Pledge to avoid climate ‘displacement’
Proposed ‘National Adaptation Strategy’ aims to mitigate warming’s effects
Atmospheric rivers that unleash destructive torrents of rain. Historic floods. Deadly heat domes and raging wildfires with smoke that hazes out the sun.
This is already Canada’s reality in a warming world, and now the federal government wants to shepherd provinces, territories, Indigenous groups and the private sector along a new national strategy to prepare for the worsening effects of climate change, even as it pushes to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are creating the threats.
The developing “National Adaptation Strategy” includes no overall price tag or solid commitments at this point, but floats a series of proposed goals, including a pledge that, by 2030, Canadians affected by climate disasters like floods or wildfires are “no longer displaced” and have their livelihoods restored within one year.
The government also suggests more money should be devoted to emergency services and disaster risk-reduction, that biodiversity loss should be stopped and reversing by 2030, and that all infrastructure should be “climate-resilient” by 2050, a term that could mean resistant to melting permafrost in the far north or buildings in southern Canada made from materials that can handle extreme temperature fluctuations.
The goal is to consult with the public and other levels of government as some provinces develop strategies, and to release the final national adaptation framework as a “blueprint” to co-ordinate national action by the end of 2022.
“We’re already feeling the impacts of climate change. And we know Canada, like most countries around the world, isn’t prepared to face the impacts of climate change,” said federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault, who held a press conference on the banks of the flood-prone Rivière des Prairies outside Montreal on Monday.
“We can’t just sit back and watch climate impacts affect more and more of our communities,” he said.
Pegging the estimated cost of climate impacts in recent years at several billion dollars, Guilbeault called on provinces and cities with jurisdiction over urban planning to participate in the consultations, and did not rule out the possibility of having to relocate people from vulnerable areas in the coming years — including Indigenous communities that were forced decades ago onto reserves on floodplains.
“That’s why it needs to be a national adaptation strategy,” Guilbeault said.
While the government has already earmarked more than $3.4 billion to prepare for the impacts of climate change, including $2.1 billion put to 70 projects as of this month, officials say they still can’t predict how much money will be needed to defend against the threats of global warming.
“We do not yet know what the costs are going to be,” said one senior government official, who briefed journalists on the strategy Monday on condition they weren’t named.
What’s clearer, according to federal scientists, is Canadians should brace for various impacts of climate change even as countries around the world pledge historic action under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change — which includes the 2015 Paris Agreement — to aggressively slash greenhouse gas emissions that warm the planet. Yet global temperatures have already increased by almost 1 C, while in Canada the average temperature has climbed by almost 2 C, according to a 2019 report published by Environment Canada.
The report concluded that temperatures were likely to keep rising over the next two decades, regardless of global action to reduce emissions. That means some level of adaptation to the consequences of a warmer climate will be necessary — and collective efforts to reduce emissions can now only determine how bad things get.
The costs of climate change impacts are already climbing. According to the Canadian Climate Institute, which has called for increased funding to prepare for climate change, the average cost of weather-related disasters after 2010 was $112 million, compared to just $8 million — in 2020 dollars — in the 1970s.
The preliminary details on the federal adaptation strategy point to expected impacts in different regions of the country. Reduced ice cover and melting permafrost in the north affects economic development, infrastructure like ice roads, wildlife and food supplies, according to a discussion paper on the strategy published Monday. Melting glaciers affect the flow of rivers and thus the water supply and potential for hydroelectricity; increasingly severe droughts and heat waves impact vector-borne diseases and agriculture.
And natural disasters like the floods and landslides last fall in British Columbia threaten lives and livelihoods, forcing people to make anguished decisions about where to live and whether to return and raising questions about the resiliency of highways and other infrastructure.
“We can slow down the rate of (climate) change, but we’re not going to reverse direction,” said Blair Feltmate, head of the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation at the University of Waterloo.