Rising danger, crippling costs: Climate change report a grim warning for Canada

By 2080, the report predicts cumulative forestry losses from fire, pests and other climate-change factors could add up to $459 billion.

The impacts of climate change are piling up faster and faster, hurting people around the world and costing Canada billions of dollars in damages from wildfires in the West to reduced seafood harvests in the East, says a new report from the world’s top global warming research body.

“It’s happening way faster, more severely and more widespread,” said Sherilee Harper of the University of Alberta, one of the 330 authors of the summary report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released Monday.

“We know what needs to be done. We need to act now.”

The summary report, intended for policy-makers, makes for grim reading.

“Climate change, caused by human greenhouse gas emissions, is driving widespread losses and damages to nature and people, which are exposing human societies and the natural world to intolerable and irreversible risks, including killing people, damaging food production, destroying nature and reducing economic growth,” it says.

The report concludes current emissions policies put the globe on track for up to 2.7 degrees of warming. That’s beyond the Paris Agreement target of two degrees, the point at which Earth will be warmer than any time in history.

That warming must be halted, the report says.

“Adaptation also is not an alternative to emission cuts. If warming continues the world will increasingly face changes that cannot be adapted to.”