← 2050: Degrees of Change
2050: Degrees of Change
Episode 4 - Cities
00:33:25
Vancouver says it will run on 100 percent renewable energy by 2050. We look at how climate change will re-shape our cities, and ask if we're doing enough to mitigate its effects on our environment as well as our society.
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- [00:00]
Laszlo Vashini
Extra value meals are back for just $5.
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Mark Porter
Get a savory and sweet sausage, egg.
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Laszlo Vashini
And cheese McGriddles plus hash browns and a coffee only at McDonald's for limited time only.
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Johanna Wagstaff
Prices and participation may vary.
- [00:12]
Doug Smith
Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska and California.
- [00:14]
John Vanderden
And for delivery.
- [00:17]
Margo Parks
This is a CBC podcast.
- [00:33]
Ava (AI assistant)
Good morning, Ariadne. It's time to wake up. It is 9am on October 10, 2050. Thanksgiving Monday. The high in Vancouver will be 18 degrees. Skies have cleared after the extreme windstorm on the weekend. Your calendar lists meeting your cousin Heather at Olympic Village at 11am you must leave by 10:34am to take rapid transit in order to arrive on time. A reminder that your family Thanksgiving meal is planned for a 4pm start. Do you want to schedule an autonomous car pickup to ensure arriving home on time?
- [01:12]
Johanna Wagstaff
That's okay, Ava.
- [01:13]
Margo Parks
Last night dad said Heather and I.
- [01:15]
Johanna Wagstaff
Could go biking if the wind had died down. What's going to happen with that tree.
- [01:20]
Margo Parks
That came down in the apartment garden last night?
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Ava (AI assistant)
A community work party is being organized. Damage is detected in the vertical garden quadrant.
- [01:31]
Johanna Wagstaff
This is 2050 Degrees of Change, a CBC Vancouver podcast where we explore how climate change will shape our province in the year 2050. I'm CBC meteorologist Johanna Wagstaff and I'm your guide to our future. A future we're not just making up. A future based on scientific projections. Climate change will transform our environment, both our natural ecosystems and our built environment. And it's happening exponentially. But there are a lot of people already thinking about how this will change our neighborhoods, our cities and our streets by 2050. Electric vehicles are the norm. Norway banned the sale of internal combustion engines after 2025, and BC followed suit 10 years later. Automated self driving cars are are a common way of running errands in the city. Transport trucks run on hydrogen cells, although there are still some diesel generators out there. In cities like Vancouver, biking and walking is even more accessible than it is today. But what works for Vancouver doesn't work for every city in the province. Because there's no cookie cutter solution to climate change. Every city will have to find unique solutions to face climate change head on. And even in 2050, many municipalities continue to struggle with this.
- [02:46]
Doug Smith
Change doesn't happen overnight. It's a slow evolution and Vancouver's been changing dramatically for the last 20 years. If you compare it to where we were in 1986 compared to where we are today, there's a massive change, but it kind of sneaks up on people. It's not overnight and we're going to see the same thing as we head towards 2050. We're going to see a lot of changes in where we live, how we live, how we travel and the energy we use throughout the whole city.
- [03:10]
Johanna Wagstaff
That's Doug Smith.
- [03:11]
Doug Smith
I'm the Director of Sustainability for the.
- [03:13]
Johanna Wagstaff
City of Vancouver and his mission is to make Vancouver the greenest city in the world by 2020.
- [03:20]
Doug Smith
There isn't an Oscar for greenest city in the world, so no one's going to give us a prize at the end of that time. We're on track for most of our targets. We have hard targets that we measure every year and we report publicly to make sure there's accountability and things are moving forward. And some of them we're not going to hit, some of them are going to be very difficult. And some of them we've already surpassed. For example, our. Our target was to have a 50% mode split for active transportation, walking, biking and transit. We've already hit that in 2015.
- [03:45]
Johanna Wagstaff
By the middle of the century, Vancouver plans to be fully powered by renewable energy and to cut greenhouse gases to 80% below 2007 levels. These are extremely ambitious goals, but what does this actually look like?
