This article was written by Bill Curry and Mike Hager, and was published in the Globe & Mail on June 6, 2023.

Canada could exceed the largest total amount of burned area recorded in this country in a single year, as climate change increases the frequency and intensity of wildfires and puts Indigenous communities at higher risk, according to new federal numbers.

Natural Resources Canada released updated data and forecasts Monday showing that, asofJune4, there had been 2,214 wildfires across Canada this year, and about 3.3 million hectares burned. The 10-year average over the same timeframe is 1,624 fires and 254,429 hectares burned.

The department said it is unusual to have blazes across most of the country this early in the wildfire season, and Canada could pass the annual record for burned area if the rate of fire activity continues.

The figures and analysis were released in conjunction with a Monday news conference by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his ministers to discuss the data. Mr. Trudeau expressed a willingness to spend more on support if the situation worsens.

“With the given projections, it is expected that we have enough resources to cover the summer,” Mr. Trudeau said. “If things get worse, we’re developing contingency plans and we will of course make sure that we are there … to ensure that all Canadians are protected right through this summer.”

Brian Simpson, a semi-retired consultant based in Castlegar, B.C., said Canada’s system for fighting these disasters is based on the idea that only one side of the country will burn at a time.

That way, provinces with lower levels of risk can share their firefighters and equipment, which has worked well in years past.

This year, with so many fires burning from the Atlantic to B.C. so early in the season, the system is facing major pressure.

“Now you start to get into this quandary where there’s not enough resources for the amount of fire on the ground, and the larger jurisdictions, who are typically the ones that are going to be providing lots of resources outside, are starting to pull back because they’re starting to either get fires or they’re imminently going to have [them],” Mr. Simpson, who spent four decades fighting wildfires and eventually led B.C.’s Wildfire Service, said.

Wetter weather should continue to help Alberta and Nova Scotia with the fires burning in those places, he said, but Quebec still faces major hurdles battling blazes, and B.C. is set for a very dry and dangerous June.

So far, 198 Canadian firefighters have travelled to other provinces this season to pitch in, and 957 foreign firefighters have landed in Canada, federal officials said during their Monday briefing.

Quebec Premier François Legault said more than 480 firefighters are fighting about 30 fires in his province. But more than 160 forest fires are burning there, he added, and international support is needed.

“When I talk to the premiers of other provinces, they have their hands full,” Mr. Legault told reporters in Quebec City on Monday.

Mr. Legault said an additional 200 firefighters are coming from France and the United States, and Quebec is also in talks with Costa Rica, Portugal and Chile as it searches for additional resources.

He said no lives have been lost in the province’s fires, but they have forced about 10,000 people from their homes, most of them in the northwestern Abitibi-Témiscamingue region, and the eastern Côte-Nord region.

Diane Rioux was making dinner at home in Lebel-sur-Quévil-lon on Friday, when the small city in the Abitibi-Témiscamingue region issued a warning. Immediately, she asked her oldest daughter to grab a pen so she could dictate a list of what they would need to bring if they had to go.

When the evacuation order came shortly after, Ms. Rioux, her husband and her three children packed medication, clothes and hygiene products before joining a convoy of people who had been ordered out of the area.

“We did it as a family, and it went very quickly,” she said. “We took my 83-year-old dad, and we left.”

Federal Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair said Monday there were 413 wildfires burning across Canada, and that 249 of those were deemed out of control. There were 18 active wildfires impacting First Nations, including six in Alberta, five in Saskatchewan, one in the Northwest Territories, four in Quebec and two in Nova Scotia.

About 26,000 people had been evacuated from their homes across the country.

Rain over the weekend allowed Alberta to end its monthlong state of emergency Sunday, and helped contain several fires in Nova Scotia.

In Alberta, there were 63 active wildfires on Monday afternoon, with 16 deemed out of control. Five evacuation orders remained in effect, displacing more than 4,300 people. The orders were primarily impacting remote Indigenous communities.

Chief Conroy Sewepagaham, of Little Red River Cree Nation, east of High Level in Northern Alberta, said in a Cree and English update posted Friday on social media that a fire around Wood Buffalo National Park continues to grow and has burned more than 80,000 hectares of land.

”We’re just going to keep hammering and keep doing what we’re doing here. The more we can get these ground fires extinguished, the sooner we all can come home to Fox Lake,” he said.

