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Good afternoon, and welcome to Globe Climate, a newsletter about climate change, the environment and resources in Canada.
I’m Rachel Ferstl, filling in for Sierra Bein this week.
As we wrap up the first week of fall, cooler weather is starting to kick in for parts of Canada – possibly to the relief of many Canadians who endured above-normal temperatures and heat waves this summer.
Some of those heat waves were made far more likely thanks to climate change, Environment Canada said last week when it released a batch of results from its new rapid attribution tool, which describes the influence of climate change on extreme weather.
The results showed that August heat waves in some of Canada’s most northern areas were at least 10 times more likely due to climate change, including ones in Inuvik, N.W.T., and Nunavut’s Kitikmeot and Kivalliq regions, where temperatures peaked between 12 and 13 degrees above normal.
Climate change made seven other August heat waves in Canada two to 10 times more likely, Environment Canada said, and one in Manitoba was made one to two times more likely.
Now, let’s catch you up on other news.
Noteworthy reporting this week:
- Natural resources: In Indonesia’s Sulawesi, the promise of a nickel boom comes at a cost for local farmers
- Wildlife: The ‘ghost gear’ strangling Canada’s marine wildlife
- Policy: Federal panel calls for cutting Canada’s emissions in half by 2035
- Pay dirt: Engineering firm Stantec cashes in on environmental digs in the race against climate change
- Agriculture: Science meets tradition to give Canadian wild rice the boost it badly needs
- From the Narwhal: The lonely Lake Superior caribou and a lesson in limits
A deeper dive
Sicily, poster child for the European climate crisis
Eric Reguly is the European bureau chief for The Globe and Mail and is based in Rome. For this week’s deeper dive, he talks about his trip to report on the Sicilian drought.
I have been to Sicily a dozen or more times since I moved to Rome many years ago. Each time, I flew to Palermo, the capital. To cover the Sicilian drought, I went by train. The drought is not unique to Sicily. I wanted to see how the landscape changed as I rolled into Italy’s deep south.
The view from my carriage windows looked normal on the first two-thirds of the nearly six-hour trip. When I reached the northern part of Calabria, the region that forms the “toe” of Italy, the profuse green of the farm fields and mountain valleys gave way to scattered patches of light brown, then extensive stretches of them, an indication of the lack of rainfall and irrigation water. The heat rose. When I reached the terminal for the ferry that would take me to Messina, the port city in Sicily’s extreme northeast, the temperature was a stifling 37 Celsius. At that point, I began to understand the severity of the Sicilian water shortages. “Crisis,” an overused term in journalism, seemed apt in this case.
The Sicilian coast, with its endless hotels and resorts, seemed more or less normal – the tourism industry will pay anything to fill swimming pools and water gardens. The interior was another story. Much of the land was arid, virtually indistinguishable from nearby Tunisia, a desert country I know well. Farmers I talked to were in a panic, none more so than those with livestock. Some had slaughtered their dehydrated cattle and goats because they could not get enough water for them or the price of water delivered by tanker truck was too high. It is an open secret that the Mafia steals water from reservoirs or irrigation pipes and sells it to desperate farmers at extortionate prices.
The drought is worst in the area around Agrigento, on Sicily’s south coast. I had trouble finding a hotel because so many were closed due to a lack of water for showers and toilets. Sicilians pray for rain. When I was in Enna, an ancient hilltop town in the island’s centre, we did get a short, intense burst of rain one evening. But the land was so dry that it soaked up the water immediately. By morning, when the heat shot up, the soil became hard and dry and cracked again. Sicily needs a monsoon, not a sprinkling.
Read more about drought-stricken Sicily, where shrivelled crops and depleted lakes are a harbinger of Europe’s climate crisis to come.
- Eric
Italian farmer and member of Coldiretti farmers' association, Rosario Cognata, walks in his lemon field where fruits suffer high temperatures, in Campobello di Mazara, south west of Sicily, on August 8, 2024.MARCO BERTORELLO/Getty Images
MARCO BERTORELLO
What else you missed
- Environment, energy ministers offer Jagmeet Singh a briefing on carbon pricing
- Severe summer weather cost $7-billion in insured losses in Canada’s most destructive season on record
- In the gateway to the Arctic, fat, ice and polar bears are crucial. All three are at risk
- Dramatic images show drought’s toll on Brazil’s Amazon rainforest and its rivers
- Canada’s 2024 wildfire season on track to be the second-largest in the past two decades
- Supplies, emergency workers rushed to North Carolina while Florida digs out from Helene’s damage
Opinion and analysis
Editorial board: Canada falls further behind its Paris climate promise
Dawn Calleja: We’re facing an existential climate threat but still waiting on the world to take action
Green Investing
Quebec says Northvolt battery project will go ahead even as company cuts 20% of global staff
Sweden’s Northvolt AB is cutting a fifth of its global workforce as it reins in expansion plans in the face of a downturn in demand for electrical-vehicle batteries, raising new questions about the pace of construction of a battery factory under way in Quebec.
- Suncor CEO Rich Kruger is all in on oil. He’ll figure out the shift to renewables later
- Deals on Brookfield stakes in wind and hydro assets net nearly $1-billion
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 reader questions.
Photo of the week
A drone view shows a scientist picking pears in Ecotron, a research facility in which researchers from the University of Hasselt are studying the effects of climate change on biodiversity, in Maasmechelen, Belgium, Sept. 23, 2024.Bart Biesemans/Reuters
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
- Scientists believe this is the answer to nuclear waste
- Resilience lives on in Mi’kmaq country
- Norway’s gamble into sustainable salmon farming
- Green Steel? Algoma wants to go electric
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