debris spread across a beaach
Environment

Weird West Coast weather: panic globally, Act locally

qathet Living, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Growing up, no one Anastasia Lukyanova knew drove a car. They didn’t need to. Her family lived in a sixth-floor apartment in a ten-floor highrise, in Ufa, Russia – a dense, mid-sized city of about a million, sandwiched between two rivers

Within a five minute walk of home, she recalled, are four grocery stores. Buses stop outside her family home at least every five minutes. The storied Trans-Siberian Railway stops in her hometown, offering affordable, frequent trips as far away as St. Petersburg and Beijing.  

In other words, each citizen’s transportation emissions are minuscule compared to here, where she is the City of Powell River’s sustainability planner. Her position was initially funded by Ottawa, but is now part of the City’s commitment to environmental responsibility – which has been entrenched since the City adopted the Sustainability Charter in 2007. 

Here in qathet, about 70 percent of local CO2 emissions, which cause climate change, come from transportation – mostly private vehicles. Ana is quick to point out that it’s not the fault of individuals. Since the 1950s, qathet has been built for car-dependence, rather than walkability or public transit. 

The job of local governments, she said, is to make eco-alternatives “practical and appetizing.”

“2021 was a big deal,” Ana said. “Climate change is a complex system and you can’t predict the type of change, the year it will happen or the severity. But we saw it happen in 2021 here in BC. Okay, I guess. This is the timeline we’re dealing with. 

“Climate change can be seen as an opportunity to reduce our emissions, and make a community we can be proud of.” 

But Ana isn’t optimistic about beating climate change by biking or busing more. Quite the opposite. As a mathematician and engineer, she has a scientist’s brain on the numbers, and they are not promising for halting or reversing change quickly enough to avoid catastrophe. 

Locally, though, through sustainability planning, she can do her part, however limited, to help qathet mitigate climate change, even as we’re in the midst of it, she said. Some of her projects include a heat pump rebate, the Zunga bus pilot, electric vehicle charging stations, reduced energy use at the Recreation Complex, cycling infrastructure and more. 

For the past year, qathet has faced season after season of weird weather: the heat dome, drought, water spouts, flooding, record snowfall, king tides coinciding with storm surges, and more. Frequently in recent years, qathet has also spent summers under a blanket of yellow smoke from fires in the Interior and the Western US – though thankfully that was not part of 2021’s line-up.  

Some citizens are understandably feeling terror and panic about what the abrupt change represents. Others are understandably reassuring themselves that weird weather is nothing new, and the threat is overblown. 

Meanwhile, local governments are reacting to weird weather in three ways: attempting to mitigate it by trying to reduce emissions, like Ana does; urging citizens to protect themselves and their properties as new threats emerge; and cleaning up after it when it wrecks civic infrastructure, such as the seawalk during King Tide week in early January.  

Ryan Thoms calls our culture “flat footed” in our slow, hobbled reaction to the new weather we’ve witnessed. 

“There is plenty of good proactive work happening by all the local authorities who are addressing climate change as a priority, but there is still lots of important work to keep doing by both governments and residents,” says Ryan.

He is the Manager of Emergency Services for qathet Regional District. He’s responsible for helping the whole region develop emergency plans for new threats: wild fires, sea level rise and worse – the changes we haven’t imagined yet. 

“Some of the extremes are eye-widening, but they’re pretty consistent with climate change predictions that have been around for a long time,” said Ryan. “If you’ve been paying attention, you shouldn’t be surprised. We have more energy in the system, so we’re having heavier storm cycles. The question now is, how do you adapt to it? What can you do to minimize impacts?”

For the past 10 years, Ryan has focused on preparing qathet for fires, through the FireSmart program. This year, the program will kick off a little early to reflect last year’s early, hot and dry fire season. He was pleased that buildings such as the Recreation Complex, Library and Texada Legion were able to open their doors to citizens who needed relief from the heat during the worst of June’s record setting days. “It’s really hard on people, especially if they have underlying health issues,” Ryan said. 

What else is hard on people? Feeling overwhelmed. 

“For 2022, I’m wishing the pandemic moves on,” he said. “It’s a cumulative fatigue that happens, that there’s too many of these things all at once, and we do need to adapt to some of these changes, but we can’t live in a state of emergency all the time. We’ve been really lucky here. And I am hoping for a nice calm year. But climate change is real and we will see more of these extremes. 

“So we’ll keep pushing preparedness, and evacuation plans. That’s our part of the job. Everyone appreciates the seriousness of this. The importance of it. It’s not just crazy weather. The question is, what can we learn from what we’ve seen so far? And then prepare for it. These things don’t need to be emergencies if we adapt.”  

Weird weather over the last decade – and especially the last year – has been a motivator for both adaptation to and mitigation of climate change. Even if some of these more ecologically-minded steps don’t halt warming, Ana points out, that can be very good for our communities. 

“It breaks my heart that people here are isolated in their senior years because of transportation problems, and the stories of younger people having to choose between paying rent and buying gas for their vehicle. As governments, our focus should be on making better decisions both practical and appetizing.” In other words, keep calm and carry on doing our absolute best to adapt and mitigate. 

How to beat weird weather

Mitigate: Stop our contributions to climate change; primarily, reducing our CO2 emissions. 

Adapt: Changing our infrastructure and ways of doing things so the impact of climate change is reduced.

Five ways to get ready for 2022’s weather

Laura Roddan, qathet Regional District’s Director of Planning, explains that a main role of local governments is to encourage citizens to prepare for hazards. 

Getting your property ready for weird weather or climate change? That’s up to you. With the RD’s help. Here’s how:

1. FireSmart

Avoid damage to your home by applying FireSmart principals to your property. You can book the coordinator, Marc Albert, for a visit, and he will give you a work plan and offer subsidies for making changes. 

2. Sea Level Rise

If you own waterfront property, you had a front-seat view for January’s king tides and storm surge combination, which damaged the seawalk and tossed logs too close to homes on some beaches. The Green Shores for Homes offers property owners advice on staving off tide-related property damage. You can also learn more about potential risks on qathet.ca, in the Sea Level Rise Coastal Flood Mapping Project. 

3. Drain your ditches

Some local roads saw flooding during 2021’s atmospheric rivers in November. Laura reminds property owners that ensuring their ditches and culverts are clear so that water can drain properly is the responsibility of individuals, not local governments. 

4. Manage your contribution
to climate change

Local governments are responsible for providing both garbage and transportation services. Over the past decade, citizen opportunities for active transportation – such as walking and biking – and recycling and compost have grown considerably, and continue to evolve. 

5. Get involved in flood prevention 

In 2022, the Regional District will lead a public engagement process to learn more from citizens. It’s called the qathet Coastal Flood Adaptation Strategy. Watch for more in the coming months. 

Top image credit: In early January, king tides, sea level rise and wind storms combined to ravage Powell River’s sea walk. It was closed for several days as City crews put it back together. – Photo by Giovanni Spezzacatena

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