Globe Climate: Tracing the burn scars

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Good afternoon, and welcome to Globe Climate, a newsletter about climate change, environment and resources in Canada.

Only a few hours north of Toronto, an effort is under way to take a stand against reptile mortality.

The area, near Georgian Bay, is one of more than 700 sites in the world recognized by UNESCO for its ecological significance. Considered the world’s largest freshwater archipelago, it hosts more than 50 at-risk plant and animal species in Canada – including reptiles like snakes and turtles.

But ‘tis the season for road trips and construction and, as Tavia Grant writes, a hot asphalt surface is an appealing place for a snake to lounge under the summer sun. This, coupled with their attempts to cross the roads, leads to high rates of reptile road mortality.

To combat this, a number of initiatives are taking place. Short, concave fences are built into the natural landscape beside busy roads to prevent slippery reptiles from scaling them. Construction and hydro workers are learning the tricks of the trade from conservationists to identify and protect turtle nests. Since 2020, 10,258 eggs have been collected and between 2020 and last summer, 7,858 hatchlings were released back into their natural habitat.

The best part? The construction workers – and their kids - have become citizen scientists who are helping to document where the turtle eggs are being laid and returning to watch the hatchlings take their first steps.

For some teams, mitigating the impact on wildlife even factors into their planning of public works projects.

Now, let’s catch you up on other news.

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Noteworthy reporting this week:

1. Coal: Revival of the Rockies’ once-prosperous coal industry clashes with those who say it will harm the land
2. Textiles: From field to frock, clothing made from Canadian flax and linen is full of promise
3. Jasper: Residents return to what’s left of home
4. Smoke: Western fires blanket the Prairies with heavy smoke, raising air-quality index to highest risk level
5. From The Narwhal: Great Lakes beach safety tests are often outdated and unreliable

A deeper dive

Tracing the burn scars

Kate Helmore covers agriculture and the environment for The Globe’s Report on Business section. For this week’s deeper dive, Kate talks about how scientists determine the carbon emissions of a wildfire and why Canada, and many other countries, don’t count wildfires in their emissions reports.

Last week, an international consortium of scientists released a report on the state of wildfires in 2023. Canada’s season took the top spot. Whatever metric you measured – number of fires, areas burned, emissions, the size of the blaze – “pretty much every record was smashed,” said the study’s lead researcher.

Perhaps the greatest concern was carbon emissions. In the 2023 season, Canada’s wildfires released nine times the usual amount of carbon – the equivalent of 10 years’ worth of normal emissions.

The scientists arrived at this number in two ways. The first is through real-time satellite observation. The emissions are calculated by analyzing the extent of the fire and estimating how much carbon is released based on the type of vegetation burning.

In 2023, Canada’s boreal forests burned. These areas are significant carbon sequesters. When they burn, the carbon they store is released into the atmosphere in devastating amounts.

The second is through burn scars. After the fire has ravaged an area, researchers compare before-and-after photographs. The blackness of the landscape is an indication of how deep the fires burned. Extreme wildfires destroy the soil, too – another significant carbon sequester.

Wildfires that cut deep into the landscape leave scars that won’t heal for decades, sometimes even centuries, essentially taking one of our most important tools in the fight against climate change – forests – out of action.

And this begs questions about how we calculate and report emissions moving forward. Canada – like all other countries – does not include wildfire emissions in its annual update on GHG emissions. We only count human-caused emissions (such as those produced by the oil and gas sector). The emissions from wildfires are included separately in the overall report in a later chapter about land use.

The justification for this is complex.

The emissions released from wildfires make those emitted by industry (if industry reporting is accurate) seem insignificant by comparison. Would Canadians still feel compelled to cut emissions if they felt doing so would have a negligible effect on overall emissions reductions?

We also count our boreal forests as carbon sinks and factor those into our annual National Inventory Report – which meaures GHG emissions – as an offset to total emissions. Are we adjusting this reporting to account for the record-breaking hectares of carbon-sequestering forests we are losing?

When asked, Environment and Climate Change Canada said the report is continuously updated, and the latest editions include revisions as “science evolves, and underlying data improves.”

-Kate

What else you missed

• Green energy projects eye underground salt caverns as key to hydrogen storage
• Hundreds of Portuguese firefighters battle Madeira wildfire
• Going off the grid on the rugged Faroe Islands
• Extreme weather drives travelers to cooler destinations this summer
• Climate change intensified rain that caused deadly Indian landslides, study finds
• Ernesto becomes a hurricane again, causing dangerous rip currents on Canadian, U.S. East Coasts
• Parkland Corp. faces lawsuit from top shareholder Simpson Oil
• New Brunswick’s Point Lepreau nuclear power plant down until mid-November
• The top UN court sets a December date for the start of hearings in a landmark climate change case

Opinion and analysis

Alex Bozikovic: Toronto needs to get over its fear of car-free streets

John Vaillant: Vancouver narrowly dodged a fire disaster. But nowhere is truly safe

Meredith Lilly: Tariffs on Chinese EVs are a no-brainer. Why is Ottawa dragging its feet?

Ali Bhagat: Wildfires foreshadow the looming crisis of internal displacement

Pau S. Pujolas and Oliver Loertscher: Canada’s productivity problem isn’t that big if we exclude oil

Green Investing

Utilities give clean energy investors a boost over solar

Investors in the clean energy sector have taken a drubbing from steep drops in solar stocks this year, but have made strong returns on positions in utilities, which have been one of the brightest spots in the United States equities arena in 2024.

Surging demand for power from artificial intelligence applications and data centres have spurred investment across the utilities and power producer sector, which is set to see rising revenues from all major customer segments.

Some utilities stocks have outshone even the brightest stars of the tech arena, with Texas-based power producer Vistra Corp. outperforming microchip giant Nvidia since March.

Equity analysts are upbeat on the outlook for utilities for the rest of the year, especially if U.S. interest rates are lowered and reduce the cost of debt financing for infrastructure development, service expansions and grid upgrades.

That positive forecast contrasts with that of the solar industry, which was rocked by a high-profile bankruptcy this month that may spark a pivot by clean energy investors into the utilities arena instead.

• Jasper wildfires: A stark reminder of managing ESG risk in your portfolio
• ‘Underconsumption core’: Young people flaunt their used stuff in new social media trend
• Seeds are gifts from nature, a major organic producer says. It’s ending sales and giving them away

The Climate Exchange

Check out our new digital hub where you can ask your most pressing questions about climate change. It’s a place where we hope to help by answering your questions, big and small, about the continuing changes and challenges around climate change. Along the way, we’ll aim to highlight the people, communities and companies working toward climate solutions and innovations.

For the record: While RBC supports the initiative financially, the company has no say in what questions get asked or how The Globe answers them.

Photo of the week

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Guides and Explainers

• Want to learn to invest sustainably? We have a class for that: Green Investing 101 newsletter course for the climate-conscious investor. Not sure you need help? Take our quiz to challenge your knowledge.
• We’ve rounded up our reporters’ content to help you learn what a carbon tax is, what happened at COP28 and just generally how Canada will change because of climate change.
• There are ways to make your travelling more sustainable. Here are some books to help the environmentalist in you grow, as well as a downloadable e-book of Micro Skills – Little Steps to Big Change.

Catch up on Globe Climate

• Water scarcity in Western Canada
• What does a Team Canada meteorologist do?
• In the wake of Jasper’s wildfire
• Suspense builds around water quality in the Seine