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magazine / oct10
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October 2010 issue |
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EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK
Adapt and prosper
This summer’s torpor of heat and humidity
here in Ottawa made it easy to envision the difficulties
of life in a much warmer and wetter world and to
anticipate some of the impacts — environmental and economic
— that such a future would bring.
As dawn broke over Québec, Montréal, Ottawa and points
between on May 31, the sky had a sickly yellow-brown pallor
and the air held an acrid, smoky smell. Millions of people
stepped outside to start the day and wondered where the fire
was. In the house next door? A block or two away? Where?
A record number of calls flooded Montréal’s 911 operators,
exceeding even the volume during the ice storm of 1998. The
cause was a series of out-of-control forest fires hundreds of
kilometres away, in central and northern Quebec.
Heavy rains in June flooded the South Saskatchewan River
and its tributaries and washed out highways and homes, forcing
Alberta to set up a $200 million fund to pay for damages not
covered by insurance companies. An intense heat wave in the
first week of July triggered a 20 percent increase in calls to
Urgences-santé, Montréal’s ambulance service, and spurred the
city to keep open a network of public buildings as cooling centres.
By mid-August, British Columbia had overspent its annual
$52 million forest-fire budget while saving homes and properties
in the Cariboo region and elsewhere around the province.
Similar news came from around the world through the summer:
in Moscow, heat and smog doubled the daily death rate
to 700; in Pakistan, hundred-year floods damaged or destroyed
thousands of villages and displaced millions; in northwestern
China, a mudslide killed more than 1,100 people. The latter
was caused not by natural factors but by mining, deforestation,
dams and a careless attitude by authorities toward the local
environment, according to a geologist at Lanzhou University,
who had warned of such a disaster four years earlier.
These days, you’d be naive to suggest that any such specific event was directly caused by climate change but wise to be
concerned that climate change had set the stage for it. What
is certain, though, is that the frequency and intensity of such
events will increase as the planet continues to warm.
This point is driven home by the “Degrees of Change” diagram
on the poster map included with this issue. Compiled
by Canada’s National Round Table on the Environment and
the Economy (NRTEE), an independent federal agency that
advises the government on sustainable-development solutions,
the diagram is the result of rigorous analysis and distillation
of two decades’ worth of climate-change research and modelling
and is the first to focus comprehensively on expected impacts of
climate change within this country. Our collaboration with the
NRTEE on this issue of Canadian Geographic means that you,
our readers, get an exclusive look at its forecasts.
Whether they are random acts of nature or the result of
human-induced conditions, floods, forest fires, mudslides, smog
and other such environmental events all come with enormous
implications, both humanitarian and monetary. But they can
also be catalysts for changing our behaviour and, if we’re smart
about it, adapting our economies to minimize their frequency,
scope and cost. And a nation as resourceful and innovative as
Canada is should also be able to find some competitive advantages,
and even prosperity, in a warming world. This is already
under way in many fields as we move to a low carbon-emissions
economy, but much more work lies ahead in managing the
economic risks and opportunities for Canada. The stories in this
issue deepen and expand on the points in the diagram, reinforcing
the idea that how we respond to climate change now will have
serious environmental, economic and social impacts on our future.
— Eric Harris
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