In Nova Scotia, at the height of evacuations from a Halifax-area wildfire, more than 16,000 people were forced to leave their homes northwest of the city, and the city said about 4,886 remained displaced Monday.

Halifax has said more than 150 homes were destroyed in the blaze, but there were no reports of deaths or injuries.

The Halifax-area fire is now contained, with an estimated area of 950 hectares, and the city said Monday that it is moving into a recovery phase, which includes soil and air quality testing.

Meanwhile, in southwestern Nova Scotia, the massive Barrington Lake fire continued to burn out of control on Monday, though heavy rain on the weekend helped stop its advance.

Former CBC host says he is embracing role as an elder — and not having ‘to kiss anybody’s ass’

This article was written by Marco Chown Oved and was published in the Toronto Star on June 4, 2023.

There are many origin stories for the climate movement.

Some point to the testimony of NASA scientist Jim Hansen before U.S. Congress in 1988. Others say it was the signing of the UN Convention on Climate Change in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, or the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, or the Paris Agreement in 2015.

But few remember that Toronto hosted one of the first major climate meetings in 1988, issuing a final statement warning that “the Earth’s atmosphere is being changed at an unprecedented rate” and the “ultimate consequences could be second only to a global nuclear war.” It was then that David Suzuki — one of Canada’s best known television hosts even back then — was captivated.

He wrote a book, “A Matter of Survival,” on the emerging scientific consensus around the dangers of climate change and then started his own foundation, dedicated to finding and promoting solutions. And he’s never looked back.

Accomplished geneticist, gifted communicator, author of 16 books, recipient of 29 honorary degrees, Companion of the Order of Canada and cultural icon from coast to coast, 87-year-old Suzuki is a still strident advocate for the climate and the planet.

Since announcing his retirement as host of the CBC’s flagship environmental program, “The Nature of Things,” after 44 years, he says he’s been “freed” from the travel schedule and the strictures of the national broadcaster and can now focus on his role as an elder, imparting lessons learned from a life at the nexus of science and activism.

He came into the Star’s podcast studio for a wide-ranging talk about his career, the climate movement, technological and nature-based solutions and how he sees his role evolving after TV. These are some highlights from the conversation, edited for length and clarity:

On the role of elders

When you’re an elder, you don’t have the same vested interests. I don’t have to kiss anybody’s ass to get a job, a raise, or a promotion. I’m way beyond worrying about fame or money or power. So it allows me to speak the truth from my heart without all of that stuff tempering what I say. And I believe this is the most important part of my life. As elders, we have had the privilege of living an entire life. We’ve made mistakes. We’ve had failures. We had maybe some successes. Those are life lessons. And our job now is to sift through that life for some of the important lessons to pass on to the young ones so they don’t make the same mistakes.

I was involved in the peace movement way back in the ’60s and ’70s, and one of the most powerful groups was retired admirals and generals against nuclear war. These are guys that had gone through the system saying: ‘We need nuclear deterrence. We’ve got to build up our arsenal.’ And the minute they retired, they could tell us the truth. They said: ‘This is crazy. These are not making us safer.’ And they had a powerful impact. So I call on CEOs and corporate presidents, for God’s sakes, once you’ve retired and made your money, speak the truth. Tell us the truth.

On his own bias

We have been hammered all through the years that I’ve done “The Nature of Things” because we’ve covered issues of logging, of the disappearance of birds, of (the harms caused by) fossil fuels. And does the corporate sector go, “I wonder what if ‘The Nature of Things’ is right?”

That’s never the response. It’s always: ‘You’re biased, CBC. You’re biased, ‘The Nature of Things.’ And when the criticism comes to me it’s: ‘Get that guy off the air!’ or ‘Fire him from the university!’ And they’re all ways of not confronting the issues being raised.

Yes, we are biased. There’s no doubt about it. But our bias is that we are deeply embedded in the natural world. And whatever we do to the natural world, we’re doing directly to ourselves. That’s our bias.

On who bears responsibility for addressing climate change

It’s people, but it’s also the system we’re embedded in. We all have contributed in various ways. The problem is that we’ve created systems — and this is at the heart of it — (that) have disengaged ourselves from the web of relationships (in nature).

