What is Climate Prosperity?
Canada works to plan for and profit from the risks of climate change
By Graham Lanktree
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What is climate prosperity?
Canada works to plan for and profit from the risks of climate change
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Global warming impacts health
Climate change could be the biggest global health threat of the 21st century, but Canada has been slow to respond
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The drying Saskatchewan River
In the last century the flow of the river has dropped by 12 percent. Can the South Saskatchewan be saved?
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Halifax Harbour’s rising waters
Global warming is giving Halifax a sinking feeling. How is the maritime city planning for rising sea levels?
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Canada’s future resources
What does a future of climate change hold for Canada’s resource-based industries?
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Bees have evolved to play a pivotal role in the natural world, so much so that our economy is also lifted on their wings. In Canada, the pollination the tiny insects provide is an industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars — approximately $1.7 billion, in fact. And globally their worth rises to $217 billion.
Disturbingly however, bees have been disappearing worldwide. Since 2006, annual honeybee losses in Canada have hovered at 30 percent. Recent winter mortality has been the highest on record, say Canadian professionals who raise bees commercially. But still, no one definitively knows why they’re dying.
In September, James Thomson, a professor with the University of Toronto’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, published a 17-year examination of the pollination of the wild lily in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. There, he found a long-term decline in pollination early in the season, as well as in bee numbers, and began to suspect a “climate-driven mismatch between the times when flowers open and when bees emerge from hibernation.”
Although no solid link between climate change and declining bee populations has yet been forged, Thomson’s research reminds us of the fragility and interconnectedness of the climate’s complex structure and its impact on natural resources. Much can rest on what may at first seem like a small cog.
We know that climate change is happening. In the Arctic, which acts as a barometer for what will happen in the rest of the world, summer sea ice has shrunk drastically as air temperatures have shot up. The best we can do is to prepare for the future as an insurance policy against catastrophe.
That’s where the idea of climate prosperity comes in. It’s a new way of looking at climate change by admitting that there’s a problem and trying not only to alleviate it but to also mitigate it and prosper from that mitigation.
Across Canada, the federal government is working with the provinces to prepare for drought in the Prairies, to cope with coastal erosion in the Maritimes and to ready large urban centres such as Toronto and Montréal so residents can cope with high temperatures.
In October, Canadian Geographic explores all this and more, from engineers working on new ways of building important infrastructure to cope with the changing climate, to foreign policy analysts creating contingencies to ensure the security of our Arctic resources. Canada is preparing for a future that is heating up faster than we thought, but if we take the right steps, perhaps we can prosper.
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October 2010 issue
