Here’s all the latest local and international news concerning climate change for the week of Dec. 2 to Dec. 8, 2024.
Here’s the latest news concerning climate change and biodiversity loss, from the steps leaders are taking to address the problems to all the latest science.
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In climate news this week:
• Rising sea levels could put Vancouver’s airport underwater
• Conserving just five per cent of watersheds can protect cities from floods: UBC study
• Canadians to spend $801 more on food in 2025 as climate, Trump affect prices: report
Human activities like burning fossil fuels and farming livestock are the main drivers of climate change, according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This causes heat-trapping greenhouse gas levels in Earth’s atmosphere, increasing the planet’s surface temperature.
The panel, which is made up of scientists from around the world, has warned for decades that wildfires and severe weather, such as B.C.’s deadly heat dome and catastrophic flooding in 2021, would become more frequent and more intense because of the climate emergency. It has issued a “code red” for humanity and warns the window to limit warming to 1.5 C above pre-industrial times is closing.
According to NASA climate scientists, human activities have raised the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide content by 50 per cent in less than 200 years, and “there is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate.”
Climate change quick facts:
• The Earth is now about 1.3 C warmer than it was in the 1800s.
• 2023 was hottest on record globally, beating the last record in 2016. However scientists say 2024 will likely beat the 2023 record.
• Human activities have raised atmospheric concentrations of CO2 by nearly 49 per cent above pre-industrial levels starting in 1850.
• The world is not on track to meet the Paris Agreement target to keep global temperature from exceeding 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels, the upper limit to avoid the worst fallout from climate change including sea level rise, and more intense drought, heat waves and wildfires.
• On the current path of carbon dioxide emissions, the temperature could increase by as much 3.6 C this century, according to the IPCC.
• In April, 2022 greenhouse gas concentrations reached record new highs and show no sign of slowing.
• Emissions must drop 7.6 per cent per year from 2020 to 2030 to keep temperatures from exceeding 1.5 C and 2.7 per cent per year to stay below 2 C.
• 97 per cent of climate scientists agree that the climate is warming and that human beings are the cause.
Latest News
Rising sea levels could put Vancouver’s airport underwater
Vancouver International Airport is at risk of flooding due to climate change, according to a new Senate report that looks at critical transportation infrastructure across Canada to assess how it will fare in the changing climate.
Vancouver’s airport, Canada’s second-busiest airport, is on Sea Island in the Fraser River delta, surrounded by 22 kilometres of dikes to keep the river and sea water at bay. But with sea levels estimated to rise by at least one metre in the next 75 years and an anticipated increase in extreme precipitation and storm surges, the report says the island could flood.
“The state of the Vancouver airport is Vancouver’s problem, it’s Richmond’s problem, but it’s also a problem for every person in Western Canada who drives through there — and it’s a really important freight airport too,” said Sen. Paula Simons, one of 10 members of the standing Senate committee on transport and communications, which wrote the report.
“This isn’t just a question of your ability to go to Maui. It’s a question of how we get goods and services across the Pacific to Asian markets and how we bring our imports in.”
Simons was shocked to learn the bustling, economically vital airport is at risk.
“As an Edmontonian and a Westerner, I had no idea how vulnerable the Vancouver airport really was,” Simons said. “I was absolutely thunderstruck to realize how vulnerable it is because it’s built on an island. And it’s lovely, but it creates an inherent risk at a time when sea levels are rising.”
—Shannon Waters, The Narwhal
Canadians to spend $801 more on food in 2025 as climate, Trump affect prices: report
Food prices in Canada are likely to increase by three to five per cent next year, according to a newly released report, but wild cards like climate change and Donald Trump could have unforeseen impacts.
That’s the conclusion of the 15th annual food price report released Thursday by a partnership that includes researchers at Dalhousie University, the University of Guelph, University of Saskatchewan and University of British Columbia.
The report’s authors used three different machine learning and AI models to make their predictions, and concluded a Canadian family of four can expect to spend $16,833.67 on food in 2025 — an increase of up to $801.56 from last year.
Though it still marks a rise in grocery bills, the rate of food price growth has moderated since the days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when rampant inflation meant Canadians suffered through double-digit year-over-year food price increases.
“It would be fantastic if it was even lower, but you know, it’s a step in the right direction,” said Stuart Smyth, the University of Saskatchewan’s campus lead on the project. “I think that consumers can hopefully look forward to a little bit of a flattening out in terms of food price increases for the coming year.”
