CBC News — What the new IPCC report says climate change could — and is — costing Canadians
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The release of a new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report (“Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability”) provides an opportunity to better understand the costs of climate change on communities all around the world. A recent article by the the CBC News science desk places these impacts and costs into the Canadian context across four important categories including: wildfires, cities/floods, food production and indigenous health.
The Canada 1 Water team is always looking for partners to help us translate the results of our integrated hydrologic forecasting into societally relevant metrics. The project will help us to understand exactly how future climate conditions (i.e. droughts and severe storms) will impact soil moisture, groundwater levels and stream flows across Canada. But we need a diverse set of partners to help us quantify second order impacts to food production systems, indigenous health, forest health/wildfires and the housing market. If you are interested in collaborating with the C1W team to answer these questions don’t hesitate to contact us (info@aquanty.com)!
“[T]he new report says wildfires are the top climate change risk facing Canada. [] 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 [which] could result in the loss of $459 billion in forestry by 2080, with the biggest losses in British Columbia, Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories.
[C]ity-dwellers are facing their own challenges. The report found that North American cities are already facing challenges from a warming planet, including the severity and frequency of “climate-induced hazards” and extreme events, such as severe storms. [] According to the IPCC, flooding accounts for 40 per cent of weather-related disasters since 1970, the costliest being the 2013 Calgary flood which cost $1.8 billion in insurance losses and an additional $6 billion in uninsured costs.
The report states that high temperatures along with extreme weather events linked to climate change — such as droughts, floods and heat waves — will “increasingly limit production in agriculture” including aquaculture and fisheries. [] By 2050, parts of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Yukon and the Northwest Territories will experience water scarcity in the growing season.
When it comes to food, Indigenous people face some of the biggest challenges. ”