Lookahead: Was 2021 a horrible fluke for BC? Or a preview of 2022?

Jordan This year was as bad as it gets for British Columbia, right? It’s hard to imagine any province suffering the devastation of three separate, rare, and deadly climate events within the span of less than 12 months. It feels almost impossible, so is it?

For the next few days, we’ll be looking ahead to 2022 and trying to give you a sense of what it could bring, from labor to the pandemic and yes, to climate driven disasters.

Even given the changes that we’ve made to the global climate via our emissions, BC’s disasters were unprecedented. So how much of this was a preview of the new reality and how much of it was driven by climate, sure, but also just terrible luck? The answer to this question will likely come in 2022 when we reach late spring or early summer and it starts to get hot, and that answer will go a long way to determining everything from how the province builds back, to how it adapts, to how far along we are on the climate curve, and to how livable parts of this province might be a few years down the line.

I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings, this is The Big Story. Ainslie Cruickshank is a freelance journalist based in BC. She writes about climate, environment, and natural resources. She’s appeared in many publications, including for our friends at The Narwhal . Hey, Ainslie.

Ainslie Hi Jordan.

Jordan Thanks so much for joining the show.

Ainslie Thanks for having me, it’s great to be here.

Jordan I’m going to open with a question that I’ve asked a few people this past year, and I keep hoping for a different answer, but I’m probably not going to get one. What has it been like reporting on climate in British Columbia this year?

Ainslie I think this year has definitely felt different because of the scale of the disasters and the fact that they really seem to hit one after another. You know, I think in previous years we have seen bad wildfires and damaging floods, but this year, just having them all together like that, and again, just the scale of the, of the damage, it definitely felt different. Like the stories were no longer warnings for the future, but that the things we’d been warning about and that scientists had been warning about for years, were actually hitting.

Jordan And if you can divorce this question from the previous one, I also just want to ask you, what has it been like living in BC, through all this the past year? Cause I think out here we kind of feel like you’re getting a preview of what most of the planet will eventually experience to some degree.

Ainslie Yeah, I think it’s definitely felt a bit surreal. So I live in Vancouver, so I think it was really the heat wave and the smoke from the wildfires that affected me most directly. And you know, even in Vancouver where we didn’t get as hot temperatures as some of the other places in the province, it was just a really intense heat and it felt like during those really hot days that almost just managing the temperature became such a focus of the day. It became almost difficult to focus on work and it was really just trying to decide, okay, ‘when do I close my windows to try to keep this moderately cooler air inside?’ as the day just kept heating up. It was a bit of a shock in a lot of ways.

Jordan Before we get into the specifics and the future of BC for next year and probably indefinitely, could you maybe run us through the major weather events that BC saw? Because I feel like for people who haven’t lived through it, it can get easy to forget one or two of them.

Ainslie Yes, for sure. Lets start with the heat wave. In late June, a heat dome stalled over BC. And over the next few days, we saw unprecedented temperatures across the province. The heat was stifling and the impacts were really severe. I’m sure a lot of people saw those headlines about the starfish and crabs and muscles being basically boiled on the coast. Farmers lost crops, and most seriously, hundreds of people died. And a group of scientists with the World Weather Attribution Initiative, they did a rapid analysis of the heat wave and they said it was virtually impossible without climate change.

And that hot, dry weather really pushed up the wildfire risk in BC and pushed the wildfire risk to extreme. I’m sure everybody’s familiar now with Lytton, this small village, it’s kind of right at the confluence of the Fraser river and the Thompson rivers. And the town set something like three consecutive temperature records during the heat wave. I think the official records say it got up to 49.6 degrees. I heard from some locals who said that it was even hotter than that actually, that their thermometers read warmer than that. Which is hard to imagine, I think, if you haven’t experienced that temperature.

And then a fire sparked and it destroyed 90% of the buildings in Lytton. And it happened fast. I mean, some residents said that they had just minutes to get out. They grabbed what they could, but people lost so much. And then over the next two weeks, there was just more and more fires starting. The BC wildfire service in their a summary of the season, I think they said an average of 40 new wildfires was starting every day during those first two weeks of July.

And then over the course of the season, thousands of people had to leave their homes and evacuate their communities because of the threat of wildfires. And then the fall comes and I think a lot of people felt a little bit of relief with the arrival of cooler weather and some rain, and that really helped to dampen the fire risk. But of course, now we know that that relief didn’t last too long.

In mid November, there was a powerful atmospheric river that brought days of really heavy rains. And the damage I think was shocking for a lot of us. There were mudslides that tore up highways, people were left stranded in their cars. They had to be rescued by helicopter. There were communities that were entirely cut off from the rest of the province and tragically, we saw more people die. And the flooding was just extreme. We saw the entire city of Merritt was evacuated because floodwaters took out their wastewater treatment. Hundreds of homes have been affected. Some people have been allowed back in now, but I think a few hundred buildings, the city says that they’re unlivable and they are assessing damage there.

