Applications open for $530M fund to support climate resilient infrastructure in Windsor

Applications are now open in Windsor-Essex for a new federal fund with more than half a billion dollars to help municipalities adapt to climate change, Windsor-Tecumseh MP Irek Kusmiercyzk announced Friday.

Kusmiercyzk said $530 million dollars has been made available under the fund. In addition to cities and towns, he said not-for-profits, Indigenous communities and research centres like the University of Windsor can apply for the funding.

"The maximum amount is $1 million per project, but there's also a second stream for feasibility studies and we'll be able to partner with local stakeholders for up to $70,000 to do feasibility studies as well too," Kusmiercyzk told CBC News.

"This is an important investment. This will help communities become resilient in the face of climate change and build resiliency into their local infrastructure."

Announcing the fund on Monday, Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault said he knows the money — the first such dedicated adaptation fund for municipalities — is well short of the $10 billion over a decade that the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) requested.

"Half a billion is not $10 billion. But it is not nothing," he said. "It is a strong commitment on the part of our government to work with our partners in municipalities and the FCM to help our communities be more resilient."

FCM is a national organization that represents more than 2,100 cities and communities in Canada. It conducts policy research and advocates for various positions.

In 2019, FCM and the Insurance Bureau of Canada released an analysis that called for $5.3 billion in annual climate adaptation funding shared between the federal, provincial and municipal governments.

Kusmiercyzk said the fund will go a long way in helping to build resilience in the region.

"We know that cities and towns and communities are on the front lines when it comes to climate change and we saw it in Windsor-Essex in 2016 and 2017 when we experienced two back-to-back one-in-100-year floods," he said.

"Thousands of homes were under water, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of damage. So, communities are at the front lines and there's a tremendous cost attached."

Giving examples of how the region could take steps to become more resilient in the face of climate change, Kusmiercyzk pointed to strengthening water treatment facilities, strengthening and expanding pumping stations, planting trees or things like rain infrastructure planning, planting rain gardens that can minimize water flows, combating soil erosion and building up berms especially around in flood plains and around large bodies of water. 

"Our community in Windsor-Essex is in the centre of the Great Lakes and so we're always paying attention to water levels. We're always paying attention to flood warnings," he said.

"Studies point to the fact that for every dollar spent building resiliency, there's $15 saved in disaster recovery costs. And so we need to really start planning, building resiliency into our communities because we know climate change is real, we know the impacts are becoming more frequent — floods, wildfires — and so we have to prepare for those now."