I feel helpless and I am certainly not the only one. We are at the dawn of the year 2022, but – let’s face it frankly – the future looks bleak and climate change. When it comes time to take stock, the year 2021 will undoubtedly be the year of all disasters and I am not referring to the global COVID-19 pandemic.
Devastating forest fires in Western Canada, deadly heat waves, never-before-seen floods, drought: Canada is not spared and neither will the rest of the world.
Take, for example, the historic July floods in Germany, which turned out to be the country’s worst natural disaster since the end of World War II and left 180 people dead.
Take the small town of Lytton in British Columbia, which has become infamous despite itself, where the record for the highest temperature in Canada was recorded at 49.5 ° C.
Take the historic heat wave that landed in this same province last June where nearly 719 sudden deaths were recorded in one week.
You want my opinion, these extreme events are just the tip of the iceberg. Worse yet, these extreme weather events will take the lives of thousands of people with them. I add more, because the insurer Swiss Re estimates the costs of natural disasters in 2021 on a planetary scale at nearly 320 billion Canadian dollars, up 24% compared to the previous year.
Imagine what we could have done with all this money for our schools, our hospitals, our young people and the reduction of inequalities.
In addition, the unpredictability of weather events linked to climate change will sooner or later have an upward impact on the price of foodstuffs, estimates Sylvain Charlebois, director of the laboratory of analytical sciences in agrifood at Dalhousie University. This means that food, although a basic need for all of us, will cost more and more. It will have negative effects within the population such as an increase in the number of people in a situation of food insecurity.
You see, climate change spares no one and has consequences, whatever we say and whatever we do.
Certainly, Canada’s new Minister of the Environment, Steven Guilbeault, speaks of a “global awareness” of heads of state and government in the wake of COP26. Many of them came to take part in this great international meeting, which could indeed make us believe that our leaders would once and for all take action beyond fine words. The issue of fossil fuels was one of the most discussed subjects. Good news, some 20 countries have made a commitment to end international fossil fuel subsidies, including Canada.
But, much more will have to be done. We should not simply aim for targets like 2030 or 2050, but targets and short-term actions like 2023, 2024. The energy transition must be now because it is urgent.
In addition, other reports will come during the year 2022, such as that of the climate experts of the United Nations. Their preliminary conclusion is unequivocal: life on Earth as we know it will inevitably be transformed by climatic upheavals within 30 years. Can’t the urgency be clearer? Now, not 10 or 20 years from now, we can make a difference. I remain optimistic, but we must take action, without thinking too much.