FUTURE SHOCK
Climate refugees, an older demographic and an economy based on more people providing services are just part of what we can expect B.C. to look like in 50 years, as Derrick Penner explains.
Waves of immigration that have shaped Metro Vancouver in decades past will continue to do so in the future — but by the year 2067 will come with a twist.
By that time, thanks to climate change, it is likely that many of the immigrants flocking to British Columbia from around the Pacific Rim will be fleeing increasingly inhospitable weather conditions in their homelands as much as anything, according to demographer Andy Yan.
“The idea of climate refugees will definitely come into play 50 years from now,” said Yan, who is director of the City Program at SFU.
Rather than just looking back at B.C.’s past as Canada marks its 150th birthday, The Vancouver Sun and Province are attempting to look forward at what Metro Vancouver and B.C. might look like 50 years from now.
And 50 years into the future, Metro Vancouver’s climate during the summer is expected to become more like Southern California’s climate now.
That will make Metro Vancouver more of a refuge for people living in places that will become even hotter and drier, helping to shape population growth and nearly double the number of people in the region.
So Metro Vancouver municipalities will face a dual challenge: finding ways to fit another 1.5 million people into the same constrained landscape while building communities that are also resilient to the extremes of flooding and drought expected in a changing climate.
“I think there are some profound choices in front of us,” Yan said.
WARMER, WETTER WINTERS
Metro Vancouver of 2067 will be recognizable, but it will certainly be a very different place.
Its geography — North Shore mountain vistas, ocean views, and a verdant river valley that constrain a burgeoning port city — will look familiar.
But in 50 years, the region will be in the full grip of an anticipated three-degree shift in average annual temperatures, the effects of which are outlined in a recent report on climate projections into the 2050s commissioned by the Metro Vancouver regional district.
The region is also expected to become a little bit wetter as it warms, according to the report. Average annual precipitation should rise to 1.95 metres by the 2050s, from an average of 1.87 metres now.
That doesn’t sound like a big increase, but more of it will fall as rain during short-duration winter storms, and less as snow that then melts over longer periods in the spring and summer.
Warmer, wetter winters will lead to more frost-free days and longer growing seasons, which presents new opportunities for agriculture. However, with springs that fade into hotter, drier summer droughts, the change in climate will alter the crops farmers can grow, according to the report.
Hotter summers, with the projected average number of days exceeding 25 degrees expected to rise to 55 by the mid-2050s, from 22 days a year now, will change the types of plants and trees that will form the city’s increasingly important greenscape that provides cooling shade and mitigates the need for power-hungry air conditioning.
“I think, locally, one of the issues around drought is going to be the impact on urban forests, green infrastructure,” notes sustainability expert Stephen Sheppard, requiring the adaptation to more broad-leaf tree species and fewer coniferous trees that don’t do well in hotter, drier conditions.
“There are going to be a multitude of downstream effects of things that happen to our ecosystems, to our farmland, to our shoreline, to our infrastructure because of things like storms and erosion,” said Sheppard, who is director of the Collaborative for Advanced Landscape Planning at the University of B.C.
For instance, municipalities such as Delta or Richmond will need to raise all their dikes two to three metres to protect their communities from the one- to 1.2-metre rise in sea levels anticipated in the coming decades, Sheppard said.
The cost to raise all of Metro Vancouver’s dikes to that standard would be $9 billion, Sheppard said, “and no one’s saying where that (money) comes from.”
SMART, CONSIDERED DENSIFICATION
B.C. Stats’ official population estimates project out to about 2040, putting Metro Vancouver’s population at 3.5 million by that time, but demographers consider growth rates consistent enough to extend projections farther into the future.
“We’ve had about two-per-cent growth (annually) for a very, very long time,” said Patrick Condon, chair of the urban design program in the University of B.C.’s school of architecture.
And long-term demographic trends suggest that the population will be older on average, which will present both business opportunities for an increasingly service-oriented economy and challenges for economic growth as age reshapes the workforce.