—The Canadian Press
B.C.’s Ministry of Environment and Climate Solutions set to make power announcement Monday
The B.C. government has scheduled a news conference Monday to make a significant announcement about B.C. Hydro’s competitive call for power.
Premier David Eby, along with Adrian Dix, minister of energy and climate solutions, Tamara Davidson, minister of environment and parks, and Chris O’Riley, president of B.C. Hydro will make the announcement at 12:30 p.m.
This call for power lands at a volatile time for the utility. Successive years of drought that slowed inflows to Hydro’s key reservoirs left it a net importer of electricity in its 2023-24 fiscal year, which ended in March with the corporation importing about 20 per cent of its electricity needs.
That has carried over into Hydro’s 2024-25 fiscal year, with its first-quarter financial report showing that it needed imports to fill 17 per cent of B.C.’s needs for the three months between the end of March and beginning of July.
B.C.’s Energy Ministry has said Hydro’s critics who warn the utility will run short of power as soon as 2026 rely on “inaccurate assumptions” that underestimate its ability to generate electricity over the summer.
—Tiffany Crawford, Derrick Penner
Conserving just five per cent of watersheds can protect cities from floods: UBC study
Researchers at the University of B.C. say there’s a nature-based way to protect cities from floods, like the 2021 catastrophic flooding in B.C. or more recently the deadly floods that wiped out towns in Spain.
A UBC study says preserving just five per cent of watersheds and two per cent of Canada’s land could shield more than half of urban floodplains, saving lives, crops and infrastructure.
Matthew Mitchell, the study author who is a UBC forestry expert, says this is the first research of its kind in Canada to explore how ecosystems function as natural flood buffers.
Key ecosystems safeguard 54 per cent of built-up areas and 74 per cent of cropland in floodplains, according to the study. When these areas are preserved, they absorb water, slow run-off and reduce the strain on flood defences,” said Mitchell.
“Trees and vegetation can capture that rainfall as it comes down. But also one of the major ways beyond that is the soil and having places where it’s not impervious, it’s not pavement or concrete,” he said. “The soil really absorbs and slows it down. So when we get these atmospheric river events there’s a capacity to slow that down and release the water over a longer amount of time, rather than all at once.”
Canada faces numerous challenges because of climate change, human alteration of rivers, watersheds and floodplains. With weather patterns shifting fast, projections call for more flooding across the country, which means governments must look at protecting natural ecosystems as part of its adaptation strategy, the study concludes.
—Tiffany Crawford
UBC profs receive $1 million grants for research on butterflies, Indigenous law and nature
Two University of B.C. professors have each been awarded $1 million grants from the inaugural Wall Legacy Awards funded by the Peter Wall Endowment.
Michelle Tseng, an assistant professor of zoology, will receive the grant for her research on butterflies and biodiversity. Law professor Stepan Wood receives it for his work on how Indigenous and settler laws can work together to promote healthier relationships between humans and nature, and between settler and Indigenous societies, UBC announced Tuesday.
Postmedia interviewed Tseng earlier this year after her team noted an estimated 60 per cent drop in observations of cabbage white butterflies across Metro Vancouver this season.
Tseng said there are several reasons this could be happening such as a cooler, wetter spring, or it could be related to climate change and extreme changes in temperature, or from spraying invasive species. But scientists want to study this decline to find out for sure.
Wood said his work is about bridging two global movements — the ‘rights of nature’ movement and the Indigenous revitalization movement.
“You can’t have reconciliation between humans and the Earth without reconciliation between settler and Indigenous societies, and vice versa. The key to both is respect — respect for all beings, and respect for Indigenous laws,” he said in a statement provided by UBC.
—Tiffany Crawford
Negotiators fail to reach an agreement on a plastic pollution treaty. Talks to resume next year
Negotiators working on a treaty to address the global crisis of plastic pollution for a week in South Korea won’t reach an agreement and plan to resume the talks next year.
They are at an impasse over whether the treaty should reduce the total plastic on Earth and put global, legally binding controls on toxic chemicals used to make plastics.
The negotiations in Busan, South Korea, were supposed to be the fifth and final round to produce the first legally binding treaty on plastics pollution, including in the oceans, by the end of 2024. But with time running out early Monday, negotiators agreed to resume the talks next year. They don’t yet have firm plans.
More than 100 countries want the treaty to limit production as well as tackle cleanup and recycling, and many have said that is essential to address chemicals of concern. But for some plastic-producing and oil and gas countries, that crosses a red line.