We think the world is a pyramid in which we’re at the top, and everything else below is for us. All of our laws, our economy, our politics are built on that assumption. We’re at the top of the pyramid and we’re in charge of it all. We need to remember that we’re part of a web of relationships. We’re just a little strand within it.

On whether individual or collective action is more important

Both. People are always looking for a magic bullet. There isn’t one. They say, ‘What can we do? What’s the one thing?’ Well, you know, we can change the way we behave. And there are ways to make a big difference individually. And I could talk about that. But the other thing is that we’re living within a system within which big decisions are made and we have to hammer those who represent us.

We say democracy is the best system, (because) all people eligible to vote now can determine government policy. But children don’t vote. Future generations don’t vote. And yet they are impacted more heavily by decisions made today than we are.

On nuclear power

Of course, nuclear doesn’t have the greenhouse gas emissions that burning fossil fuels does. But I think what we’ve learned that when you put all of your eggs in big, big technology, you become very, very vulnerable. There’s no way that nuclear can be a part of the challenge we have right now.

Nuclear couldn’t possibly kick in within the next 20 years as a significant (solution). And that’s if you had an all-out building program. SMRs — small (modular) nuclear reactors — we don’t even know whether they’re a possibility. The scale of small nuclear reactors that would be needed to deal with it would be enormous. And it’s way in the future. We’re dealing (with) right now and nukes are not the answer.

They (take a long time to build) and they’re the most expensive. And, you know, there are all of the (other) problems associated with it. I know the industry likes to say, ‘Oh, no, people weren’t killed by nuclear power.’ We have no idea what the long-run effect is when you’re creating isotopes that are going to last for thousands of years.

On critical mineral mining for batteries

Mining is one of the most destructive activities we have. And I think the place we have to do almost all of our mining now is in our debris, our waste areas. We’ve got to start mining our garbage dumps and all of the places where we’ve thrown all of the crap that we’ve made and consumed.

Batteries certainly must be a part of the future towards which we’re going. I think that lithium right now is the best atom that we can use. But there are sodium batteries that are coming out. They’re heavier. They can’t hold as much energy. I think that we have to hope that there will be in the future batteries of a totally different dimension.

But the problem now is lithium has become the atom of choice and the demand is going to be enormous. Right now a decision is going to be made about whether we should be mining the ocean bottom, because there are huge lithium deposits. This is the absolute insanity now of our species. We are a terrestrial animal and we ought to be very careful. We don’t know anything about the oceans that cover 70 per cent of the planet and we want to go in and trash it in order to get lithium? That’s not the solution.

On why Canada needs to cut its emissions, though we can’t fix climate change on our own

That was the same argument (I heard) at Kyoto in ’97. The Alberta delegation was there and they were saying that we’re a trivial part (of global emissions). Why should we be subjected to (limits)? And my response then as it is now is, first of all, we are a part of the major contributors and we are the rich countries. What right have we got to ask the developing world not to do what we’ve done?

We’re setting the example for the poorer countries to try to follow. They want to achieve the kind of wealth and position that we’re in. We’re the example. If we can’t show that this is the wrong path, that we’ve got to change, why the hell should they pay any attention to us?

On nature’s version of nature-based solutions

The problem that we face is we’ve run out of time. We simply don’t have the time. Over the history of life on the planet for 3.9 billion years, there have been these five mega-extinctions. Ninety-five per cent of organisms disappear from the fossil record. And nature recovered. I mean, that’s such an astounding shift. But it took 10 million years. And this is the point. Nature will always win out.

People say, ‘We’re destroying the planet. We’re changing the planet, destroying the biosphere.’ But the earth and nature will carry on. Radically different, perhaps, but it’ll carry on. It doesn’t need us.

We’re trying to ramp up nature. So people are going, ‘We’ve got to plant six trillion trees.’ We’ve got to stop using nature as an aid to us, to talk about a forest or a wetland as a carbon sink. No, they’re this entity that has evolved on its own and it does what it does. We’ve got to just leave nature alone. But we won’t because we don’t have time.

So we’ll plant trees in the assumption they will suck in enough carbon to get us out of the problem. And it’s going to take time. And there’s no way we can ramp that up.