New immigration will follow familiar patterns that have helped shape the population up until now, said Yan, but “by 2067, we’ll pretty much be on track to see a good number of climate refugees.”
As Metro Vancouver becomes more like California is now, Yan said cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco will become hotter, too, perhaps pushing more of their populations to migrate.
“What’s going to be interesting is that (immigration) is going to be global. It may be from sources we have yet to comprehend.”
Then there will be the challenge of housing 1.5 million additional people.
“I think it (requires) a level of smart and considered densification, not densification for densification’s sake,” Yan said.
The Metro Vancouver regional district’s answer to that challenge is its strategy to create compact urban communities that concentrate density along established transit corridors in a plan that looks out to 2040.
“I think we don’t build density for density’s sake,” said Metro Vancouver chairman Greg Moore. “You fit it in around urban centres, around corridors where there’s transit.”
Condon argues that Metro Vancouver runs the risk of building a region where the wealthy live in Vancouver and the suburbs closest to it, while middle- and lowerincome residents are relegated to town centres dominated by highrises in far-flung suburbs at the end of expensive-to-build rapid transit.
“If we’re going to have a servicebased economy, (we need) a housing strategy that ensures people can live pretty close to where they work,” Condon said.
Moore counters that many of the 21 municipalities in the region are stepping up to that challenge.
The City of North Vancouver, for instance, encourages “gentle densification” by allowing for secondary suites and laneway homes on all lots in its single-family neighbourhoods, he said.
Moore also pointed to Port Moody’s Newport Village, where a previously under-utilized district is being turned into a vibrant, walkable town centre, and the addition of mid-rise housing in downtown Port Coquitlam (where he is mayor) as examples of “density done right.”
SERVICE-SECTOR SURGE
Population growth alone will help strengthen B.C.’s economy of 2067 with the need to build for and provide services to a regional population of four million or more and a provincial population of more than seven million.
The demographic shift, with a bigger percentage of the population over 65, will also help shape a growing service-sector economy, Condon said.
While Metro Vancouver has become a tech hub, which is supplanting some of the province’s traditional, resource-based goodsproducing industries, the service sector is now 75 per cent of the economy.
“That’s probably going to go up to 85 to 90 per cent,” Condon said. “Everybody providing some kind of service to other people in the region.”
And that will include services to look after an aging population, whether it’s jobs in new care facilities, new recreation options or tourism services, said Ken Peacock, vice-president and chief economist for the Business Council of B.C.
However, Peacock cautioned that making accurate predictions about the economy two years from now is difficult enough, let alone two or three decades in the future.
“My read of the past 20, 30 years, things changed a lot and in ways no one really saw coming,” Peacock said.
But he does expect that natural resources will continue to play a big role in the national economy.
“If you look back 30 years, resources played a big role in the Canadian economy,” he said. “And 30 years later, they still play a big role in the economy. I don’t expect that to change.”
Peacock also expects that growth in Asia will continue to shape B.C.’s economy and reinforce Metro Vancouver’s status as a gateway port for Canadian exports to the Pacific Rim.
My read of the past 20, 30 years, things changed a lot and in ways no one really saw coming.
One unknown will be the extent to which automation and artificial intelligence intrude into the economy to replace labour and reduce employment, Peacock said.
A 2017 report from the Torontobased Brookfield Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship found that some 43 per cent of B.C.’s workforce faces a high risk that automation will take over at least some of their tasks over the next couple of decades.
The communities most susceptible would be those with the highest concentrations of jobs in industries such as forestry and agriculture, where manufacturing involves more repetitive tasks.
B.C. is already renowned for its efficient, technology-driven sawmills, but the Brookfield report, using StatsCan and McKinsey Institute data, estimates that up to half the jobs in communities such as Quesnel, Williams Lake and Abbotsford could be vulnerable to automation.
Current movements opposing trade agreements such as NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership are another wild card that might impact growth.
“We could see a 20-year period where we see a retreat in globalization, depending on how things unfold,” Peacock said. “That would be very different from the past 20, 30 years.”