Trudeau government says Canada will eliminate deaths from extreme heat as it sets new goals to fight climate change
The Canadian government unveiled its new “national adaptation strategy,” reports the Toronto Star, which includes goals such as “eliminating all deaths from extreme heat by 2040 and halting and reversing the destruction of Canada’s nature within the next seven years.”
The paper continues: “The strategy also says that by 2026 the federal government will develop new rules to incorporate climate considerations into building and highway codes, by next year it will include climate resilience factors in all new federal infrastructure programs , will produce hundreds of new high-risk flood maps by 2028 and aim to create 15 new urban national parks by 2030.
In a speech to a province that has been hit by flash floods that washed out highways, a deadly heat dome that killed more than 600 people and a wildfire that burned the inland British Columbia town of Layton to ashes two years ago, Environment Minister Stephen Guilbeau said, that there is no doubt that the impacts of climate change will continue for decades to come.”
Meanwhile, Reuters reports that emissions from Canada’s wildfires have reached record highs “as smoke reaches Europe.”
The news bulletin added: “Forest fires burning across large swathes of eastern and western Canada have released a record 160 million tonnes of carbon, the EU’s Copernicus atmospheric monitoring office said on Tuesday.”
This year’s wildfire season is the worst in Canadian history, with about 76,000 sq km (29,000 sq mi) burning across eastern and western Canada. That’s more than the total area burned in 2016, 2019, 2020 and 2022, according to the Canadian Interagency Center for Wildfires.”
Separately, the Guardian reports that, further south, “the record heat wave that hit parts of Texas, Louisiana and Mexico has become at least five times more likely due to human-induced climate change, scientists have found [from Climate Central ], marking the latest in a series of recent extreme heat dome-type events that have scorched various parts of the world”.
Photo by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/orange-fire-68768/