- [03:59]
Doug Smith
So we're in a great location to have that conversation. Down here in Olympic Village, you're not going to see dramatic changes, you're going to see evolutions throughout the city. But what you can see here in the Olympic Village, I mean, you can just hear actually, as opposed to seeing. It's quiet, it's a very dense urban neighborhood. And there's cars. Cars are still part of the picture. There's no war on cars, but we need to reduce the amount of cars and reduce the amount of fossil fuels we use. So you're going to see areas that are really designed for people as opposed to designed for cars. And then people are added on later. And this is a great example where we have some. On street parking, small, narrower streets, things are quiet, but lots of pedestrian areas. This neighborhood is also really well designed from an energy point of view, where the whole neighborhood is supported by the neighborhood energy utility, which uses waste heat from the sewer systems from the downtown of Vancouver to heat all of these buildings and to produce their hot water. And they reduce greenhouse gases by 60% by using that type of heating system. And the only greenhouse gases we have is because there's so many people living here, we need a little bit of natural gas for peak boiling. Where this neighbourhood is going to struggle a bit in the future, though, is with sea level rise. So even though It's a relatively new neighborhood. It was designed before we had a really good handle on what the future of sea level rise will be. And we're going to have to make some changes in this community, as well as a lot of coastal communities around the city of Vancouver, to deal with sea level rise. So that's another change residents will see is how they interact with the waterfront will be impacted. Though we're going to work really hard to try to keep people's access to the waterfront available. Though it may look a little different than what you see today.
- [05:27]
Johanna Wagstaff
How different? Like what sort of examples of that change in interaction.
- [05:31]
Doug Smith
So in areas like Falls Creek here, you won't see too much of a difference, because in most places you've got a seawall and a railing, and then you look down, you see water, you'll see that. Except you might be a couple feet higher. But in other areas, like on the north side of Falls Creek, where we're designing a whole new community, we want to actually have a park that goes right into the water. But if in 50 years that park's going to be underwater, it's not much of a park, is it? So we're designing that area so parts of it may be able to flood during storms or high tide areas. But 99% of the time, when there isn't a big storm and a super high tide, like a king tide, people will still be able to walk down to the waterfront and see it. But it'll be a very robust park design. So once or twice a year, if there is a big storm and the park does go underwater, it's going to recover from that.
- [06:13]
Johanna Wagstaff
So Vancouver is planning to shift to 100% renewable energy by the middle of the century. What will it take to get there and what will that look like? I mean, we're already getting much of our energy from hydro, but how will that change as our sort of population and density change?
- [06:30]
Doug Smith
So right now we're getting about 31% of our energy through renewable sources, and that's mostly our hydroelectric electricity, but there's some biofuels, there's some solar power in the city already. What you're going to see as far as how people are responding to the city, you won't feel much different in your buildings other than your buildings will be. You'll have fresher air in the buildings, they'll be warmer in the winter, and your utility bills will go down significantly, but they'll function the same, they'll be the same size. None of that will really change where I think people will see a huge difference is in the transportation. You'll see a lot less ownership of vehicles and a lot more sharing of vehicles. And you'll have a situation, which maybe we had a hundred years ago, where really only a few rich people own cars and everybody else just borrows cars and shares them because it's so much more cost effective. Why would you pay hundreds of dollars a month to park a car that isn't doing anything for you? Why not just rent a car when you need it?
- [07:18]
Johanna Wagstaff
So in the future, will we be looking at streets full of charging stations rather than gas stations? I mean, Even just by 2050, you'll.
- [07:26]
Doug Smith
See that way before 2050, probably in the next 10 years. We've already got 170 charge stations in Vancouver. They're all over the place. They're kind of hidden in parking stalls and places. Over the next five to 10 years, you'll see hundreds more public charging places available. And as much as it's funny, as we start building this stuff, we were getting some criticism saying, why are you building these? No one has an electric car. And I guarantee in three years we'll be getting criticism saying, why aren't you building more? Because everybody's buying electric cars and there's no place to charge them. And we see the electric charging as being a transition. The city is going to have to provide some electric charging for the next five to ten years as we build out the infrastructure. But past that time frame, we really think cars are going to be a lot like your cell phone. You're going to charge them at home, you're going to charge them at work, you're going to charge them whenever you can. But it's not like a gas station where you wait till it's empty and you go fill it up. You basically just charge it wherever you happen to be parked at the time.
