At the end of June 2021, a historic heat dome covers British Columbia, with the temperature reaching 49.6 degrees in the center of the province. This extreme weather event is the deadliest to ever hit Canada. The coroner’s office concludes that the heat wave caused 619 deaths in the province. In the Vancouver area, this climatic event kills more people in less than a week than COVID in a year.
Extreme weather events are on the rise, and Quebec is no exception, as evidenced by the historic floods of 2011 in the Richelieu Valley, 2017 and 2019 in southwestern Quebec, the heat wave that caused 62 dead in Montreal in 2018, the devastating tornadoes that tore through Gatineau the same year, and hurricane Fiona that battered the Magdalen Islands in 2022. Easter weekend’s freezing rain storm and flooding this spring are painful reminders of our vulnerability to a raging climate.
While we cannot attribute a single weather event to the effect of climate change, science indicates that climate change increases the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events. Insurers are well aware of the phenomenon, as are governments who are facing exponential growth in the costs of the devastation caused by these less and less natural disasters.
All of this is happening while global warming is just over 1.1 degrees. What will happen in 25 years when we exceed 1.5 degrees of warming and get closer to 2 degrees?
The climate emergency is no longer a pipe dream. The climate crisis is tearing up roads, wiping out coastlines, destroying crops, blowing away homes, claiming lives and swallowing up the savings of thousands of people every year. Faced with such a record, we would expect an all-out mobilization to strengthen our resilience and protect the most vulnerable among us. However, this is not the case, and it is urgent to change course.
A measurements quilt
Most of the adaptation plans of municipalities and governments to date boil down to producing studies, planting trees and upgrading certain infrastructures without any real overall plan. This is particularly the case in Montreal and in the major cities of Quebec. The result is a quilt of measures that have no real effect on the overall resilience of our infrastructure and our communities. The lack of substantial funding for adaptation is a major obstacle, but Quebec also lacks an overall vision, a global strategy that would strengthen our resilience by 2050.
There is still time to deploy a consistent adaptation strategy.
The renewal of our infrastructure assets takes decades and starting now, we can take advantage of the rehabilitation of our aging infrastructures to upgrade them and strengthen our resilience, at a lower cost.
From now on, everywhere in Quebec, we must eliminate urban heat islands, and no more streets should be redone without planning greening measures that reduce ambient heat and capture rainwater. If we start in 2035 or 2040, we will run out of time, and the costs will be paid in billions of dollars and shattered lives. This is why the conclusion of a green pact between Quebec and the municipalities, accompanied by funding of $2 billion per year, is an essential starting point.
A real adaptation strategy will require time, financial resources, concrete targets and a coherent approach across the entire territory with the objective of reducing the climate vulnerability of all Quebecers. This strategy should not only focus on upgrading our road, energy, rainwater or other infrastructures, but also identify the populations most at risk to strengthen the resilience of their living environments. The Montreal Climate Summit, which will be held on May 9 and 10, will measure the gap to be filled in order to arrive at a real adaptation strategy, and the means to be deployed to accelerate the pace.
Of course, the most profitable adaptation strategy remains to limit global warming by reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. Adapting to a warming of 1.5 degrees is infinitely easier than adapting to a warming greater than 2 degrees, assuming such a thing is possible. But we can no longer ignore this public health and safety issue. It is now as urgent to adapt as to reduce our emissions. The weather disasters of recent years have sounded the alarm. It’s time to act.