On nature surprising us

After (the Second World War), we ended up in Leamington, Ont., on Lake Erie, and every spring there was a hatch of mayflies you wouldn’t believe. They hatch out of the water. They live for 24 hours and they’re basically a flying gonad. They’ve just got to find a partner, mate and die and their carcasses would pile up on the beaches a meter deep. They’d cover houses so that you couldn’t see through the windows. They would cover the highways and cars would get into an accident skidding on their bodies. Within a decade, they were gone. That immense biomass was gone because of pesticides. Farmers began to apply them in massive amounts and they washed into the lake. And Lake Erie soon after that was declared dead.

Lake Erie, I gather, has rebounded now. And people are writing to me all the time saying: ‘the mayflies are back.’ Yeah, they’re back, but nothing like what they were. Our problem is that we forget what nature’s abundance really was.

On changing baselines

Daniel Polley, one of Canada’s eminent fisheries biologist, started this idea of shifting baselines. Every generation we forget what it was (like) in the previous generation.

Callum Roberts wrote a book about the oceans and there’s a shot on a dock in Florida, taken about 50 years ago. And you see the fishermen standing there with these giant fish groupers and things. And they’re all very happy and proud with these fish.

Then there’s a shot on the same dock taken 30 years later. And now the fish, they don’t have the giants, they’re medium-sized ones. The fishermen are delighted. They’re happy as can be.

And then the final one is a current picture, same dock. And now the people are holding (tiny) fish. And each generation thinks this is great. That gives you an idea of the extent to which we’ve really diminished the planet’s plenty.

We don’t remember what it was like. That’s why among Indigenous people, elders are so important to them. They remember the world as they learned it through their elders.

This article was written by Stephen Thomas, the Clean Energy Manager at the David Suzuki Foundation, and was published in the Toronto Star on June 3, 2023.

We all need and use electricity — to heat and cool our homes, power our online lives and charge our cars or power transit commutes.

Canada has set a goal of 100 per cent zero-emissions electricity by 2035, with new clean electricity regulations expected this year.

The benefits of adding wind and solar to power that electricity go deeper than fighting climate change; they include more affordable energy bills, healthier homes and cities and more good quality jobs.

The stories we often hear of wind, solar and other renewables rarely reflect the current reality. Today, wind and solar are proven technologies with decades of successful operation in Canada. They’re now the least expensive sources of electricity in history — cheaper than electricity from gas, oil, coal or nuclear.

Canada’s electricity grid is aging and needs upgrading as we begin to use much more electricity to power our lives. The good news is that even with these additional investments, the cost of household energy will, within time, go down for everyone as we move away from fossil fuels and toward the efficient use of clean electricity.

With affordability top of mind, low-income families need direct financial support to unlock these benefits and to access building retrofits and energy-saving technologies like electric heat pumps. A national strategy to alleviate energy poverty would ensure those suffering from the high costs of fossil fuels get a break as they transition to cleaner options.

Renewable energy is also local, secure, stable energy. It’s true that the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine. But grids can be reliably run with secure power using energy storage, new transmission connections between provinces and Canada’s significant existing hydroelectric resources.

The fallout of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and other disruptive global events speak to the price volatility of fossil fuels.

It’s impossible to predict the increasingly common price spikes for fossil gas to heat our homes or gasoline to fuel our cars.

Contracts for renewable electricity often lock in low, predictable pricing for 20 to 30 years, without being so beholden to global markets or supply chains.

Building all of this new electricity infrastructure and upgrading homes to be more energy efficient will create jobs. Lots of jobs. A Clean Energy Canada report estimates that meeting clean energy goals will lead to a net gain of 700,000 jobs by 2050 in Canada — even accounting for job losses in the oil and gas sector during the energy transition.

Indigenous communities are leaders in clean electricity projects and deserve to be at the forefront of these benefits as a key element of energy sovereignty and economic reconciliation.

The energy transition’s health benefits are often overlooked. We’re used to living with the health effects caused by fossil fuels, but we shouldn’t be.

Every day, more than 42 people in Canada die from health complications caused by burning fossil fuels, according to a federal government report. This has economic impacts to the overstretched health care system reaching more than $120 billion a year.

With so many benefits, why aren’t we seeing a push for more renewables? The foundation for this transition has been set with an unprecedented tens of billions of dollars in investments for clean electricity in the March federal budget. But these investments will only pay off if they’re coupled with strong clean electricity regulations that ensure a move away from fossil fuels to renewables.

