STOCKHOLM | Forest fires, floods, storms, landslides… Our soldiers are increasingly called upon to respond to climatic disasters. This is also the case in Sweden, except that there, it is the National Guard composed of civilians who is in the front line and not the army.
It was also the violent fires that engulfed the country in 2018 that prompted Loukas Christodoulou, a teacher in Stockholm, to apply for the National Guard.
“Everywhere in the media, we saw members of the National Guard putting out the fires, as just before they had also helped when we received a wave of Syrian refugees, he explains. So I understood that they were a backbone of our society and I wanted to be part of it.
Anne Caroline Desplanques / JdeM
Loukas Christodoulou, teacher and member of the National Guard in Stockholm, Sweden.
Remedy for eco-anxiety
Getting involved also allowed her to tame her eco-anxiety by giving her the tools to act in order to help her community be more resilient. Now he no longer feels like a helpless victim.
Eco-anxiety is a phenomenon on the rise in many countries, including in Quebec, where this anxiety leads a quarter of young people from Generation Z not to want children, according to a Léger poll conducted in the fall of 2022. .
“If you believe that we are facing a climatic cataclysm, you cannot pretend that nothing has happened, you cannot just walk in the street and protest, you must do something concrete to help”, pleads Mr. Christodolou.
A model for Canada?
Like Sweden, Germany trains civilians to respond to natural disasters. It has 80,000 volunteers in 800 different locations across the country.
“That’s what the country has done to ease the burden on the military,” Josh Bowen, of the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology’s Disaster and Emergency Management Program, told the House of Commons a year ago. year.
Corporal Braden Trudeau, Canadian Armed Forces
But in Canada, “we have become so used to calling in the troops that we are not developing the civilian capacity necessary to intervene,” he lamented.
“To tackle the climate crisis, we need to increase the resilience of our communities. It involves physical infrastructure, but also social infrastructure. And that’s all of us,” says Mr. Christodoulou.
*This report was produced thanks to a grant from the Fonds québécois en journalisme international.