- [08:24]
Johanna Wagstaff
Electric vehicles, responsive. Real time temperature control in buildings, More wearable tech Drone deliveries, Interactive screens on the streets, Virtual reality work meetings, virtual reality holidays. Technology will play a huge role in how our future looks. So how are we going to power all of this? This is one of the biggest challenges facing cities. Not only will it be logistically difficult, but politically difficult too. Building codes can be adjusted relatively easily. Vancouver required all new builds to be carbon neutral after 2030. But changing where our power comes from is more complicated in 2050. Electric heat pumps and solar hot water are used in residential areas. Single family homes now make up just a small fraction of Vancouver's housing stock. Some are heated by renewable natural gas. Derived from methane, which also fires gas stoves in restaurants across town. Different kinds of incentives, both provincial and municipal, have helped homeowners switch over their power source as well as seal up drafts and replace windows. But the biggest driver of change has been a hefty carbon tax, which was an unpopular political choice at the time. In 2022, the national carbon tax was set at $50 a ton. In 2050, it's $200 a ton and has been for years. While higher levels of government can make far reaching changes like carbon taxes, cities have led the way when it comes to mitigating the worst effects of climate change. They're more localized and more nimble. Squamish was the first municipality in B.C. to become carbon neutral when its carbon offset program went live in just 2018. But beyond carbon trading, cities spent decades rapidly moving towards renewable energy. By mid century, passive homes with in house renewables are the norm for new construction. The buildings don't look all that different, but how the power grid is set up certainly is. And everyone is more conscious of where that power comes from. In 2045, BC's first tidal generator went in and there are wind kites generating power in the mountains.
- [10:38]
Steven Shepherd
I think people are going to see a lot more energy in their lives than they have now. Right now you just flick a switch or pop a button and you get gas heating and you're unaware of it, but that gas comes from 1000km away and you're paying for it all the time. At some point those prices will change and go up.
- [10:59]
Johanna Wagstaff
Steven shepherd is a landscape architect and the director of UBC's urban forestry program. He also does a lot of work on how climate change will look in our own neighborhoods and what we can do about it. He even made a video game about it called Future Delta. I've put my life's work into this time machine and I have decided to send you. I think you are the one with both the knowledge and the influence to change the past. I was looking at some of the screenshots and it's sort of like Sims climate change version. And I'm a huge Sims fan, so I was totally into it. What are some of the, as you said, a lot of it is making decisions and exploring solutions. But can you take us through what some of the simulations would make Delta look like in the year 2050?
- [11:46]
Margo Parks
Sure.
- [11:46]
Steven Shepherd
Well, you can think about sort of the adaptation side, so raising dikes, which obviously can block views and change, you know, the character of communities. That's one option. Walls, tidal gates, we Explored a tidal gate in, in Ladna to protect the heritage community in the harbor. But that would be a fairly major engineering action, not unlike what's being proposed for Steveston in Richmond. Also managed retreat, you know, actually withdrawing, pulling back from some areas of farmland, possibly even, you know, some of the low lying housing that is very vulnerable. But there's also the whole kind of energy side of it, you know, renewable energy. So we, in part of the game, you can, you can find your way to a floating community that has, you know, wind power and potentially tidal power and solar panels on all the buildings and local, local food grown in sort of greenhouses, these kinds of things in a, in a way that's very different perhaps from what we see right now.
- [12:59]
Johanna Wagstaff
By growing a low carbon economy and adapting strategically to find co benefits, Delta avoided the dystopic 2090 that we first started this adventure in our climate stabilized by 2050. We transformed, we made trade offs and we have new challenges. We have a future. A future. Delta Stephen imagines a future where buildings have more on site energy, where communities are built with wood rather than concrete, where green spaces and tree canopy play an aesthetic as well as an environmental function. Trees provide cool shade to people and buildings and an important way to avoid washouts from all those downpours. We've imagined a world where we've managed to phase out fossil fuels at a shocking speed. While not every city has managed to pull off what Vancouver has by 2050, you might think that major energy companies would tell us something different. After all, they've built empires with fossil fuels. But when we spoke to Enbridge, we were told that, yeah, they agree renewables is where the money's going. Laszlo Vashini is in charge of new growth with Enbridge.