And then there’s Abbotsford, which you’ve covered on this show as well. The Sumas Prairie, which is an agricultural hub, was just completely inundated with water. I think we’ve all seen by now those videos of people using boats to ferry supplies and rescue farm animals. And, you know, these images just really stick with you. And it was devastating. Hundreds of farm animals died in those floods.

Jordan Can you maybe explain a little bit more about something you just touched on, which is that when you said the heat dome created these conditions that created more severe wildfires. And I wonder also, I think I heard something about this, but maybe I don’t understand it correctly, that the damage from the fires made mudslides more likely when the rains came. It just feels like one feeds into another until you end up with this escalating damage.

Ainslie Yes, that’s definitely right. So the heat waves, that really intense heat and it was really dry, we didn’t have any rain. And so what it does is it dries out the grasses and the brush and the forests, and that’s the fuel for the fire. And so when a fire sparks, it’s going to spread much more quickly and more intensely, and it’s more difficult to fight. If that happened after a nice, heavy rain, a fire might spark, but it might not spread as quickly or as easily. So those hot, dry conditions, we didn’t have just one heat wave in Vancouver, in BC, we had several recurring periods of hot dry weather. I think BC wildfire said that in late June and July, we were seeing kind of fire conditions that we would more typically have seen later in August in BC.

So then you have these wildfires, these intense wildfires, it can strip the landscape so that vegetation that would have absorbed some of the water during heavy rain, isn’t there. And it also changes the conditions of the soil so that they’re almost repellent of water. So instead of absorbing that water deep into the ground, it’s more likely to run off. And it’s not to say that we wouldn’t have seen any flooding if not for the fires, but in some areas that experienced fires and then these really heavy storms, it may have made the flooding worse.

Jordan I’m going to ask you what I asked a reporter from our station out there, CityNews 1130, who answered it in terms of like the immediate response, but maybe you can help with the big picture. How would you describe the government’s action and response to these escalating disasters?

Ainslie I think definitely in the immediate aftermath, the focus is on emergency response and getting support to people who need it and repairing critical damage. And I think there had been some criticisms about that moving too slowly in some situations, and perhaps there not being enough support for people. In terms of the climate, I think it really points to a need for a greater focus on adaptation. We know that BC can expect more heatwaves, more wildfires, more flooding, so we need to be looking at how to manage those risks.

And I think that is a two-part response. It means that we need to be investing in adaptation. So whether that’s improving the diking system or changing where we build so that rivers have more space to naturally flood without it impacting people. And then also I think we need to be investing in our emergency response. So we saw emergency responders have to deal now with a series of disasters. And so we need to make sure that we have the capacity to respond when these things happen, because we know that we will be seeing more climate related disasters.

Jordan In terms of more disasters, I don’t think anybody would dispute now that they’re going to be happening more frequently. But what I do wonder about in terms of the future is, and maybe this is hopefully naive, is if this year still couldn’t have been kind of a really bad fluke, just in terms of severe events coming one on top of another and playing into each other, like you just described. Is there a chance of that or we should prepare for this every year?

Ainslie I think what happened this year is still rare, still an extreme kind of version of what could happen in the future. I think BC has seen floods and fires in the same year before. Usually that flooding is sort of during the spring runoff, but I think that the degree of the disasters and coming one on top of the other, was still in some ways, a unique situation.

So looking just at the heat wave that, the World Weather Attribution Analysis that I mentioned, they said that even in today’s climate, that heat wave was still a one in 1000 year event. So that’s still pretty rare. It means that every year there’s a one in 1000 chance of that happening. But they did say that if we get to two degrees warming above pre-industrial times, and right now we’re around 1.2 degrees warming, that this type of heat wave could happen every five to 10 years. So that’s a lot more frequently that that risk suddenly increases. We also know that with warming, there could be more of these atmospheric rivers and stronger atmospheric rivers.

So while I think that right now, these kinds of extreme events are still relatively rare, if we don’t get warming under control, these disasters and the fact that they can happen one after another, I think suddenly becomes a little more likely.

Jordan I’m not asking this question for 2022 or even 2023 or 2024 necessarily, but you know, we cover climate change, a lot on this program as well and cynically, I’m not counting on us holding to 1.5 degrees. So if we do get to, say, that that two degree level, given everything that you’ve just described, what does that mean for the future of BC as a livable place with the robust agriculture industry?

Ainslie So I think that there’s still a lot we can do to also lessen the impact of extreme events. So definitely if if we aren’t able to control warming, which I’m hopeful that we will be able to limit it, or at least prevent the very worst case scenario. But I think we also have to acknowledge that there is some warming that’s already baked in. So we’re going to continue to see heat waves and wildfires. We’re going to continue to see heavy rain storms. But I think this is where that question of adaptation and what we can do to sort of lessen the effect of those events, becomes really important.

