Unless you’re brave enough to consider the reality of our global environmental situation, don’t read this. Confronting it is not a matter of being pessimistic or optimistic, but of being realistic—of assessing what we’re doing on our planet, what we want to avoid, what we want to accomplish, and what we can do both collectively and individually to have a more promising future. In one more year we will have reached a quarter of the way to 2100, and we are well on our way to creating conditions that we will either applaud or bemoan.
Continue reading The Quadra Project: Welcome to 2024Tag Archives: Sea level rising
Saving the Cowichan Estuary from drowning in a climate-fed ‘coastal squeeze’
Canada’s National Observer, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
High atop a dike hemming the Koksilah River as its fresh waters meet salt, red-winged blackbirds call out as they patrol their territory.
Noisy heralds of spring, the blackbirds return to the Cowichan Estuary each year to nest and protest human intrusion with sharp signature trills from the brush along the riverbank.
Today the interloper is Tom Reid, conservation land management program manager with the Nature Trust of British Columbia (NTBC), who stands atop the 15-foot-high rock embankment he is working to destroy.
The dike, built to fortify farmland stolen from the estuary, is stifling the tidal marsh vital to the survival of a host of endangered salmon and bird species that rely on it for breeding, feeding and migration, he said.
Continue reading Saving the Cowichan Estuary from drowning in a climate-fed ‘coastal squeeze’
Unchecked climate change puts Canada’s West Coast in hot water
Canada’s National Observer, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Last year was the hottest on record for the ocean, an upward trend only expected to continue as it wreaks havoc on coastal communities and spurs irreversible losses to marine ecosystems.
Ocean warming has cascading effects, melting polar ice and causing sea-level rise, marine heat waves and ocean acidification, the United Nations’ panel of climate experts made clear on Monday.
Sea-level rise has doubled in the last three decades, reaching a record high in 2021, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported. Rising seas, coupled with more extreme weather, are setting the stage for a perfect storm of flooding for coastal communities.
Continue reading Unchecked climate change puts Canada’s West Coast in hot water
Salish Sea Rising
Originally published in the Watershed Sentinel
By Delores Broten
Thirty years ago, I was running the tiny Friends of Cortes Island office out of the community hall at Manson’s Landing. This led to many interesting and sometimes passionate conversations. One regular visitor was Basil Seaton, veteran of the internment camps for British soldiers in Burma during World War Two. Basil took it as his mission to educate me about climate change. I remember in particular a floppy disk he brought that contained various climate change scenarios.
Fast forward thirty years. My computer is more like a Ferrari than a horse and cart, and the Province of British Columbia advises communities to plan for one metre of sea level rise by 2100, and two metres by 2200. But the predictions are still all over the place, depending on the modelling used and the assumptions made.
Continue reading Salish Sea Rising
Quadra Project: Sierra Quadra’s open letter to Mosaic Forest Management Corporation
Originally published on the Discovery Islander
Mosaic Forest Management Corporation is responsible for forestry operations on TimberWest’s Tree Farm Licence 47 on Quadra Island. The letter below was written by Sierra Quadra to Mosaic on October 14, 2021, after the extraordinary “heat dome” of June-July, but before the unusually cold weather of December, and before the “atmospheric rivers” that deluged southwestern BC with record rainfalls, flooding the Fraser Valley and washing out Greater Vancouver’s crucial road and rail links.
Continue reading Quadra Project: Sierra Quadra’s open letter to Mosaic Forest Management Corporation