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.
With 2023 already shattering records for Canada’s worst wildfire season ever, a new poll shows more than two-thirds of Canadians agreeing that the blazes are at least partly caused by climate change.
The survey by Abacus Data for Clean Energy Canada found that 68% of respondents believed this year’s wildfires were connected to the climate emergency, Clean Energy Canada reports. Some 89% said they had noticed an increase in natural disasters over the last decade, with seven in 10 identifying those events as a direct result of climate change.
“Wildfires and extreme weather remind Canadians that climate change isn’t just a global or theoretical phenomenon,” said Abacus Data CEO David Coletto. “It is having real and often devastating impacts on people’s lives. The result is that a growing number of people are making a party or political leader’s commitment to tackling the crisis table stakes to their political behaviour.”
“As the impacts of climate change become more frequent and apparent, Canadians are connecting the dots,” said Clean Energy Canada Communications Director Trevor Melanson. “For politicians, this is more than a box to tick. Canadians both care deeply about climate action and are generally skeptical of political parties on this issue. It will take serious, sustained, and credible efforts to win them over.”
Coletto and Melanson were referring to subsequent sections in the poll in which:
• 86% of respondents said parties’ plans to address climate change and expand the green economy would be important to them in the next election, and 21% said it would be essential for their vote;
• 87% said it’s important or very important for Canada to stay competitive with its global allies in the shift to clean energy;
• 68% saw major, recent investments in electric vehicle battery manufacturing “as evidence that the transition to clean energy can benefit Canada’s economy”.
Record Wildfire Year, Record CO2 Emissions
Clean Energy Canada published the poll just days before UK data scientist Hannah Ritchie reported Canada’s wildfire losses at 5.8 million hectares in June and 8.5 million hectares (85,000 square kilometres) so far this year, eclipsing a record of 7.4 million hectares set in 1995. Consistent record-keeping began in the 1960s.
“We obviously don’t know how much will be burned in the second half of this year, so we can’t do complete year-to-year comparisons,” Ritchie wrote. “But even when we add post-June burns for previous years, 2023 is still going to be a record year. This would be the case, even if zero hectares were burned from July to December.”
Last week, the Copernicus atmospheric monitoring service in Europe reported that carbon emissions from Canadian wildfires through June 26 had already reached 160 million tonnes, the highest in 21 years of data, producing a smoke plume that was affecting air quality in Europe by the end of last month.
“Our monitoring of the scale and persistence of the wildfire emissions across Canada since early May has shown how unusual it has been when compared to the two decades of our dataset,” said Copernicus Senior Scientist Mark Parrington. While the long-range smoke transmission wasn’t unusual, “it is a clear reflection of the intensity of the fires that such high values of aerosol optical depth and other pollutants associated with the plume are so high as it reaches this side of the Atlantic.”
All of those numbers—most notably the persistent wood smoke blanketing many cities in Canada, the United States, and beyond—have drawn renewed attention to the hazards in wildfire smoke, with real-time air quality data gathered by the Canadian Climate Institute pointing to C$1.28 billion in health costs in one province over a single week.
The institute calculated that figure for Ontario based on exposure to PM 2.5 fine particulate matter, a recognized, major determinant of respiratory disease and premature death, between June 4 and 8. The total included $467 million for Ottawa, $436 million for Toronto, and the rest spread across five central or eastern Ontario census divisions.
‘Fiddling While the Forest Burns’
“Some can continue to argue that climate change is somebody else’s problem, and that Canada is a small global player, and there’s not much we can do,” wrote the CCI’s Dave Sawyer, Seton Stiebert, and Colin Welburn. “Such an attitude is foolhardy, ignoring climate science and keeps us from addressing impacts, literally fiddling while the boreal forest burns and chokes us with smoke.”
The CCI numbers left out costs like ecological damage, firefighting expenses, household costs to avert PM 2.5 exposure, and impacts on tourism and recreation. But the New York Times business desk picked up that thread this week.
“The fires have upended [Canadian] oil and gas operations, reduced available timber harvests, dampened the tourism industry, and imposed uncounted costs on the national health system,” the Times writes. “Those losses are emblematic of the pressure being felt more widely as countries around the world experience disaster after disaster caused by extreme weather, and they will only increase as the climate warms.”
And with that, “what long seemed a faraway concern has snapped into sharp relief in recent years, as billowing smoke has suffused vast areas of North America, floods have washed away neighbourhoods, and heat waves have strained power grids,” the Times adds. “That incurs billions of dollars in costs, and has longer-reverberating consequences, such as insurers withdrawing from markets prone to hurricanes and fires.”
That volatility wipes out the older myth that Canada could gain economically from a mounting, global climate emergency.
“It’s come on faster than we thought, even informed people,” Sawyer, the CCI’s principal economist, told the Times. “You couldn’t model this out if you tried. We’ve always been concerned about this escalation of damages, but seeing it happen is so stark.”
Canadians Lose $25B Per Year
Although, as the Times points out, the Institute made its best effort to do precisely that modelling last fall, calculating that Canadian households will see $25 billion in annual losses from climate damage as soon as 2025.
With the deepest heat of summer still ahead, CBC is already asking what will happen after the Donnie Creek Fire near Fort St. John, the biggest in British Columbia history at 5,715 hectares as of July 2, finally goes out.
“It will continue to burn for weeks and probably until the end of the fire season,” veteran wildfire specialist and Thompson Rivers University professor Mike Flannigan told the national broadcaster. “It may actually burn through winter, smouldering in deeper organic layers, and then pop up.”
Citing Flannigan, CBC casts the Donnie Creek blaze as part of an historic wildfire season that “would not have been possible if not for human-caused climate change, as a warmer world causes more lightning strikes—which lead to around half of all fires, and ones that burn for longer.”
“The warmer it gets, the more efficient the atmosphere is at sucking the moisture of the fuels… on the forest floor,” Flannigan explained. Without rain to offset that drying effect, “it’s easier for a fire to start, easier for a fire to spread, and it means more fuel is available to burn.”
That level of destruction raises concerns for the unique boreal forest in northeastern B.C., and for wildlife whose habitats could be changed forever, CBC says. It could also set off a rush for commercial timber once the fire is out.
“Those shifts in patterns are not only increasing the amount of carbon emitted but also changing the vegetation that’s coming back,” explained Kevin Smith, boreal program manager at Ducks Unlimited. “The concern is that the boreal forest in many areas with a much drier and warmer climate could start to shift toward more of a grassland savannah.”
