On this date last year, Canada woke up in amazement in a “valley of death” in British Columbia. A heat dome covering parts of the United States and Canada had sent the mercury soaring to nearly 50°C in Lytton, a village engulfed in flames in a remote area northeast of Vancouver. The Lytton region is still burning this summer, but not to the point of marking the imagination. The summer climate shock comes to us this time from Europe. France, Spain and the United Kingdom, to name a few countries, are grappling with a poisonous cocktail of droughts, heat waves and forest fires.
Bucolic villages have had to be evacuated, regions and countries that thought they were immune to climate change are suffering from the dizzying rise in mercury. Lives are at stake. The most vulnerable and the oldest are the first to fall under the insidious assaults of the heat. As industrialized nations continue to waver in their efforts to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, public health experts and environmentalists are sounding the alarm. By the end of the century, some parts of the world will have become too hot to inhabit. This is notably the case of Mexico, certain regions of Central America, the Persian Gulf, India, Pakistan and South-East Asia, reported the recently the Washington Post. The daily has done useful educational work by illustrating the reactions of the human body to heat. There are relentless limits to our ability to adapt, a well-drawn line between life and death.
The tragedy that is playing out in European countries is also ours. It is fashionable in Quebec to consider climate change as the problem of other nations. Our nordicity, sometimes so harsh, gives us a feeling of false security. In June, the environment division of the To have to reported that the impacts of warming in southern Quebec are twice as fast as the global average. Here too, extreme events will increase in intensity, duration and frequency, warns Taha Ouarda, expert in hydrometeorology at the National Institute for Scientific Research. According to data from the National Institute of Public Health of Quebec, there were three days of more than 32 ° C per year, on average, ten years ago. By 2040, there could be around 20 per year.
Here too, climate change kills. Thus, the early heat wave last May is associated with an unexpected increase of 157 deaths in one week, according to data from the Institut de la statistique du Québec. COVID-19 does not seem to be involved in this phenomenon of excess mortality. In 2020, 149 people also died from heat waves. In 2018, there were only 66.
Heat waves strike the imagination, but their effects are forgotten as soon as the temperature returns to its normal seasonal average. It suffices to reread the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to be convinced that the situation will not improve. The average rise in temperatures in southern Quebec could reach between 3.5 and 4°C in the coming decades, or even 5.2°C if the world misses the targets set in the Paris Agreement. Quebec will continue to overheat with a major risk factor. Indeed, the marked aging of the population will increase vulnerability to heat waves.
Cities around the world are now adopting new representative functions: those of heat chiefs, no less. In Quebec, efforts to prepare for the dystopian world of tomorrow are clearly insufficient. We have maps of heat islands in major cities, but land use planning strategies are not evolving fast enough to redesign greener living environments and better manage risk, especially in the poorest neighborhoods.
In the wake of COP26 in Glasgow, Canada announced its intention to adopt a National Adaptation Strategy by the end of the year in order to strengthen the resilience of the economy and society in the face of climatic changes. In Quebec, the Legault government has released $437 million to build resilience, or 5% of the amounts provided for in the Plan for a Green Economy. This is a start, promised the Legault government, aware that it will be necessary to improve investments in adaptation to climate change. An interesting avenue would be to create, here too, a function of heat manager, with a national scope, a budget and concrete means of action to limit the pernicious effects of rising temperatures on human health.
We dance at the top of a volcano. We can no longer rely on individual actions and isolated actions to ensure the protection of human life in the face of climate change.