As climate change intensifies, Canada finds itself grappling with a critical need to balance its investment between reducing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to the growing impacts of extreme weather events.
“We absolutely need to slow down climate change, we need funding and mitigation, but adaptation needs to be up there, and right now we’re not seeing that,” says Anabela Bonada, managing director of the University of Waterloo’s Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation.
Despite the escalating frequency and severity of wildfires, floods, and heatwaves, the federal government has spent far more on mitigation efforts than it has on adaptation, raising concerns among experts and stakeholders like Bonada.
Since 2015, Canada’s federal government has allocated $42 billion towards initiatives aimed at reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, as part of its commitment to the Paris Agreement. That contrasts with only $1.9 billion spent on adaptation.
In 2023, Environment and Climate Change Canada introduced the National Adaptation Strategy (NAS), outlining 26 targets to manage the impacts of climate change, including wildfire prevention, flood control, and heat management.
While the strategy represents a forward-thinking approach, insufficient funding has hindered its success. “A good plan, with limited resources, does not go far,” Bonada told BNN Bloomberg in a Wednesday interview.
She noted that adaptation initiatives were laid out in the 2016 Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change, “but with no funding those initiatives never made it off the shelf.”
The Insurance Bureau of Canada also says it’s time to increase the amount we spend on adapting to climate change instead of fighting it. The group suggests an annual budget of $5.3 billion for the next six years would be a good start.
They have a financial incentive to want to see progress. From 1983 to 2008, claims related to insured losses from weather events averaged between $250 million and $400 million annually. However, over the past 15 years, the average has risen to $2.1 billion per year. This dramatic increase reflects the heightened vulnerability of Canadian communities to climate-related disasters.
This disparity in funding priorities is further exacerbated by the increasing severity of forest fires, which have become a major source of carbon emissions. “We’re not seeing across the board the kind of reductions that were expected by this time, and what’s not accounted for when we’re even talking about our GHG emissions in Canada, we don’t account for forest fire emissions,” Bonada said.
The World Resources Institute recently reported that forest fires in Canada emitted over 3,000 megatonnes of carbon dioxide last year. That dwarfs the 53 megatonnes of emissions that industrial and agricultural initiatives have managed to take out of the atmosphere since 2005.
“We can slow the forest fires down; we can diminish them,” said Bonada. “There’s a lot we can do to reduce their incidence and severity, especially near vulnerable communities.”