This story includes details on the impacts of climate change that may be difficult for some readers. If you are feeling overwhelmed by this crisis situation here is a list of resources on how to cope with fears and feelings about the scope and pace of the climate crisis.
Wildfires, floods, and threatened food supplies are among the biggest impacts Canadians can expect from the climate emergency, based on the analysis in the “atlas of human suffering” the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change unveiled last week in its report on climate impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability.
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“It may be difficult to get through all the facts and figures on yet another tome—it’s more than 3,500 pages,” CBC writes. And while the IPCC release included a section on North America, there were precious few segments devoted to Canada.
But “among all the numbers, the report’s message is clear: climate change is already taking its toll on humanity, at a grave cost,” the national broadcaster says. “Some of that’s hard put a dollar figure on, but the concrete costs are already mounting,” and “it could be much worse, depending on the trajectory we take.”
The news story cites the 2016 wildfire known as “The Beast”, which caused C$3 billion insured losses in Fort McMurray, Alberta and packed a monster climate punch of its own. “What’s worse is that the report suggests that places that only experience fire every 400 years will experience them as often as once every 50 years,” CBC writes.
“We’re kind of used to these events being sort of discrete events: there was a flood last year or there was a forest fire three years ago, kind of thing,” said Wilfrid Laurier University environmental studies professor Robert McLeman, a coordinating lead author for the IPCC report chapter on health, well-being, and the changing structure of communities. “Now the risk that’s starting to emerge is that these events start to happen closer together, that they’re more severe when they do occur.”
The more than 80% of Canadians who live in cities may not be at immediate risk from wildfires, CBC says, but they face increasingly frequent and severe storms and other extreme events. Flooding has accounted for 40% of the damage, and the country’s costliest weather-related disaster since 1970 was the 2013 Calgary flood, which left behind $1.8 billion in insurance claims and another $6 billion in uninsured losses.
In the weeks leading up to the IPCC report, a study by the Intact Centre for Climate Adaptation connected flood risk to more intense storms due to a combination of factors, including climate change, loss of natural infrastructure, poor land use planning, over-building of communities, and aging homes and municipal infrastructure.
CBC cites food security as a climate risk that is already confronting Canadian farm and fishing producers, adding that Indigenous communities are particularly vulnerable to changing ecosystems, reduced supplies of traditional foods, and nutrient loss.
“The reality is that most Canadians, regardless of where they live, have felt the impacts of the climate crisis,” Julia Levin, senior climate and energy program manager at Environmental Defence Canada, told CBC. “That’s been felt most by communities in the North, whose homes are literally falling to the sea, and where food security is already diminishing.”
