It’s hot out there, and it’s only going to get worse.
St. Albert and large parts of the planet baked this summer under scorching heat. That’s just over a year after last year’s heat dome ruined Sturgeon County’s crops and burned Lytton, B.C., to the ground.
Climate change is here, and its consequences are severe. Researchers say we can blunt its effects by reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, but add that we will still see sizeable shifts in our climate even if we get to net-zero emissions today.
That means we must adapt.
Sturgeon County and St. Albert worked with the All One Sky Foundation to create climate adaptation plans which they released this summer. This week, The Gazette looks at those plans to see how they apply to this region and your home.
Douse the flames
Climate models project that average annual temperatures in St. Albert and Sturgeon County will rise about 4 C by 2060, the adaptation plans found.
Four degrees is the difference between an ice age and today, so it’s no small shift, said Jeff Zukiwsky, director of climate adaptation and resilience with All One Sky. Climate models project longer, hotter, and drier summers for this region, as well as more severe weather such as thunderstorms.
More hot, dry conditions mean more wildfires, said Pat Mahoney, who has battled many such fires in his years as Sturgeon County’s fire chief.
Mahoney said his department switched to smaller, more mobile fire trucks and water tenders a few years ago to better fight wildfires. They also stepped up permitting requirements for controlled fires, and started using thermal cameras to ensure those fires were properly extinguished — especially winter ones, which often smolder out of sight.
“That’s cut our spring fires down 60 to 70 per cent,” he said of the thermal cameras.
The county has also started using drones to fight fires, Mahoney said — a step recommended by the climate adaptation plans. Drones can identify water sources, entrances, and at-risk areas before a fire happens, predict a fire’s movements once it starts, and scan for hot spots to quench after a fire is extinguished.
The adaptation plans call on officials to educate the public about wildfire risks.
FireSmart is a provincial program which teaches people how to protect their homes from wildfires, Mahoney said. His department holds information sessions and does home visits to promote it.
St. Albert uses FireSmart in its engineering standards by having buffer zones between forests and homes and keeping more fire-resistant poplars around forest edges, said Louise Stewart, the city’s senior public works manager.
FireSmart has many tips for homeowners, Stewart said. Trim the lower branches of spruce trees to prevent fires from spreading up from the ground, for example, and store your firewood away from your walls.
You can also design your home to guard against wildfires, said Kenton Zerbin, a permaculture designer from Sturgeon County. Use aluminum siding instead of flammable vinyl on your walls, for example, and consider Rockwool insulation, which is made of fire-resistant metal and rock.
Clear, cool the air
Wildfires produce smoke, which has choked the St. Albert and Sturgeon County region for many of the last few summers. The adaptation plans call on governments to create clean air facilities/smoke shelters to protect people from such smoke.
St. Albert upgraded the filters on all its public buildings a few years ago to deal with smoke from B.C.’s wildfires, Stewart said. Servus Place and St. Albert Place are the city’s two official smoke shelters; crews can also swap in carbon filters at St. Albert Place if the smoke gets really bad.
Portable air filters can help mitigate wildfire smoke at home, Zukiwsky said. (You can make one yourself by taping a furnace filter to a box fan.) Those N95 masks you have to protect against COVID-19 can also shield you from smoke.
The extreme heat often associated with wildfires can cause health problems — nearly 600 people died in B.C. due to last year’s heat wave, for example.
The adaptation reports call on governments to set up cooling shelters (places with good air conditioning, essentially) to prepare for greater heat. St. Albert has designated St. Albert Place, Servus Place, and the Jensen Lakes Library as its official cooling shelters, said city spokesperson Nicole Lynch.
Trees can help beat the heat at home. Plant trees and shrubs by your home to create shade, especially around your air-conditioner, Zerbin said. Use deciduous trees instead of coniferous ones close to your home — they’re less flammable, provide shade and evaporative cooling in the summer, and shed their leaves in the winter to let warm light into your home.
Manage the water
Extreme heat can lead to drought and water restrictions, as St. Albert and Sturgeon County residents have experienced in the recent past. But climate change can also bring floods, as happened in 2020 when record rains drowned crops in the county.
The adaptation reports recommend the use of wetlands and forests to guard against floods and droughts.
Wetlands trap, filter, and store water, reducing the impact of floods and droughts, said Melissa Logan, environmental co-ordinator with the City of St. Albert.
“The more wetlands we have in the landscape, the more water can be retained.”
The City of St. Albert holds regular tree-planting events such as Arbor Day and (coming this Sept. 24) the Clean and Green Riverfest to expand its tree canopy and enhance riparian/wetland zones. The city is also identifying wetlands and natural areas for protection in its newly annexed lands as part of its land-use planning process, Logan said.
City officials are doing a tree inventory to determine which species might be vulnerable to new pests introduced by global heating, said city parks operations supervisor Erin Pickard. They have also changed engineering standards to require more tree diversity on streets (reducing the odds of all of them falling to a single pest) and started picking trees for drought and insect tolerance.
Rainwater harvesting can help your garden survive a drought, Zerbin said. A typical roof will fill a 1,000 L container pretty quickly during a rainfall, so he recommended have several such containers.
If you’re worried about flooding, plant native trees and shrubs for more water absorption and use downspouts to direct water away from your foundations, Zukiwsky said. Backwater valves and sump pumps can also help keep stormwater from backing up into your basement.
The adaptation reports call on governments to look into recycled water, or greywater, as a way to address water shortages.
Sturgeon County resident Sylvain Blouin works with greywater through his Rock-N-Wash car wash chain, which was the first in Alberta to use recycled water when it opened in Edmonton in 2013. He is now working on a new car wash in Strathcona County which he hopes will recycle 80 per cent of its water, saving him millions of gallons a year.
“It’s the right thing to do for the municipality, the environment, and the shareholders,” he said of greywater recycling, and it feels good to do so, too.
Blouin said greywater has yet to catch on in Alberta in part because the province has so much cheap water. More frequent droughts could drive interest in greywater, while new technologies and the greywater guidelines issued by the province in 2020 will make it much easier for people to get into it. Blouin said governments could drive greywater use by making it mandatory in certain water-intense industries — California has done so for car washes, for example.
Adapt local, mitigate global
Climate change is a global problem that requires worldwide action on greenhouse-gas emissions to address, Zukiwsky said. But it’s also a local problem with local impacts in the form of floods, fires, heat, smoke, and drought — impacts we must address through adaptation.
Cutting emissions is important, but communities still need to adapt to the impacts of climate change that are affecting us today, Zukiwsky said.
“Even if the world stopped emitting greenhouse gases tomorrow, we’d still be locked into several decades of additional warming,” he noted, as it will take decades to undo the emissions we’ve already created.
“We still have to adapt for decades to come, and the more we adapt now, the more money we save and the more lives we save.”
Visit climateresilienthome.ca for more tips on how to adapt your home to climate change.
