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Good afternoon, and welcome to Globe Climate, a newsletter about climate change, environment and resources in Canada.

Only a few hours north of Toronto, an effort is under way to take a stand against reptile mortality.

The area, near Georgian Bay, is one of more than 700 sites in the world recognized by UNESCO for its ecological significance. Considered the world’s largest freshwater archipelago, it hosts more than 50 at-risk plant and animal species in Canada – including reptiles like snakes and turtles.

But ‘tis the season for road trips and construction and, as Tavia Grant writes, a hot asphalt surface is an appealing place for a snake to lounge under the summer sun. This, coupled with their attempts to cross the roads, leads to high rates of reptile road mortality.

To combat this, a number of initiatives are taking place. Short, concave fences are built into the natural landscape beside busy roads to prevent slippery reptiles from scaling them. Construction and hydro workers are learning the tricks of the trade from conservationists to identify and protect turtle nests. Since 2020, 10,258 eggs have been collected and between 2020 and last summer, 7,858 hatchlings were released back into their natural habitat.

The best part? The construction workers – and their kids - have become citizen scientists who are helping to document where the turtle eggs are being laid and returning to watch the hatchlings take their first steps.

For some teams, mitigating the impact on wildlife even factors into their planning of public works projects.

Now, let’s catch you up on other news.

Open this photo in gallery:

Painted turtle hatchling ready to be released in the Georgian Bay area. It was one of thousands released in 2022 back into the wild.Supplied


Noteworthy reporting this week:

  1. Coal: Revival of the Rockies’ once-prosperous coal industry clashes with those who say it will harm the land
  2. Textiles: From field to frock, clothing made from Canadian flax and linen is full of promise
  3. Jasper: Residents return to what’s left of home
  4. Smoke: Western fires blanket the Prairies with heavy smoke, raising air-quality index to highest risk level
  5. From The Narwhal: Great Lakes beach safety tests are often outdated and unreliable

A deeper dive

Tracing the burn scars

Kate Helmore covers agriculture and the environment for The Globe’s Report on Business section. For this week’s deeper dive, Kate talks about how scientists determine the carbon emissions of a wildfire and why Canada, and many other countries, don’t count wildfires in their emissions reports.

Last week, an international consortium of scientists released a report on the state of wildfires in 2023. Canada’s season took the top spot. Whatever metric you measured – number of fires, areas burned, emissions, the size of the blaze – “pretty much every record was smashed,” said the study’s lead researcher.

Perhaps the greatest concern was carbon emissions. In the 2023 season, Canada’s wildfires released nine times the usual amount of carbon – the equivalent of 10 years’ worth of normal emissions.

The scientists arrived at this number in two ways. The first is through real-time satellite observation. The emissions are calculated by analyzing the extent of the fire and estimating how much carbon is released based on the type of vegetation burning.

In 2023, Canada’s boreal forests burned. These areas are significant carbon sequesters. When they burn, the carbon they store is released into the atmosphere in devastating amounts.

The second is through burn scars. After the fire has ravaged an area, researchers compare before-and-after photographs. The blackness of the landscape is an indication of how deep the fires burned. Extreme wildfires destroy the soil, too – another significant carbon sequester.

Wildfires that cut deep into the landscape leave scars that won’t heal for decades, sometimes even centuries, essentially taking one of our most important tools in the fight against climate change – forests – out of action.

And this begs questions about how we calculate and report emissions moving forward. Canada – like all other countries – does not include wildfire emissions in its annual update on GHG emissions. We only count human-caused emissions (such as those produced by the oil and gas sector). The emissions from wildfires are included separately in the overall report in a later chapter about land use.

The justification for this is complex.

The emissions released from wildfires make those emitted by industry (if industry reporting is accurate) seem insignificant by comparison. Would Canadians still feel compelled to cut emissions if they felt doing so would have a negligible effect on overall emissions reductions?

We also count our boreal forests as carbon sinks and factor those into our annual National Inventory Report – which meaures GHG emissions – as an offset to total emissions. Are we adjusting this reporting to account for the record-breaking hectares of carbon-sequestering forests we are losing?

When asked, Environment and Climate Change Canada said the report is continuously updated, and the latest editions include revisions as “science evolves, and underlying data improves.”

-Kate


What else you missed


Opinion and analysis

Alex Bozikovic: Toronto needs to get over its fear of car-free streets

John Vaillant: Vancouver narrowly dodged a fire disaster. But nowhere is truly safe

Meredith Lilly: Tariffs on Chinese EVs are a no-brainer. Why is Ottawa dragging its feet?

Ali Bhagat: Wildfires foreshadow the looming crisis of internal displacement

Pau S. Pujolas and Oliver Loertscher: Canada’s productivity problem isn’t that big if we exclude oil


Green Investing

Utilities give clean energy investors a boost over solar

Investors in the clean energy sector have taken a drubbing from steep drops in solar stocks this year, but have made strong returns on positions in utilities, which have been one of the brightest spots in the United States equities arena in 2024.

Surging demand for power from artificial intelligence applications and data centres have spurred investment across the utilities and power producer sector, which is set to see rising revenues from all major customer segments.

Some utilities stocks have outshone even the brightest stars of the tech arena, with Texas-based power producer Vistra Corp. outperforming microchip giant Nvidia since March.

Equity analysts are upbeat on the outlook for utilities for the rest of the year, especially if U.S. interest rates are lowered and reduce the cost of debt financing for infrastructure development, service expansions and grid upgrades.

That positive forecast contrasts with that of the solar industry, which was rocked by a high-profile bankruptcy this month that may spark a pivot by clean energy investors into the utilities arena instead.


The Climate Exchange

Check out our new digital hub where you can ask your most pressing questions about climate change. It’s a place where we hope to help by answering your questions, big and small, about the continuing changes and challenges around climate change. Along the way, we’ll aim to highlight the people, communities and companies working toward climate solutions and innovations.

For the record: While RBC supports the initiative financially, the company has no say in what questions get asked or how The Globe answers them.


Photo of the week

Open this photo in gallery:

A worker uses a knife to remove labels from plastic bottles on Aug. 18, 2024 in Kathmandu, Nepal. Avni Ventures is a green social business based in Kathmandu that is pioneering the circular economy in Nepal through PET collection and recycling, green technology R&D, sustainability education, and consultancy services. As the largest responsible plastic waste collection and recycling network in Nepal, Avni has created a formal supply chain, supported waste entrepreneurs, and partnered with local governments to reduce CO2 emissions and eliminate child labor in the waste sector. The company is also the official recycling partner of the Mountain Clean Up Campaign, led and co-ordinated by the Nepali Army, in charge of sorting and processing the recyclable waste collected from Mount Everest, the world's tallest mountain.Mailee Osten-Tan/Getty Images


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