Here’s all the latest local and international news concerning climate change for the week of June 2 to June 8, 2025.
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Here’s the latest news concerning climate change and biodiversity loss in B.C. and around the world, from the steps leaders are taking to address the problems, to all the up-to-date science.
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• Early-season wildfires of note continue to burn across Western Canada, causing evacuations, poor air quality
• How UBC’s sustainability hub is helping reduce embodied carbon in the construction industry
• Sunday is World Oceans Day. The AP reports on David Attenborough’s new documentary ‘Ocean.’
• There’s a wildfire crisis in Western Canada. Why is this happening so early in the season?
Human activities like burning fossil fuels and farming livestock are the main drivers of climate change, according to the UN’s intergovernmental panel on climate change. This causes heat-trapping greenhouse gas levels in Earth’s atmosphere, increasing the planet’s surface temperature.
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The panel, which is made up of scientists from around the world, has warned for decades that wildfires and severe weather, such as B.C.’s deadly heat dome and catastrophic flooding in 2021, would become more frequent and intense because of the climate emergency. It has issued a code red for humanity and warns the window to limit warming to 1.5 C above pre-industrial times is closing.
According to NASA climate scientists, human activities have raised the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide content by 50 per cent in less than 200 years, and “there is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate.”
And it continues to rise. As of May 5, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen to 429.64 parts per million, up from 428.15 parts per million last month and 427.09 ppm in March, according to NOAA data measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory, a global atmosphere monitoring lab in Hawaii. The NOAA notes there has been a steady rise in CO2 from under 320 ppm in 1960.
• The Earth is now about 1.3 C warmer than it was in the 1800s.
• 2024 was hottest year on record globally, beating the record in 2023.
• The global average temperature in 2023 reached 1.48 C higher than the pre-industrial average, according to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. In 2024, it breached the 1.5 C threshold at 1.55 C.
• The past 10 years (2015-2024) are the 10 warmest on record.
• Human activities have raised atmospheric concentrations of CO2 by nearly 49 per cent above pre-industrial levels starting in 1850.
• The world is not on track to meet the Paris Agreement target to keep global temperature from exceeding 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels, the upper limit to avoid the worst fallout from climate change including sea level rise, and more intense drought, heat waves and wildfires.
• On the current path of carbon dioxide emissions, the temperature could increase by as much 3.6 C this century, according to the IPCC.
• In April, 2022 greenhouse gas concentrations reached record new highs and show no sign of slowing.
• Emissions must drop 7.6 per cent per year from 2020 to 2030 to keep temperatures from exceeding 1.5 C and 2.7 per cent per year to stay below 2 C.
• There is global scientific consensus that the climate is warming and that humans are the cause.
(Source: United Nations IPCC, World Meteorological Organization, UNEP, NASA, climatedata.ca)
Wildland firefighters battling a blaze in northeastern B.C. were preparing for a challenging weekend as strong winds could push flames closer to the small community of Kelly Lake, about 80 kilometres south of Dawson Creek.
Karley Desrosiers, a fire information officer with the B.C. Wildfire Service, told a news conference Friday that strong southwest winds the day before had pushed the Kiskatinaw River fire north and south of Kelly Lake.
While the flames didn’t reach the community of about 75 residents, an eight-to nine-kilometre stretch crossed over the Alberta boundary, she said.
A cold front Friday, which was forecast to begin around 5 p.m., was expected to shift what she called “strong, erratic, gusty winds.”
“So the wind will be pushing the fire from the northwest towards the southeast,” she said. “So (with) the wind pushing the fire from the north, there is the potential for that flank that’s adjacent to the community, north of Kelly Lake, to move more toward the community.”
Read the full story here.
—The Canadian Press
Poor air quality fuelled by wildfires burning across the Prairies left a large swath of the country enveloped in a haze for another day.
Parts of Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Ontario, Quebec, Saskatchewan, and Newfoundland and Labrador were experiencing poor air quality and reduced visibility due to the wildfires, a situation expected to continue through Sunday.
Much of southern Ontario was under an air quality statement on Thursday and Friday that lifted early Saturday morning.