- [14:10]
Laszlo Vashini
Technology adoption has been speeding up over time. If you look at how long it took the automobile to become the standard, it took 100 odd years. Electricity took 50 years, a color television only 20 and a cell phone 15. The renewable energy business in Canada is just tremendously expanding. In 1996, for instance, the installed wind capacity in all of Canada was exactly zero. The interesting thing with renewables is people need to remember that it doesn't always produce right? So when it's not windy, it isn't producing. But 1 megawatt of wind, for instance, can power 315 homes. Our overall investment now that we have is sufficient to power over 1.1 million homes. And that's enough if you think about it, to more than do the entire lower mainland in British Columbia.
- [15:16]
Johanna Wagstaff
So do you think by the year 2050, we'll still be using fossil fuels.
- [15:20]
Laszlo Vashini
Well, I think it's going to be difficult to completely get away from it, but I think in different sectors, we will definitely see renewables taking over the lion's share. Already you have jurisdictions that have the vast majority of the incremental investment now in the renewable space. So in Alberta, for instance, we see coal being shut down, being replaced with renewables. In other jurisdictions as well, the incremental dollar is all going to go towards renewables, but it will take a while for the existing base to work itself way through the system.
- [16:06]
Johanna Wagstaff
Ultimately, we're looking at a change as big as the Industrial revolution. Renewable energy sources means that our economy has completely shifted. There's a tremendous amount of work to be done. And some policy experts are skeptical that we'll make these changes fast enough to meet the mitigation scenario we've chosen. But there are some radical forward thinking plans in place. If the city of Vancouver hits its targets, it will be an amazing city to live in in 2050. Less noise pollution, more active transportation, more community green space. Who wouldn't want to live in a city like this? But that comes with a price tag and not just the cost of more bike lanes or more seawall maintenance, or even the cost of expensive projects like light rail. We're talking about the cost of actually saving the places where we live, a cost that individual cities simply cannot raise on their own. Something Doug Smith says he thinks about all the time.
- [17:00]
Doug Smith
We're talking significant costs. The province did a study with the Fraser Basin Council a couple of years ago that indicates that if we do nothing to deal with climate change and sea level rise in the region, basically the lower mainland, we would see about a $32 billion cost to our economy through damage, through lost jobs, you name it, a whole bunch of things. And to respond to those costs to build up dikes and levees and sea gates and things is in the neighborhood of about $10 billion for the region. So we're talking huge, huge amounts of money that will really have a negative impact on our economy, which is why it's so important to try to mitigate sea level rise by reducing our greenhouse gases today. And we know that it's going to happen for the next two or 300 years, and we're putting a huge burden on our children. But if we can mitigate now, hopefully it'll stop eventually and they won't be burdened with billions of dollars of infrastructure costs.
- [17:51]
Johanna Wagstaff
People are planning for this future right now. Mark Porter and John Vanderden work with Associated Engineering. They say climate change influences every project they work on. Mark does vertical structures.
- [18:03]
Mark Porter
So buildings, structures last a very long time. So we, you know, Design Life is 75 years, but we know from experience, and I've been into structures that are still around after 100, 150, 200 years. We have to design in adaptation. We have to be able to change those things and adapt them in the future. As a hard structure, it's going to be there a long time, and that's one of the challenges that we face.
- [18:29]
Johanna Wagstaff
Could you sort of take us through what an ideal building for you would. Would look like something that you could build today that would sustain in the year 2050?
- [18:38]
Mark Porter
When it comes to buildings, you can't divorce mitigation from adaptation. The two, the two really go hand in hand. It's a real opportunity for us when it comes to our built infrastructure to reduce our carbon footprint and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, make our buildings much more energy efficient. So, like, as a number one, I think, and we're starting to see this with the building codes that Vancouver is building in and the province is looking at as well, really driving our energy efficiency down so that our reliance on fossil fuels is way down. It makes the buildings more robust. It means that they'll be naturally cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter, and that's a good thing. It allows them to be more robust against a changing climate. I think some of the. Well, ideally a smaller footprint on the house and a simpler roof shape will alleviate some of those problems where we get lots of heavy rain and lots of heavy snowfall and they get trapped on the roofs. Generators, electrical equipment will, instead of being in the basement, will be up on a higher level, especially in those lower areas. I think we will need to pay attention, and we already do, but pay more attention to those vulnerable areas where there's potential of earth slips and slides, especially when there's clearing stuff. And then we've got increased runoff and increased water running off the, off the surface. So simple shapes, but not to detract from the ability to have good architecture. But I think the beauty and the warmth needs to come from the inside of the space rather than a kind of elegant, fancy shelf. That would be my. But I'm an engineer. But, you know, you can have a lovely warm interior, lots of natural wood, all those materials inside, but if the. Almost like a, A snail shell. Right. So, you know, you're kind of enclosed in this capsule, which is robust from the elements, but inside is beautiful.