Despite the oil and gas lobby’s claims to the contrary, there has never been a better time to leave fossil fuels behind once and for all.

The moment for affordable, secure, renewable power has arrived. It’s time to lock in new clean electricity regulations that ensure we get to 100 per cent clean electricity by 2035. The sooner we start this work, the sooner communities will begin to see the benefits.

Extreme weather events drive up the cost of home insurance

This article was written by Rosa Saba and was published in the Toronto Star on June 3, 2023.

The wildfires plaguing residents in Alberta and Nova Scotia are part of a larger trend that’s driving up the cost of home insurance as extreme weather becomes more common, insurance experts say.

“Premiums in Canada have been increasing for some time already,” said Marcos Alvarez, global head of insurance at DBRS Morningstar.

After a large event like the wildfires dominating Canadian headlines, customers in those geographical areas might see their policies re-priced, said Alvarez, or might see insurers becoming more involved: “When you have losses of this magnitude, you might reassess how you approach your underwriting price.”

Over time, these changes on a local level will contribute to the larger trend, he said.

According to a July 2022 report by Ratesdotca, home insurance premiums in Ontario had risen about 10 per cent in less than a year, with increasing incidences of severe weather one of several factors contributing to higher costs for homeowners, especially those in smaller population centres.

A similar report published a year earlier found that home insurance rate growth was well outpacing inflation, with average home insurance rates in Alberta up 140 per cent over 10 years to $1,779 as of early 2021, while in Ontario the average annual rate was up 64 per cent to $1,284.

Larger losses are the biggest contributor to higher premiums, whether those losses are due to natural disasters, inflation or other rising costs, said Daniel Ivans, an insurance expert with Ratesdotca.

“When you have a loss, it’s more expensive now than it’s ever been,” he said.

According to the Insurance Bureau of Canada’s annual report, severe weather caused $3.1 billion in insured damage in 2022, up from $2.1 billion in 2021, and the third worst year in Canadian history. The Fort McMurray fire put 2016 in the highest spot at almost $6 billion.

The increasing cost of insuring homes at risk for damage from extreme weather was highlighted this week in California, when insurer State Farm announced it would no longer accept commercial and residential insurance applications in the state due to “historic increases in construction costs outpacing inflation, rapidly growing catastrophe exposure and a challenging reinsurance market.”

The trend where certain risks become less, or completely, uninsurable because of climate change is happening around the world, said Alvarez. State Farm isn’t even the first insurer to leave the California market, he noted.

Insurers in Canada face the same problems as State Farm, said Craig Stewart, IBC’s vice-president of climate change and federal issues. These include higher costs for rebuilding and reinsurance, plus more frequent events like wildfires, he said.

But it’s unlikely Canada will see an insurer make the same move as State Farm any time soon, Alvarez said. For one, home insurance prices in California are regulated, meaning insurers have limits on how much they can charge, while in Canada insurers don’t have the same barriers.

The California situation is extreme, Stewart said, with fires becoming not just more common but essentially a predictable event.

“Living in California is akin to living on a floodplain in Canada,” he said. “We know that the disaster is going to happen.”

Ivans said while insurers in Canada sometimes pause new business amid a disaster, this happens rarely and is only a matter of days or weeks.

Alvarez said while homeowners are currently covered for wildfires as part of standard home insurance, they’re underinsured for other risks, including flooding.

When a segment becomes uninsurable, it’s a public policy problem, he said. That’s often when the government steps in, which it did with flooding, promising to create a national low-cost flood insurance program in the latest federal budget.

Alvarez thinks we could see the Canadian government getting more involved in insurance in the future if other natural disasters become increasingly difficult to insure against.

“Wildfire could be a potential candidate for some sort of public program if this becomes more and more prevalent,” he said.

As weather events become more extreme, it is becoming more challenging for insurers to keep coverage affordable without government partnerships, said Stewart.

This opinion was written by Marsha Lederman and was published in the Globe & Mail on June 3, 2023.

Canada’s wildfire summer of 2023 has already made it into the record books, long before summer officially begins. This past week, as the calendar flipped to June, the country, east and west, was on fire. In Nova Scotia, wildfires have destroyed homes and sent people fleeing through walls of smoke and flames. This is happening not only in remote areas, but in the suburbs of Halifax. In British Columbia and Alberta, fires have been raging for weeks, displacing thousands.

