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Good afternoon, and welcome to Globe Climate, a newsletter about climate change, environment and resources in Canada.
The United Nations Biodiversity Conference, COP16, continues to be hosted in Cali, Colombia until the end of this week. The plan is to take the goals that were set at COP15 in Montreal and put them into action. But two years later, countries are already behind on meeting those goals.
The complexity of trying to address climate change is the subject of one artist’s work at the conference. Canadian artist Benjamin Von Wong created a seemingly unstable Jenga set, stacked more than six metres tall, meant to represent the state of biodiveristy.
“Just like this art project, which took many people with many different skills to pull off, it’s the same metaphor for how we’re going to solve a problem like the biodiversity crisis we now face,” Mr. Von Wong said in an interview with The Globe.
Now, let’s catch you up on other news.
The installation took about six months to create and was a team effort with help from locals in Cali, Mr. Von Wong saidJOAQUIN SARMIENTO/AFP/Getty Images
Noteworthy reporting this week:
- Agriculture: Extreme weather creates challenges for France’s winemakers
- Research: Canadian species protection laws inconsistent and inadequate, review finds
- Texas vs. Alberta: One has restricted its once-booming renewable energy sector, the other sees it as a money maker. Scroll to green investing to read more
- Green finance: Canadian sustainability board close to issuing first climate-disclosure rules
- Energy: Oil and gas investment still necessary for smooth energy transition, IEA executive says
- Oil and gas: Imperial Oil cuts cost of heating fuel in Norman Wells as the town confronts a cost-of-living crisis
- Weather: Three dead, at least one missing after atmospheric river brings heavy rainfall in B.C.
- Industry: Provinces face private-sector call to work together on industrial carbon pricing
- From The Narwhal: Indigenous nations are rematriating bison to the Prairies
A deeper dive
Finding freedom in Freediving
Mike Hager is a reporter with The Globe and Mail’s B.C. Bureau in Vancouver. For this week’s deeper dive, he talks about a movement on the West Coast to harvest food from the ocean. All photos by Nicole Holman.
Ever since my first scuba class put me an arm’s reach from the copasetic cod and eerie wrecks located just north of Vancouver’s harbour, I have been enthralled by the waters of Howe Sound.
Two decades later, in search of a feature to work on this summer, I wondered whether people were now diving this popular fjord without these clunky breathing apparatuses.
Freediver Chris Samson, along with Tg Williams, Bryan Milner, Matt Scott, and Joseph Levesque, suit up in 7mm freediving wetsuits to prepare for a dive in the 10°C water, Southern Vancouver Island, Sept. 2024.Nicole Holman/The Globe and Mail
I soon went down a rabbit hole of local freediver and spearfisher Chris Samson’s YouTube videos, where he explores southern B.C.’s craggy coastline from his home base of Nanaimo. I was struck by his commitment to harvesting sea urchins, a population I knew has exploded from a profile I did last year on a cannabis scientist helping the effort to rescue ailing kelp populations from these ravenous echinoderms.
From there, I tried to sketch the contours of the local freediving community by reaching out to a number of instructors. What I discovered was a growing cohort of folks intent on respectfully exploring their local marine ecosystem while challenging themselves.
I enjoyed talking to the Heapes family, a pair of down-to-earth anesthesiologists, and learning how they were embracing their local waters and imparting a love of this region to their sons, with whom they harvested sea cucumbers and urchins.
As our changing climate warm these waters and tanker traffic increases with the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion now online, who knows what types of species freedivers can expect to see in the coming years.
- Mike
Kelly Heape hands her sons Fox, 7, and Bear, 5, a sea cucumber as she and her husband Stephen Heape freedive Howe Sound near Vancouver on Labour Day weekend.Supplied
What else you missed
- As federal public servants fight office mandate, new study finds remote work has climate benefits
- Blackouts in Cuba raise the question: Why has the island’s solar buildout been so slow?
- Grand Teton grizzly bear that delighted visitors for decades is killed by vehicle in Wyoming
- Criminals may be leveraging climate change as record acreage burns in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest
- Montreal’s Jacques Cartier Bridge reopens after environmental protesters climb span
- New report shows patchwork of progress on climate at Canada’s life insurance giants
- Tourmaline, Clean Energy open two new natural gas fuelling stations in Alberta
- Anti-whaling activist detained in Greenland requests French citizenship after asylum bid dismissed
Opinion and analysis
Kelly Cryderman: Jasper’s rebuild has become a political football, but the town’s leadership wants no part of it
Heather Exner-Pirot and Michael Gullo: Why does Ottawa’s green investing guidebook snub natural gas and nuclear?
Green Investing
Griffin Trail, which is owned by Quebec-based Innergex Renewable Energy Inc., comprises 80 turbines feeding up to 225 megawatts, enough to power about 135,000 homes, to the Texan electricity grid.Sandy Carson/The Globe and Mail
Texas vs. Alberta
In October, 2022, The Globe and Mail’s Jeffrey Jones embarked on a road trip along Highway 3 in Alberta, where a multibillion-dollar renewables boom was transforming the landscape. With renewables now stalled or in retreat in the province, he travelled to Texas to chronicle how the state’s deregulated power market has become a mecca for developers of wind and solar power, and now battery storage. Read what he learned.
- Morgan Stanley lowers climate target, warns on sluggish transition
- Thungela CEO sees world shunning new coal investments as boon for existing mines
The Climate Exchange
We’ve launched the next chapter of The Climate Exchange, an interactive, digital hub where The Globe answers your most pressing questions about climate change. More than 300 questions were submitted as of September. The first batch of answers tackles 30 of them. They can be found with the help of a search tool developed by The Globe that makes use of artificial intelligence to match readers’ questions with the closest answer drafted. We plan to answer a total of 75 questions.
Photo of the week
Employees of Cameroon Ecology dig and pack soil at a reforestation nursery in Mbengue Dikoume on October 3, 2024. The community forest covers 3250 hectares and the plan is to replant 2,500,000 trees.DANIEL BELOUMOU OLOMO/AFP/Getty Images
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 about what a carbon tax is, what happened at COP28 and just generally how Canada will change because of climate change.
- We have ways to make your travelling more sustainable and, if you like to read, here are 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
- Wildlife photography of the year
- Tree equity in Toronto neighbourhoods
- What happens to Alberta’s wild horses?
- Sicily illustrates Europe’s climate crisis
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