The threat of climate change demands something more than thoughts, prayers and excuses

As another Canadian summer brings another round of natural disasters — wildfires in British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba and Newfoundland, flooding in Toronto and Quebec — there is a risk of the political responses to these calamities becoming rote.

Thoughts and prayers are offered. An official response is mounted. Support for reconstruction is promised. And then the political discussion moves on.

"The political pressure will disappear as soon as the fires do," political strategist and pollster David Herle said near the end of a recent episode of his eponymous podcast that featured two wildfire experts. "It's just easy in politics to forget about things that aren't burning at the moment."

It's certainly possible that the latest disasters will soon recede from memory, at least for those Canadians whose homes and communities haven't been flooded or burned. But as the effects of climate change become more and more apparent, it becomes harder to view these storms and fires the way we might have a decade ago — as singular "acts of God" that can be blamed on bad luck or unusual circumstances.

And the more these disasters happen, the greater the likelihood that voters will start asking governments what they could have done to mitigate or prevent them.

When that happens, political leaders will need to answer two questions. What are they doing to reduce the amount of unavoidable damage caused by climate change? And what are they doing to to prevent even more extreme climate change from happening?

In policy terms, these two approaches are known as adaptation and mitigation — adapting to a changing environment and reducing greenhouse gas emissions to mitigate future climate change.

In the wake of the Jasper wildfire last month, some asked whether federal officials should have done more to manage a pine beetle infestation that left behind swaths of dead trees across Western Canada. But experts suggested attempts to blame the infestation for the destruction are either misplaced or lacking.

"The condition of the forest after a century of fire exclusion followed by the mountain pine beetle infestation was an important contributing factor that created very high fuel loads over the entire landscape," said Lori Daniels, a forest ecologist at the University of British Columbia.

"Equally important was the extreme fire weather conditions due to the severe, multi-week drought and heat dome that had been sitting over Western Canada. Ultimately, the heat and high winds drove the speed and intensity of the fire, making it impossible to suppress."

It would be a mistake to look for scapegoats to avoid acknowledging the impact of climate change. But it's not necessarily wrong to ask more broadly whether governments could be doing more to limit the damage caused by the fires and storms that are now commonplace.

Even though hundreds of Jasper's buildings were destroyed, the fact that 70 per cent of the town was saved is being held up by some as a success story. That success is being credited, in part, to implementation of measures like the FireSmart program. Mike Flannigan, a wildfire expert at Thompson Rivers University, says the program should be mandatory in high-risk areas.

The Jasper fire has revived questions about whether Canada needs a federal emergency response agency; the Liberal government says it is actively exploring the idea. But Daniels says local communities also need to build up their research and expertise so that they're better equipped to manage the forests around them.

The federal government released a national adaptation strategy in 2023 — the first such national strategy in Canadian history. It followed up with an action plan that includes 73 different measures. But it's fair to ask how much more all levels of government could or should be doing.