What follows in an incomplete listing of climate-related impacts already occurring in Canada. For more, visit the CBC’s special interactive website In Our Backyard: What Climate Change in Canada Looks Like.
The climate crisis means increased flooding, such as:
Those that plague the Red River in Manitoba;
The devastating 2013 Alberta floods, which left five dead, forced the evacuation of 100,000 people, and caused infrastructure and property damage of over $6 billion;
The 2018 flood in New Brunswick — one of the worse in that province’s history — which led to 2,000–3,000 people evacuated and property damage of an estimated $24 million; and
The 2019 floods that pounded Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick, causing about 10,000 people to be evacuated and property damages of about $200 million.
It means ever-more frequent and devastating forest fires, such as:
The 2015 La Ronge wildfire that necessitated the largest evacuation in Saskatchewan’s history;
The terrifying 2016 Alberta wildfire — “The Beast” — that forced the evacuation of Fort McMurray in the heart of the oil sands and resulted in $3.6 billion in property damage, including the destruction of 2,400 homes and business and over 18,000 vehicles, and total economic costs of almost $10 billion, making it the most costly catastrophe of modern Canadian history;
The devastating summer of 2018, which saw more than 2,000 wildfires in B.C. burn some 1.3 million hectares of forest, surpassing the damage from the previous year’s historic high. The 2017 fires resulted in the longest state of emergency in B.C. history, and the 2018 fires produced enough smoke to reach 10 million Canadians, resulting in “air quality alerts” stretching across B.C. and Alberta that lasted much of the summer. The fires of 2017 and 2018 each cost the BC provincial treasury about $500 million in firefighting expenses, and property damage the first year exceeded $130 million; and
The 2019 Alberta wildfires, which forced the evacuation of more than 10,000 people and burned over 850 thousand hectares of forest. At the peak of this emergency, newly elected premier Jason Kenney was ironically forced to cancel a press conference at which he planned to announce the termination of Alberta’s carbon tax in order to be briefed by emergency officials.
It means deadly heatwaves like we saw in eastern Canada in summer 2018, which hit Quebec particularly hard and was responsible for as many as 70 deaths, mostly among the poor elderly suffering from chronic illnesses.
It means vanishing glaciers and reduced snow pack, which in turn means less water supplying our watersheds and more frequent water shortages (a risk that is particularly acute in B.C.).[1] That’s not only a problem for household water; it can have huge implications for both agriculture and the generation of hydro-electricity.
It means ongoing and accelerating coastal erosion in places like Prince Edward Island, where the shoreline in places has been losing a meter a year and occasionally as much as two meters,[2] more frequent storm surges throughout Atlantic Canada and more ferocious hurricanes such as Dorian, which pummeled the Maritimes in September 2019.
It means carbon-laden air pollution that is causing asthma attacks, particularly for Canadian children, the elderly and the poor. In April 2019, news came from the Lancet Planetary Health journal that Canada had the third-highest rate of new childhood asthma cases stemming from traffic pollution in the world (after Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates).[3] The B.C. Centre for Disease Control reports that “forest-fire smoke since the summer of 2017 has affected every community in B.C. except the islands of Haida Gwaii. The pollution from wildfire smoke has led to 10,000 additional visits to the doctor for asthma treatment.”[4]
Also on the health front, a recent study of climate risks commissioned by the B.C. government points to the doubling of Lyme disease cases in eastern Canada, and warns of a similar risk in B.C., as ticks carrying the illness thrive and spread.[5]
For Inuit and other people in Canada’s north, the consequences are more acute. A 2019 report[6] indicated Arctic permafrost is melting much faster than expected, with profound impacts on northern communities. It’s wreaking havoc with housing and infrastructure, as rail lines, airstrips, underground pipes and building foundations shift, an impact that will be hugely expensive to repair. And melting sea ice is limiting the traditional hunting and fishing practices of Inuit and northern First Nations people, and poses safety risks for those who travel on the ice.
It means disruptions to animal and fish patterns, such as reduced salmon returns on the west coast due to ocean warming and other climate effects. In August 2019, the UN’s IPCC issued a special report on land use, warning that Canada “will not be spared the impact of food shortages and price shocks if global warming is not kept below 2 degrees Celsius.” [7]
On a related front, Indigenous communities face unique impacts, as climate change disrupts local food and water systems that have been the lifeblood of numerous nations for time immemorial, and interferes with cultural practices related to hunting, fishing and foraging. A number of Indigenous communities were particularly hard hit by some of the fires and floods noted above.
For many, and particularly our children, the climate crisis will increasingly impact mental health. As mentioned in the preface to this book, the nuclear threat affected the mental health of young people in the 1980s. Similarly, we are seeing journal articles emerge over the last couple years in the Lancet and elsewhere,[8] flagging the connections between climate change and depression, anxiety and mental health, stemming both from lived experience of weather events and higher temperatures, but also simply from the growing fear of what climate change will mean. A 2019 study from the University of Alberta, conducted 18 months after “The Beast” wildfire forced the evacuation of Fort McMurray, found that 37% of high-school students in the community showed signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, despite concerted efforts by school authorities to provide mental health support after the emergency.[9]
Footnotes:
[1] ICF Consulting Services, Preliminary Strategic Climate Risk Assessment for British Columbia (Victoria: Report prepared for the British Columbia Climate Action Secretariat, B.C. Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy), July 2019. Also see: Environment and Climate Change Canada, Canada’s Changing Climate Report 2019, available at https://changingclimate.ca/CCCR2019.
[2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/pei-coastal-erosion-drones-1.5171990.
[3] Damian Carrington, “Canada Has Third Highest Global Rate of New Childhood Asthma Cases from Traffic Pollution,” National Observer, April 11, 2019, https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/04/11/news/canada-has-third-highest-global-rate-new-childhood-asthma-cases-traffic-pollution.
[4] Justine Hunter, “B.C. Is in a Grim Cycle: First Spring, Then Drought, Then Fires. Why Won’t the Province Call It a Climate Emergency?” The Globe and Mail, June 21, 2019.
[5] ICF Consulting Services, Preliminary Strategic Climate Risk Assessment.
[6] Council of Canadian Academies, Canada’s Top Climate Change Risks (Ottawa: The Expert Panel on Climate Change Risks and Adaptation Potential, Council of Canadian Academies, 2019).
[7] Mia Rabson, “Canadian Food Supplies at Risk If Climate Change Not Slowed, New UN Report Shows,” National Observer, August 8, 2019.
[8] See for example Haris Majeed and Jonathan Lee, “The Impact of Climate Change on Youth Depression and Mental Health,” The Lancet Planetary Health 1 (June 2017); and H.L Berry, T.D. Waite, K.B. Dear, A.G. Capon and V. Murray, “The Case for Systems Thinking about Climate Change and Mental Health.” Nature Climate Change 8, no. 4 (2018): 282–290.
[9] Justin Giovannetti, “More than One-Third of High-School Students in Fort McMurray Show Signs of PTSD, Study Finds,” The Globe and Mail, September 1, 2019.