Environment Canada meteorologist Jean-Philippe Begin says there’s some good news — a low pressure system passing through the Prairies, currently in Northern Saskatchewan and expected to move into Manitoba and Northwestern Ontario by Monday, is expected to bring precipitation for areas hit by out-of-control forest fires.
That system is not expected to bring much relief in Northern Alberta, however, where there is little rain in the forecast.
Read the full story here.
—The Canadian Press
Some Manitoba residents who have taken refuge in Niagara Falls, Ont., after fleeing wildfires raging in their province say they’re grateful for the hospitality but worry they won’t have a home to return to once the flames die down.
Kelly Ouskun says he saw so much fire and smoke along the highway on the drive from his family’s home in Split Lake to Thompson, about 145 kilometres away, that he felt “nauseated” and his eyes hurt.
The family flew to Niagara Falls from there and he says they’ve now settled in at one of the five downtown hotels taking in evacuees, while hanging on to hope that what he’s heard about his home — that it’s still standing and intact — is true.
More than 18,000 people have been displaced due to the wildfires in Manitoba since last week, including 5,000 residents of Flin Flon near the Saskatchewan boundary, along with members from at least four First Nations.
Read the full story here.
—The Canadian Press
Canada lacks national regulations to assess the construction industry’s embodied carbon, the total greenhouse-gas emissions associated with a product’s life cycle.
However, a team at the University of B.C.’s sustainability hub aims to change that, and help the federal government meet its net-zero emissions targets by 2050 in an effort to limit global warming.
The hub led a two-year project to tackle the challenges of reducing embodied carbon emissions in construction projects — everything from material extraction and transportation to construction of buildings and disposal of materials — and provide solutions.
Ottawa is planning to update its national building model code with a phased in plan for industry to disclose the embodied carbon footprint of buildings, and the hub’s research will influence those decisions.
A report from one of the hub’s research teams, expected to be made public in a couple of weeks, will make recommendations to Canada’s net-zero advisory body, a group that advises Environment and Climate Change Canada on how to achieve the country’s climate goals.
One of the recommendations will be to develop a national standard on reporting embodied carbon and to create a national database that can be used by local governments and industry, said Megan Badri, research manager at the UBC sustainability hub.
Read the full story here.
—Tiffany Crawford
An ominous chain unspools through the water. Then comes chaos. A churning cloud of mud erupts as a net plows the sea floor, wrenching rays, fish and a squid from their home in a violent swirl of destruction. This is industrial bottom trawling. It’s not CGI. It’s real. And it’s legal.
“Ocean With David Attenborough” is a brutal reminder of how little we see and how much is at stake. The film is both a sweeping celebration of marine life and a stark exposé of the forces pushing the ocean toward collapse.
The British naturalist and broadcaster, now 99, anchors the film with a deeply personal reflection: “After living for nearly a hundred years on this planet, I now understand that the most important place on Earth is not on land, but at sea.”
The film traces Attenborough’s lifetime — an era of unprecedented ocean discovery — through the lush beauty of coral reefs, kelp forests and deepsea wanderers, captured in breathtaking, revelatory ways.
But this is not the Attenborough film we grew up with. As the environment unravels, so too has the tone of his storytelling. “Ocean” is more urgent, more unflinching. Never-before-seen footage of mass coral bleaching, dwindling fish stocks and industrial-scale exploitation reveals just how vulnerable the sea has become. The film’s power lies not only in what it shows, but in how rarely such destruction is witnessed.
“Ocean” premieres Saturday on National Geographic in the U.S. and streams globally on Disney+ and Hulu beginning Sunday.
Read the full story here.
—The Associated Press
With no new big dams of its own to build, B.C. Hydro on Wednesday threw open a window for private developers to propose new sources of ‘baseload’ power to back up the growing list of renewable electricity proposals it’s enlisting to expand the province’s grid.
‘Baseload’ refers to sources of power utilities can turn on or off as needed, such as B.C. Hydro’s existing dams. With this, Hydro is considering possibilities for geothermal, pump-storage hydro or even grid-scale batteries as a means to meet peak demand when intermittent wind and solar sources are less reliable.