For any proposal to make it into the treaty, every nation must agree to it. Some countries sought to change the process so decisions could be made with a vote if consensus couldn’t be reached and the process was paralyzed. India, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait and others opposed changing it, arguing consensus is vital to an inclusive, effective treaty.
—The Associated Press
Top UN court to rule on key climate questions: BBC
The International Court of Justice in The Hague will hear testimony from nearly 100 countries including Vanuatu, the Pacific island nation that initiated the effort to get a legal opinion, the report said.
The hearing will attempt to answer key questions as to what countries should do to fight climate change and, critically, what should they do to repair damages linked to rising temperatures, it added.
While the outcome is not legally binding, it could give extra weight to climate change lawsuits all over the world, the BBC writes.
—BBC
EU pushes back deforestation law by a year after outcry from global producers
The European Union agreed to delay by a year the introduction of new rules to ban the sale of products that lead to massive deforestation, caving in to demands from several producer nations from across the globe and domestic opposition within the 27-nation bloc.
Officials said Wednesday that the EU member states, the EU parliament and the executive Commission reached an agreement in principle following weeks of haggling whether the initial rules would have to be watered down even further than the simple delay by one year. Originally, it was supposed to kick in this month.
The deforestation law is aimed at preserving forests on a global scale by only allowing forest-related products that are sustainable and do not involve the degradation of forests. It applies to things like cocoa, coffee, soy, cattle, palm oil, rubber, wood and products made from them. Deforestation is the second-biggest source of carbon emissions after fossil fuels.
The lead negotiator among the different EU institutions, Christine Schneider, called the delay to implement nature protection rules “a victory,” adding it would give foresters and farmers protection from “excessive bureaucracy.”
—The Associated Press
Italy to require companies buy insurance for climate risks
Starting Jan. 1, every company in Italy must buy insurance to protect its assets from floods, landslides and other natural hazards that have become more common thanks to global warming. It’s the latest sign of Europe’s rising anxiety about climate change.
As the fastest-warming continent, its climate losses have increased by 2.9 per cent a year from 2009 to 2023, according to the European Environment Agency. This year alone saw epic wildfires in Greece, a crippling drought in Sicily and costly floods in the U.K., Central Europe and Spain. And there’s still a month left.
The biggest danger in Italy is flooding. Companies affected by such events face a 7 per cent higher probability of going bust, and those that survive typically suffer a 5 per cent average decline in revenue within three years, according to a 2024 study published by the country’s central bank.
Most Italian businesses — especially small and mid-sized ones — have no protection at all. The new law will require companies to buy coverage and insurers to write policies or face fines. The plan is backed by a €5 billion reinsurance fund, set up by a state-controlled financial institution.
But there are rumblings the plan’s rollout may be delayed. One concern is that one big catastrophe could overwhelm the new fund. Another is that insurers will abandon the country’s riskiest areas, as is happening in the US.
—Bloomberg News
Energy CEO who drank fracking fluid is now Trump’s oil evangelist
Standing shoulder to shoulder with his employees, Chris Wright, chief executive officer of oilfield services company Liberty Energy Inc., held up his glass in a toast.
“To your health and the longer lives and healthier lives of billions of people around the world from oil and gas,” Wright said. Then he gulped down a shot of fracking fluid.
By quaffing the chemical cocktail of water, bleach, soap and other substances in a 2019 Facebook video, Wright, Donald Trump’s nominee for energy secretary, sought to refute fracking opponents who argued it would poison aquifers. Five years later, the stunt suggests how he might carry out US energy policy: with a flair for showmanship and an appetite for confrontation.
In a slew of TV interviews and speeches, Wright has proclaimed the moral virtues of fossil fuels and championed them as a way to lift people out of poverty. A few years ago, he picked a public fight with The North Face Inc. after the outwear maker declined to make a co-branded jacket with a Liberty competitor because of its oil-industry links. (Wright commissioned billboards that said: “That North Face puffer looks great on you. And it was made from fossil fuels.”) He has called greenhouse-gas reduction goals “perverse,” questioned the environmental benefits of electric vehicles and attacked subsidies for wind and solar projects.
His outspokenness is poised to set him apart from Trump’s previous energy secretaries, the comparatively buttoned-up Rick Perry and Dan Brouillette. But Wright, an industry insider who would be taking on his first political role, can be nuanced. A self-professed “nerdy guy,” he frequently gives lectures about the global energy system, using data-heavy charts to illustrate his points.
Rather than deny climate change outright, he characterizes it as a “modest phenomenon.”
—Bloomberg