- [20:38]
Johanna Wagstaff
John ON the other hand is all about water. So they took us to a place where all of this intersects.
- [20:45]
John Vanderden
So right now we're standing on top of a dike in Burnaby. It's right at the Burnaby, Vancouver border. And it's a dike that we've recently upgraded to the current provincial flood standards. As part of the design of this particular dike, we also designed for the ability to raise it in the future. So it's potentially adaptive design. So it provides a certain level of flood protection now, but with the rising sea levels and changing river conditions, we have the ability to raise the dike in the future to respond to climate change.
- [21:24]
Johanna Wagstaff
And how might this dike change then in the year 2050? Will it literally just get taller?
- [21:30]
John Vanderden
It's an interesting place where we're standing right now because we are relatively close to the downstream end of the Fraser river, where it outlets to the ocean. So the elevation of the dike at this location is governed by the ocean, by the storm surge. So, meaning the dike will have to be raised at this location as a result of rising sea levels and the higher surge that might occur, we also compare that against the river flood. So what happens when the Fraser river goes into flood? How high would that water level be and which is going to be higher? But at this particular location, the governing design standard is the ocean level.
- [22:13]
Johanna Wagstaff
And if this dike sort of wasn't here, and, you know, it just sort of in other sections of coastlines where we don't have something in place like this, what would happen as runoff increased and sea level waters rose?
- [22:29]
John Vanderden
Yeah, I guess the inundation areas of any areas that are affected by either riverine flooding or coastal sea level rise, the inundation area is going to expand. So we'll see deeper water, more extensive, greater extent to the limits of the flooding, and just an overall increase in the frequency and the vulnerability of those areas to flood risk.
- [22:53]
Johanna Wagstaff
And sort of sticking to the flood theme, since we're standing here in pouring rain and we're under a rainfall warning, how do you build things now that will sustain these massive swings in climate that we'll likely see here?
- [23:09]
Mark Porter
I've no doubt that it will begin to affect our design because we're going to have to deal with more extremes. So for a dam, for example, we're looking at the water pressure on one side versus what's downstream and the hydraulic pressures from one side to the other. This dike, as we raise it, will get higher, but it will get wider, too. And so we'll need to look at the impact of that and how that affects the stability.
- [23:32]
Johanna Wagstaff
So this is an area where you sort of feel confident that you could adapt to the changing climate in the next 30 years?
- [23:40]
Mark Porter
Yes, I mean, I, I think the, the planning done by the cities allows, when we're doing that initial work, we're looking at, well, what do we need to raise it to? What's not just the height, but also the extra land that we're going to take, because dikes are usually kind of trapezoidal in shape and so they get, as they get higher, they get wider, and so that has an effect. And, and also the increase in land and how that's going to affect the public space, how it's going to affect these businesses, and all those things need to be considered. And I think we've done that in this design.
- [24:12]
Johanna Wagstaff
Does it ever sort of keep you up at night, though, thinking about design, current designs that you want to create or that you have created that, you know, aren't exactly where you wanted them to be or, you know, just. How do you sleep?
- [24:25]
Mark Porter
I think any. Well, I don't know. As an engineer, we're always looking at what we do and feeding that back into our next design. And does it keep me awake at night? Sure, sometimes, yeah.