In a week when hundreds more Albertans had to evacuate their homes, voters in that province elected a Premier whose stance on climate change should concern every Canadian.

Danielle Smith’s “track record on the issue spins like a greatesthits playlist of the past 15 years in climate-denial talking points,” Chris Turner, the award-winning author of How to Be a Climate Optimist: Blueprints for a Better World, wrote in The Globe and Mail days before the election.

This is a Premier who, on the campaign trail as wildfires raged, told UCP supporters at a political rally about the declaration of a state of emergency before announcing it to the wider public.

A leader who, in her victory speech Monday night, called out Ottawa for what she said were soon-to-be-announced environmental policies, including new restrictions on electricity generation from natural gas and a de facto production cap on the oil and gas sector.

“As Premier, I cannot, under any circumstances, allow these contemplated federal policies to be inflicted upon Albertans. I simply can’t and I won’t,” she said.

Even if those circumstances are the wildfires ravaging her province, apparently.

Without any sense of shame or irony, she made this declaration (to cheers) three weeks after asking Ottawa for relief funding to deal with the wildfires. While a funding request is entirely reasonable, Ms. Smith so consistently and unjustifiably bites the hand that she is asking to feed her that it is hard not to listen to her and think: hypocrisy.

To deny a connection between the climate crisis and Canada’s increasing wildfire crisis is folly. John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast, argues with force and facts that we have to reduce our emissions as soon as possible in order to minimize the climate emergency’s already lethal effects.

“Wildfire seasons have been lengthening, and fires have been burning with a greater destructive intensity,” wrote Mr. Vaillant in the Globe in May.

Mr. Vaillant, a Governor-General’s Literary Award-winning author, said he’s angry. We should all be. Not just about government policies that don’t do enough to fight climate change (or in fact actively fight against the fight). But also about government decisions that hurt our ability to deal with emergencies when they hit.

In Alberta in 2019, the UCP government cut the elite team of firefighters who were trained to rappel from helicopters to tackle wildfires early, before they grow. What difference could that team have made this spring?

In Nova Scotia, three of the municipalities affected by the Halifax-area Tantallon fire had been identified by the auditor-general as having inadequate water sources to fight fires.

When there is an emergency, you want the person in charge to be smart, diplomatic and fair. Someone who doesn’t burn bridges in the name of bravado and vote-courting. Someone who will abandon partisanship for leadership. You don’t want a disaster trying to lead you through a disaster.

With her party shut out of Edmonton ridings, Ms. Smith announced this week that she would create a council of defeated UCP candidates from that area to advise her on all things Edmonton. Rather than listen to the MLAs Edmontonians elected, she’s going to go to the losers for advice.

If you want something else to be depressed about in Alberta, the UCP candidate who compared trans people to feces in chocolatechip cookies handily won her riding on Monday.

Another news item that may have caught your attention during Canada’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week concerns artificial intelligence. A group of top AI researchers and executives released a chilling warning: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” their statement read.

Terrifying, right? But the apocalypse need not be AI-generated. We are on track to do it ourselves, as we continue to elect not serious people (to borrow a term from Succession’s Logan Roy) because we don’t want to pay a few cents more to gas up our cars or power our homes.

We’re not going to need AI to cause our extinction event. We just need to keep electing politicians who don’t take the climate emergency seriously, even when its effects are ripping through the province they are supposed to govern.

This article was written by Lindsay Jones, Frederik-Xavier Duhamel, and Bill Curry, and was published in the Globe & Mail on June 3, 2023.

Largest fire recorded in Nova Scotia’s history grew to more than 23,000 hectares Friday

Wildfires are raging from British Columbia to the Atlantic, forcing thousands to evacuate and overwhelming firefighting capacity in some areas.

The largest fire recorded in Nova Scotia’s history, located in the southwest of the province, grew to more than 23,000 hectares Friday, provincial officials said, despite a constant attack from aerial waterbombers and firefighters on the ground.

Dave Rockwood, of the province’s Department of Natural Resources, said bone-dry forests, gusting winds and a lack of rainfall set the conditions for the blaze. “We need the weather to give us a hand when fires get this big,” he said.

Lots of rain is on the way to Nova Scotia, Environment Canada meteorologist Bob Robichaud said, but wildfires west of Halifax and in the southwestern Barrington Lake area have already forced the evacuation of at least 21,000 people and burned about 200 homes this week.