B.C. Energy Minister Adrian Dix didn’t put a number on the amount of electricity Hydro might be looking for in a request for expressions of interest, just that “we want to see what’s out there and get those proposals in place.”
Dix, however, characterized the step as “a moment when we have to build again to diversify, to build the economy and to create wealth,” not dissimilar to the period of B.C.’s dam-building boom in the 1960s and 1970s.
“We’ve got to build out clean electricity, which is one of our significant economic advantages in B.C.,” he said.
Read the full story here.
—Derrick Penner
The stretch of the Alaska Highway near Fort Nelson that closed Monday due to a nearby wildfire has reopened to single lane traffic.
The B.C. Wildfire Service says the blaze is about 26 square kilometres in size and is burning out of control about 10 kilometres northeast of Summit Lake.
It is one of two “wildfires of note” in the province and prompted the Northern Rockies Regional Municipality to issue an evacuation alert on Monday for the Tetsa River Area.
The wildfire service’s latest update says the so-called Summit Lake fire “experienced significant overnight growth” between Sunday and Monday and “continues to display aggressive fire behaviour,” growing towards Highway 97.
Read the full story here.
—The Canadian Press
In the spring of 2024, Sukhdeep Brar, a second-generation stone-fruit grower in Summerland, couldn’t even look at his cherry trees. After a deep winter freeze decimated his crops, the branches stood bare — no buds, no blossoms, no harvest.
“I didn’t want to go out into the orchard,” he said. “It was just so depressing.”
But this April, something shifted. In the first week of the month, Brar said he walked through his Summerland property and found a welcome sight — thousands of delicate pink-and-white blossoms.
“It’s a relief to see all my trees flowering again,” said the orchardist, who has grown cherries, peaches, plums, prunes, apricots and nectarines on his family farm for decades.
Last season, Brar’s 150-acre orchard was left completely barren after temperatures plunged to nearly -30C in January, killing buds and wiping out entire crops.
While there will be lots of cherries this year, the long-term picture remains uncertain. Many farmers say their future is hanging by a thread — squeezed by rising debt, climate volatility, and a market that often favours cheaper imported fruit over homegrown harvests.
Read the full story here.
—Sarah Grochowski
It’s not yet summer, but out-of-control wildfires are raging across Western Canada, fuelled by drought, warmer temperatures and lack of rainfall.
Residents in northeastern B.C., near Kelly Lake, have fled their homes, as Manitoba and Saskatchewan declared provincial emergencies this week.
As of Friday, wildfires in Manitoba had displaced more than 17,000 people. Thousands more have been given evacuation orders because of wildfires in Saskatchewan and Alberta, including 1,300 residents of Swan Hills, a community northwest of Edmonton.
Why are there so many fires burning in Western Canada?
The majority of wildfires are in boreal forests, the Northern forests, and the whole region has had very warm conditions, high pressure and hot temperatures, said Lori Daniels, a professor in UBC’s Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences.
“In some places, they’ve been breaking records. So it’s brought early spring heat and with that, of course, very low humidity and no rain,” she said. “So it looked like a good start to summer, except it’s dried out our forests.”
Daniels added that many of the areas also had low snow packs this year, so there wasn’t enough snow to melt and saturate the ground.
Read the full story here.
—Tiffany Crawford
While images of wildfires capture their ferocity, data can provide insight into how bad a fire season is.
Such is the case with two graphics, powered by satellite data, that showcase a Canadian wildfire season off to a wild — and scary — start.
Twice a day a NASA satellite sends images to the ground, giving a real-time view of where fires are burning. This is especially useful for remote areas where no sensors are stationed.
As of Tuesday that satellite had picked up four times as many fire hot spots across Canada than is typical for early June. That’s more than any year since the satellite began transmitting in 2012, except 2023, according to data from Global Forest Watch.
Though the satellite has recorded thousands of hot spots so far this year, that does not mean there are actually that many active fires. Each hot spot could be detected repeatedly over the course of days. And because each detection is about the size of 26 football fields, it can represent part of a much larger blaze, said James MacCarthy, wildfire research manager at Global Forest Watch.
Read the full story here.
—The Associated Press
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