Sep 17, 2025: Understanding Federally Identified Flood Risk Areas (FIFRA): Context, Purpose, and Implementation
The Canadian Water Resources Association is pleased to announce a special webinar on September 17th, 2025 in collaboration with Public Safety Canada. This webinar will highlight the Federally Identified Flood Risk Areas initiative.
Flood hazard identification is integral to supporting evidence-based decision-making and is particularly important for integrated flood risk management, including risk reduction, risk avoidance, and risk transfer initiatives. Since 2020, Public Safety Canada has been evaluating and operationalizing Canada-wide flood hazard modelling to conduct Canada-wide estimates of flood hazard and financial flood risk. Most recently, Public Safety Canada has developed the FIFRA initiative to help address gaps in Canada-wide flood information.
This webinar will share the research, innovation, testing, and lessons learned developing the FIFRA datasets from Canada-wide flood hazard modelling. This session will be of interest for those who want to understand more about the capabilities and appropriate uses of global scale flood hazard modelling, and will present an innovative methodology for moving beyond deterministic in / out designations of flood hazard to matrix-based methods of flood hazard and risk communication. The dynamics between data and science, policy objectives, and effective public communication will also be explored.
This event is free and will be offered in both official languages. The recordings of the presentation and resources will be made available online after the session.
Speaker Bios:
Jamie Gesualdo (Senior Policy Advisor, Public Safety Canada) has been working on various files related to flood resilience for 8 years. Her focus is advancing Canada-wide flood risk policy to increase Canadian’s resilience to flooding and encourage data-informed decision making.
Julie Van de Valk, EIT (Senior Engineering Advisor, Public Safety Canada) has an engineering and emergency management background and works to bridge natural hazards engineering, risk assessment and reduction, emergency management, and effective policy development.
More About the FIFRA Initiative
The FIFRA initiative includes two components: the FIFRA datasets and the FIFRA guideline. The goal of the FIFRA datasets is to provide Canada-wide, consistent flood hazard information to supplement and complement other sources of flood hazard data, screen areas for further study and site-specific analysis (i.e. as a screening tool), and help guide and target risk reduction efforts across Canada. The FIFRA datasets estimate areas of low, moderate, high and extreme flood hazard for all of Canada, including information on the contributing flood types. The FIFRA datasets are complete and their risk ratings and flood types will be accessible on the flood risk awareness digital resource in Fall 2025. The FIFRA guideline describes minimum mitigation thresholds that can help guide infrastructure investments and will be used to identify mitigation conditions for federal infrastructure at risk of flooding. This webinar will focus only on the FIFRA datasets.
About CWRA
The Canadian Water Resources Association (CWRA) is a national registered charity comprised of members from the public, private, and academic sectors who are committed to promoting responsible, innovative, and effective water resources management.
Formed in 1947 as the Western Canada Reclamation Association, CWRA is the only national organization addressing all water resources issues across all regions of Canada. We offer a range of services and programs focused on professional development, providing expertise and advice, education, and collaboration.
