Journal calls on Canada to ramp up climate fight

OTTAWA— A new report from one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals says Canada’s failure to cut greenhouse gas emissions isn’t just killing the planet, it’s killing Canadians.

The report on the health impacts of climate change, published Wednesday in the Lancet, concludes that successfully tackling climate change would be the single biggest thing governments can do to improve human health this century.

Chronic exposure to air pollution from greenhouse gas-emitting activities is killing an estimated 7,142 Canadians a year and 2.1 million people worldwide.

Heat waves, forest fires, flooding and major storms are causing more deaths and long-term illnesses but little data is available on how many.

The first recommendation in the report is simply to track the number of heat-related illnesses and deaths in Canada, something that isn’t done at all in most provinces.

Last summer, public health officials in Quebec said 90 people died during a heat wave. Southern and eastern Ontario suffered the same heat but Ontario doesn’t track heat-related deaths the same way, so nobody knew how many people had been affected in the province next door Dr. Courtney Howard, an emergency physician from Yellowknife who wrote the Canadian section of the report, said the world is on pace for temperature increases we can’t adapt to, resulting in more deaths and disease.

The world’s average surface temperature is already about 1 C warmer than it was in the pre-industrial era, and if we continue to emit greenhouse gases at present levels, the increase will be between 2.6 C and 4.8 C by the end of the century.

“We’re not sure we can adapt to that in a way where we can maintain the same civilizational stability and health-care systems we’re used to,” Howard said. “We’re talking about not just maintaining disease levels, we’re talking about our ability to provide health care.”