Jessika Hepburn, a resident of Birchtown, in southwestern Nova Scotia, said she and others are rallying to protect and inform vulnerable residents there and in nearby Shelburne. About half the municipality’s population – roughly 6,700 people – have been evacuated from their homes.

She said she has been going door to door to update people and ensure they have masks and water, especially those who may not know they need to leave because their telephone and internet services are not working.

“It’s a very terrifying time,” she said. “I have concern for our elders who are breathing in smoky air, who don’t have HEPA filters. There’s been no delivery of N95 masks or bottled water.”

The Canadian Red Cross has registered 7,000 affected households in Nova Scotia. The province announced on Friday that small businesses in evacuated zones would be eligible for onetime grants of $2,500.

Federal Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair said Friday that the Canadian Forces “are moving quickly” to mobilize, train and deploy an unspecified number of members in Nova Scotia. He said four waterbombers, contracted by the Nova Scotia government from Montana, would arrive Friday, and two more on Saturday.

At a news conference in Toronto, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the federal government is prepared to support firefighting efforts across the country in whatever way it can.

“This is a scary time for a lot of people, from coast, to coast, to coast,” he said.

The Canada Interagency Forest Fire Centre reported that, as of Friday afternoon, there were 324 fires burning across the country, with 167 considered out of control. That’s a big jump from Thursday, when the agency reported 209 fires, with 87 out of control.

In Quebec, there were 116 active wildfires Friday in the “intensive zone,” which covers roughly the southern half of the province, according to the Société de protection des forêts contre le feu, the organization fighting wildfires in the province.

SOPFEU is not equipped to fight so many fires simultaneously, spokesperson Stéphane Caron said, meaning it has had to prioritize. The organization has deployed about 400 firefighters to fight only 21 wildfires, Mr. Caron said.

Nearly 11,000 hectares have already burned in the zone, more than 55 times the past decade’s average at this time of the year, according to SOPFEU.

Mr. Caron said a fire near Sept-Îles, in the Côte-Nord region of Eastern Quebec, had damaged power lines, causing tens of thousands of outages Thursday.

The mayor of Sept-Îles, Steeve Beaupré, declared a state of emergency. He said about 4,000 people had been evacuated as of Friday afternoon, a total that could increase.

“I have never seen an evacuation of such magnitude” in Sept-Îles, he said.

Another 1,500 people were ordered to evacuate from the nearby Mani-Utenam community of the Innu Takuaikan Uashat Mak Mani-Utenam First Nation, spokesperson Jean-Claude Therrien Pinette said.

A combination of dry weather and heavy damage from the eastern spruce budworm had rendered the surrounding forest particularly vulnerable to fire this year, according to Mr. Therrien Pinette.

Wildfires also forced the evacuations of about 500 homes in Chapais, in Northern Quebec, according to Jean-Raphaël Drolet of the Sûreté du Québec, the provincial police.

In B.C., there were 55 active wildfires Friday, including nine considered out of control, according to the province’s online emergency map. The Peace River Regional District, the Village of Lytton and the Lytton First Nation were all under evacuation orders.

In Alberta, wildfires have burned nearly 1.2 million hectares, almost 100 times more than last year at this time. Rain and cooler temperatures have helped with the firefighting effort, but a state of emergency remains in place. There are 56 active blazes, 15 of which are considered out of control.

Christie Tucker, a spokesperson for Alberta Wildfire, said during a news conference Friday that about 1,700 local firefighters have been joined by 900 from out of province.

”It was a good day for firefighters yesterday,” Ms. Tucker said. “We saw minimal growth on wildfires in the province, allowing them to make progress on containing the fires.”

There are already more than 500 firefighters from the U.S., Australia and New Zealand assisting in Alberta, according to Mr. Blair’s office, and more than 700 additional firefighters from those countries and South Africa are expected to arrive in Alberta and Nova Scotia in the coming week.

Separate from the federal announcement, there are 17 firefighters arriving in Nova Scotia from New England on Saturday, with an additional 18 coming Monday. Another 40 from Costa Rica are arriving next week through the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre.

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This article was written by Fiona Harvey and was published in The Guardian on June 2, 2023.

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This article was written by Fiona Harvey and was published in The Guardian on June 2, 2023.

