Tag Archives: Climate Change

Cost of Climate Change

How climate change impacts insurance costs

By Bhagyashree Chatterjee, The Squamish Chief, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

As home insurance costs increase due to climate change, mitigation efforts can help residents stabilize their costs.

“We’re seeing more wildfires, floods, and storms driving up insurance costs,” said Justine Bowman, branch manager at Westland Insurance Group.  

Over the past decade, the cost of claims related to natural disasters in Canada has tripled, reaching over $2 billion annually on average, according to the Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC).  

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Fire

Burning out: B.C. wildfire fighters share stories from the frontlines

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By Matt Simmons, The Narwhal, Local Journalism Initiative reporter

“It’s like someone turned the fire switch on and it’s just not stopping.”

That’s what wildfire ecologist Kira Hoffman told me in November, as we discussed our new wildfire reality. I can’t help but think back to that conversation today, as we watch the out-of-control blazes burn Los Angeles, putting at least 180,000 residents under evacuation orders and engulfing entire neighbourhoods in the second-largest U.S. city. It’s all happening in January, a month that should have brought some rain to southern California; instead, the region is drought-stricken and bone dry.

It points to an uncomfortable reality: we need to be thinking about wildfires year-round, and not just when fires are actively burning where we live.

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Cost of Climate Change

On the Threshold of a 1.5°C World

While there is some disagreement as to whether we have crossed the 1.5°C threshhold set at COP 21 in Paris, scientists agree that we are on the brink and 2024 was the hottest year on record.

At COP 29 last November, Jim Skea, Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) explained, “Children born today will not know a world without climate change. The IPCC has shown that we, and furthermore they, will live in a world marked by more intense storms, exceptional heatwaves, devastating floods and droughts, a world where food chains are disrupted, and where diseases reach new countries.”

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Cost of Climate Change

The Quadra Project: Changes Causing Changes

We live in a time of rapid change. Such periods have been recorded in our earlier history, but nothing quite compares to the present. If this change could be represented in a graph, it would indicate a nearly vertical rise in almost everything from technology and population to species extinction and climate change. We are remaking the world, from the micro to the macro, with consequences that are unprecedented.

Two book reviews in the Atlantic magazine of December 2021 by Rebecca Giggs identify some of these changes.

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Politics

B.C.’s new clean-energy czar is a climate ‘wild card’

Canada’s National Observer, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Adrian Dix is B.C.’s new climate and clean energy czar, but it’s not clear whether his appointment signals a new commitment by the NDP government to tackle the province’s growing oil and gas emissions.

Dix, the former health minister who once ran for premier himself, was appointed as the Minister of Energy and Climate Solutions during Premier David Eby’s cabinet shuffle.

With the appointment, Eby also combined responsibility for energy and climate accountability under one roof.

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