So when we’re talking about heat waves, I think we need to be looking at preparing to manage higher temperatures. And so a lot of homes in BC don’t have air conditioning because for most of the past years it’s been fine. Like Vancouver, you didn’t need air conditioning. I didn’t have a fan until this year. I really didn’t meet it. There was those few days every summer where you were like, ‘oh, I wish I could get it’, but then they pass, and so you never picked one up. But I think suddenly maybe we need to start looking at building codes and making sure that homes have air conditioning. This was obviously a strange year because this heat wave happened in the pandemic, but making sure that people have access to cooling centres, thinking about shaded areas. There’s a lot of communities still in Vancouver and other places where it’s just concrete, we need green spaces. We need to invest in emergency response services. Think about where we’re building our homes: are they in floodplains? Look at forest management and flood management and invest in those things, so that when we get these heat waves and wildfires and rainstorms, we’re just a little bit better prepared.

Jordan Do we know anything specific about the government’s plans to prepare or to adapt? And I say this with sympathy for them, knowing that right now, they’re actually still in the middle of trying to clean up from these massive floods. So I’m not saying like tomorrow, but have they spoken, at least, to that understanding that we’ve gotta be ready for this stuff?

Ainslie Yes. I think that there’s definitely work that’s happening. The BC government has a draft preparedness and adaptation plan that they’ve released. They held consultations on it. So I expect we’ll be seeing the final plan in the next few months. There has been some criticism of that plan, in that some groups have raised concerns that it doesn’t contain enough concrete actions. It doesn’t contain timelines and funding commitments necessarily for actions. But I think what it does show is that there is some awareness that this is important. I think there’s lots of communities that are also looking at where their risks are and planning for how to adapt. But I think what these events have shown us is that that work needs to happen a lot more quickly. It needs to be a priority, which means that there needs to be money invested in that work.

And for communities, local governments, which are really on the frontline of a lot of these disasters, many of them don’t necessarily have the resources to take on all of that work on their own. So the union of BC municipalities, they’ve asked the BC government to direct a portion of the carbon tax revenues to a stable pot of funding that municipalities and local governments can apply to, to fund some of this adaptation work. So communities need to be starting to do that risk analysis, look at where they’re seeing risks and then planning for how they’re going to address and minimize and adapt to those risks. So that, if those rainstorms come, or if those heat waves or those wildfires arrive, we can lessen the impacts of them.

Jordan When you talk to your fellow British Columbians, and I’m not talking here about fellow climate reporters or your colleagues at the Narwhal, or some of the other places that are covering this, just like ordinary people that you encounter during the course of your day, has this year woken them up to the climate era? Because it feels like it should have.

Ainslie I think so. I really do think that people, if they weren’t aware before, I think there is definitely a growing awareness of the risks that climate change poses. I think we hear a lot about the anxiety that comes with that. And I think that’s totally understandable. I think we all go through those periods of stress and anxiety when you see what can happen from some of these disasters. But I also think that there is hope. There’s a lot of things that are in our control. We can mitigate climate change if we can get our greenhouse gases under control, and we know some of the solutions for that, then we can avoid the very worst impacts. At the same time, there’s also a lot we could do to minimize the impact of these disasters when they hit.

So I do think that people are more aware of the risks and I’m hopeful that ultimately that will translate into more action, and faster action. More investment in some of the solutions that we know are out there. We just need to put them in place.

Jordan Last question, then: what will you be looking for early in 2022, or maybe as the summer comes along, to try to see if we’ve made progress, to try to see if last year was a fluke or not? I’m trying to get a sense of what we can expect, and if there are any warning signs or we just have to wait and see if the heat shows up in the summertime.

Ainslie So I think I’ll be looking for a couple of things. In the first few months, I’ll definitely be looking to the governments to see what they’re going to be investing in terms of recovery and we keep hearing this term of ‘building back better’ and it gets applied in many different contexts. But I think in this scenario after these disasters, I think it’ll be important to look at how communities are planning to rebuild after some of these disasters and what ‘building back better’ looks like in this scenario. I think it will be important when the budgets come out to look at the funding commitments towards adaptation and mitigation.

And then as we get into those seasons, where it suddenly becomes a little bit riskier. So during the spring runoff, in the late spring and early summer, as we’re seeing the heat pick up, it’ll be interesting to see how next year plays out. I mean, I’m hopeful that maybe BC will get a bit of a break and next year will be a little bit calmer, give us some time to actually prepare and implement some of these adaptation measures.

Yeah, we’ll just have to see. I mean, regardless, I think the biggest question here is what our government’s going to be investing in adaptation and mitigation to try to lessen the impact of climate change.

Jordan Ainslie, thank you so much for this. Stay safe out there and I hope for better things for next year too.

Ainslie Thanks so much, Jordan.

Jordan Ainslie Cruickshank on the climate beat in British Columbia.

That was the big story for more from us. Head to thebigstorypodcast.ca. Find us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN. Talk to us anytime via email, thebigstorypodcast@rci.rogers.com [click here!].

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Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.

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