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 New Brunswick aircraft drops a mix of water and fire retardant as it passes over the wildfire in Barrington Lake, Nova Scotia, Canada in this social media handout image released May 31, 2023. Nova Scotia Government/Handout via REUTERS

June 2 (Reuters) – Wildfires are common in Canada’s western provinces, but this year the eastern province of Nova Scotia is reeling from its worst-ever wildfire season, forcing the federal government to send in the military.

The Atlantic province has had nearly 200 wildfires so far this year that have burned more than 22,000 hectares and displaced more than 25,000 people. In 2022, there were just 152 fires that burned 3,390 hectares.

Across Canada, some 2.7 million hectares have been scorched so far this year, equal to more than five million football fields, federal Minister of Emergency Preparedness Bill Blair told reporters on Thursday.

HOW UNUSUAL ARE WILDFIRES IN NOVA SCOTIA?

Situated on Canada’s eastern seaboard, Nova Scotia’s climate is heavily influenced by the North Atlantic Ocean, which brings higher humidity and more moderate temperatures than many other parts of the country. Fires are not unusual but tend to be much smaller than those in the west.

The region is covered by what is known as the ‘Acadian Forest’, which contains plenty of broadleaf trees like sugar maples mixed with evergreens such as conifers. Broadleaf trees are less flammable than evergreens because their branches and leaves are further from the ground, and their leaves hold more moisture.

The Acadian forest is much less prone to large wildfires than forests in western Canada.

WHAT’S CAUSING THEM?

Atlantic Canada received low snowfall this winter, followed by an exceptionally dry spring. Nova Scotia’s capital Halifax received just 120 millimetres of rain between March and May, roughly a third of the average, according to Weather Network meteorologist Michael Carter.

A scorching late May heatwave pushed temperatures in Halifax to 33 degrees Celsius (91.4 F) on Thursday, around 10 degrees Celsius above normal for this time of year.

Most of the wildfires are believed to be accidentally caused by human activity.

Ellen Whitman, a research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service, said there is also speculation that trees felled during Hurricane Fiona, which hit Atlantic Canada in September 2022, or killed by an infestation of forest pests may be providing more fuel than usual for wildfires, but that theory requires further investigation.

Countries investing in solar, wind: report

This article was written by Frank Jordans and was published in the Toronto Star on June 2, 2023.

The world is set to add a record amount of renewable electricity capacity this year as governments and consumers seek to offset high energy prices and take advantage of a boom in solar power, according to a new report Thursday.

The International Energy Agency said high fossil fuel prices — resulting from Russia’s attack on Ukraine — and concerns about energy security had boosted the rollout of solar and wind power installations, which are expected to reach 440 gigawatts in 2023.

That’s about a third more than the world added the previous year, taking the global installed capacity to 4,500 GW, roughly the combined total power output of the United States and China, the Paris-based agency said.

“The global energy crisis has shown renewables are critical for making energy supplies not just cleaner but also more secure and affordable,” said Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director. “Governments are responding with efforts to deploy them faster.”

Recent incentives to install renewables introduced by the Biden administration are already driving a significant uptake in the United States.

About two-thirds of this year’s increase in renewable power capacity will come from photovoltaic, with both large-scale solar farms and consumer rooftop installations seeing significant growth.

IEA said manufacturing capacity for PV components was also surging, especially in China.

Construction of new wind farms is predicted to rebound after a period of low growth. However, in contrast to solar manufacturing, the supply chains for wind turbines aren’t growing fast enough to meet demand, the agency said.

Birol also cautioned power grids must be upgraded and expanded to cope with the intermittent nature of solar and wind power, which require a fundamentally different approach by network operators compared with existing coal, gas or nuclear plants.

The report forecast that several European countries, including Spain, Germany and Ireland, will see wind and solar’s combined share of their overall annual electricity generation top 40 per cent by 2024.

Shifting the global economy away from fossil fuels is one of the most important steps for reducing greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.

Experts say that to meet the Paris climate accord’s goal of limiting temperature rise since pre-industrial times to 1.5 C, emissions need to be halved by 2030 and cut to “net zero” by mid-century.

The International Renewable Energy Agency, a separate body, has called for a major increase in wind and solar investments. Nations are expected to discuss setting an international target for the rollout of renewable energy at this year’s UN climate summit in Dubai.