Quebec infrastructure must adapt to a future with more extreme weather: experts
Quebecers will need to rethink how they design their homes to prevent further destruction from the effects of climate change, experts say.
It's a solemn reality that comes in the face of a devastating storm that killed 10 people and destroyed several homes in Quebec and Ontario over the weekend.
Homes in Quebec should be built to better endure strong winds, heavy rain and hail, said Alain Bourque, executive director of Ouranos, a Quebec consortium on climate change.
"Cities that go through hurricanes or severe thunderstorms, we just have to do [it] like them," he told CTV News.
This philosophy can be applied to all sorts of weather extremes, from heatwaves to drought, to floods to fire.
"You just need to go in California to see how they use water differently than we do in Canada in Quebec. And that's a good example of adapting to less water availability because of climate change and increased drought frequency."
A March survey commissioned by the federal government found that only four per cent of Quebecers have taken steps to protect their home from flooding, compared to an average 11 per cent of Canadians.
These measures can be as simple as applying caulk around basement windows or using water-resistant building materials when renovating.
But Bourque says the bulk of these changes needs to happen on an institutional scale; this is where "the engineers, the land-use planners, the health specialists, the urban planners" come in.
In his eyes, redesigning our lives around the "unavoidable" nature of climate change is key.
"Depending on where you live, adaptation is going to be different because adaptation is very local or regional in nature," he said.
"We need to be able to shelter our communities with respect to those risks."
POWER PROBLEMS
One risk on the minds of many Quebecers is power outages.
As of Wednesday morning, tens of thousands of Quebec households are still without electricity, with the efforts to restore power hindered by mangled wires, fallen trees and debris.
Francis Labbé, a spokesperson for Hydro-Quebec, said the corporation is expected to come up with a climate change adaptation plan in the fall to cushion the impact of future weather events.
Labbé acknowledged that although such severe storms are relatively rare, they're expected to become more common as a result of climate change.
One approach that has been adopted in some countries, such as Sweden, is the installation of underground power lines.
But Labbé said it's unlikely this measure will be included in Hydro-Quebec's plans.
"It's way too expensive," he said, adding that Hydro-Quebec's distribution grid is long enough to wrap around the globe six times.
Burying all that underground would cost an estimated $100 billion and "would impact the electricity bill of our customers."
MORE FREQUENT STORMS
According to Bourque, the type of storm seen on Saturday is only going to become more frequent.
"There's going to be much more," he said.
"My immediate thought was, 'There we go again with another weather extreme,'" Bourque said. "[The storm is] very coherent with everything that is expected out of climate change science."
If global temperatures continue to rise, Bourque said, so will the frequency of devastating weather events like this one.
The solution?
A time machine.
"If we absolutely wanted to avoid the changes that are happening now, we should have executed the promises that we did in Rio in 1992. And in Kyoto in 1997, which we did not," he said.
Since changing the past isn't an option, Bourque said the next best solution is dramatically reducing greenhouse gases moving forward.
"So we are talking about completely changing our economy to make it completely disconnected with greenhouse gases and oil and gas," said Bourque, adding that society must "go towards renewable energy" and reduce its consumption overall.
It's a predicament made all the more urgent by a recent United Nations (UN) report, which found carbon emissions were at an all-time high between 2010 and 2019.
António Guterres, secretary-general for the UN, said the world is facing "unprecedented heatwaves, terrifying storms, widespread water shortages and the extinction of a million species of plants and animals" and urged immediate action from all governments.
CTVNews.ca Top Stories
For the first time in report's history, Canada's air quality worse than U.S.
Air quality in Canada is now worse than in the U.S., according to the 6th Annual World Air Quality Report. Of the 15 most polluted cities in the two countries, 14 were in Canada.
A newspaper says video of Prince William and Kate should halt royal rumour mill. That's a tall order
Prince William and his wife Catherine have been filmed at a farm shop near their Windsor home, The Sun newspaper reported -- the first footage of Kate since she had abdominal surgery for an unspecified condition two months ago.
BREAKING Roy McMurtry, former Ontario attorney general, dies at 91
CTV News has confirmed that former Ontario attorney general Roy McMurtry has died.
Hertz CEO out following electric car 'horror show'
The company, which announced in January it was selling 20,000 of the electric vehicles in its fleet, or about a third of the EVs it owned, is now replacing the CEO who helped build up that fleet, giving it the company’s fifth boss in just four years.
'You ask for your money, they disappear': Ontario man loses $17K to AI crypto scam
A Toronto man is spreading the word of a cryptocurrency scam that lures victims using AI-generated news sites after he lost $17,000 in investments.
DEVELOPING Canada's annual inflation rate ticked down to 2.8 per cent in February, defying expectations
Statistics Canada says the annual inflation rate edged down to 2.8 per cent in February.
High thoughts: The habits of Canadian cannabis users are revealed in a new StatCan report
Statistics Canada has conducted a series of surveys to measure the impacts of legalized cannabis since the Cannabis Act took effect in 2018. The latest one, the 2023 National Cannabis Survey, sheds light on users' preferences and habits last year.
Demand soars for solar eclipse glasses in Canada. Are they worth buying?
The demand for total solar eclipse glasses used to safely view the rare celestial event has been ramping up as sellers, along with astronomy and eye-care experts in Canada, warn that viewing the eclipse with the naked eye is dangerous.
Trump says Jews who vote for Democrats 'hate Israel' and their religion
Former U.S. president Donald Trump on Monday charged that Jews who vote for Democrats 'hate Israel' and hate 'their religion,' igniting a firestorm of criticism from the White House and Jewish leaders.