence of a national, predictive peril map that brings together datasets from Natural Resources Canada, private insurers, and the building sector.
“As a country, we don’t have a predictive peril map... that takes up all the data from our national resources in Canada, from our private sector, from our building sector, and brings it together to look at what the potential patterns and risks could be,” he said.
Emerging technologies like machine learning and generative AI offer potential to extract insights from disparate datasets, helping insurers model long-term exposures and design more forward-looking products. But to get there, data infrastructure and sector-wide sharing agreements will need to evolve in parallel.
Chattree emphasized that progress depends on three pillars: boardroom focus on climate resiliency, embedding prevention as a foundational principle, and improving data access through innovation and collaboration.
