"Canadian governments, businesses, and residents currently spend a combined average of $2.9 billion every year repairing damage to homes caused by fluvial, pluvial, and coastal flooding. The distribution of losses is particularly concentrated in homes exposed to the highest levels of flood hazard. For example, homes within the top 10% (approximately 1.5 million) experience 89.3% of all losses per year whereas the top 1% (approximately 109,000) experience 34.1% (Public Safety Canada, 2022). To date very few Canadian households have invested in flood resilient retrofits before flooding occurs, opting instead to wait for government disaster recovery programs to provide support if and when flooding occurs. This reactive approach unnecessarily exposes Canadians, particularly socially vulnerable households within high-risk zones, to dire social and economic consequences (Wright et al., 2022). Without implementing adequate voluntary and regulatory flood risk reduction measures experts project that annual costs associated with repairing home flood damages may triple by 2030 (Ziolecki et al., 2020).

This paper examines the grey and peer-reviewed literature that is currently available to help drive proactive private side investment in flood resilient home retrofits, identifies where gaps exist, and points to additional research that is needed to bolster retrofit adoption."