- [24:39]
Johanna Wagstaff
Each community is going to have to figure out what climate change will mean for its infrastructure. For the 600 kilometers of dikes in the lower mainland, it might mean building out and up, as Mark just described. But what will pounding storm surges mean for Tofino's beaches? What will sea level rise mean for waterfront homes in White Rock? For erosion along Point Grey? By mid century, millions have been spent to protect the port of Vancouver and YVR airport. Flash floods means billions have been spent to repair and upgrade provincial culverts, highways and bridges. Pressure to balance water resources between agricultural and residential needs means rethinking water reservoirs. Because there's another key part of this. On top of dealing with the physical changes brought around by a warmer climate, B.C. is also going to be dealing with a population boom. By 2050, Metro Vancouver is home to nearly 4 million people, more than double the current population. Kelowna has also doubled in size. And with that kind of population pressure, you have to start thinking about increased health risks facing all of those people. Christy Ebai is one of the leading experts in climate change and human health. And as she'll tell you, the health consequences that come with a changing climate range from the inconvenient to the life threatening.
- [25:58]
Christy Ebai
We'll have much longer summers. There'll be hotter summers and we'll see the kinds of heat waves we've not seen before. And during heat waves, people who are particularly vulnerable, those are over the age of 65 and we can expect to see more people going to hospitals, for example. And unless we're more effective with heat wave early warning systems, we'd also expect to see mortality go up for people who are outdoor workers or people who engage in outdoor sports. Those higher temperatures will also cause problems. It'll be more difficult to work, for example, in orchards. We may have to think differently about how some of our sports teams play their games, at what time of the day they play their games.
- [26:41]
Johanna Wagstaff
A warmer climate will also mean poor air quality. The greenhouse gases we have in our environment act sort of like a blanket, trapping heat and pollutants closer to the surface of the Earth.
- [26:53]
Christy Ebai
We'll see changes also, particularly in ozone. And so you'll see people who've got challenges with high ozone levels. That includes people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, people who go out and run every afternoon if you've got any kind of lung sensitivity. And that will be more difficult to manage. There will be particular consequences for first nations people. Some of the medicines, medicinal plants that they use. And I have already found that with higher temperatures that those crops aren't growing quite so well and they're finding in some places having access to their traditional medicines becoming more difficult. Also with higher temperatures and changing precipitation patterns, we're likely to see more wildfires. The good news from the perspective of the health sector is that many of these could be prevented. We can't stop the climate from changing, but the better we understand the potential health consequences, the better our health systems will be in terms of preparing for those conducting the research that needs to be conducted to make sure that communities and people who are particularly vulnerable will be protected from the kinds of changes I've mentioned.
- [28:07]
Johanna Wagstaff
It goes beyond physical ailments, though. It also comes down to well being.
- [28:12]
Margo Parks
Not just this direct something nasty and the environment is going to make you sick. But how your life and livelihood and lifestyle is changing is also really important.
- [28:24]
Johanna Wagstaff
This is Margo Parks. She's the Canada Research Chair in Health, Ecosystems and Society. She basically looks at how we interact with our environment, how that will be affected by climate change and what that means for our well being.
- [28:37]
Margo Parks
My area of interest is in trying to understand how ecosystems provide this foundation, fundamental foundation to health and wellbeing. And that's not just for humans, but for other species. And what's been fascinating to me has been the way that climate change has started to overlay all of that work.
- [28:57]
Johanna Wagstaff
So in 2050, how will it change our well being?
- [29:00]
Margo Parks
And so what I get interested in is actually getting people to imagine how might things taste, smell, look, sound different because of climate change. And that's because it's going to impact how water's running through riverbeds, it's going to impact how trees are growing, it's going to impact how food is growing, it's going to impact what things smell like in the spring, it's going to impact all these micro details of people's daily lives. And so that will depend on the places that you live, the different ecosystems you're in, the different rural communities you're in. The things that resonate most strongly for me are actually the micro events. The fact that maybe a family goes to fish at this river for the last 50 years and they go back and the fish are not making it there, or that we're dealing with the way in which people have interacted with landscapes over time isn't possible for them anymore. It's a big part of what we're all experiencing, that the sense of loss, the sense of confusion, the sense of sadness, the sense of anxiety. As a relative newcomer to northern B.C. and Canada, what I notice is the way people tell their stories to me about things that were and things that are now. And it's not a small thing when somebody wants to be able to coach you. I'm a newcomer, they want to tell me where to go and how to access things or where I might find something. This is not about trying to maintain a stasis or something as just the same as it has always been, but it is about us learning to adapt our relationships with place. As things are changing in new ways.
- [30:42]
Johanna Wagstaff
Do you get discouraged thinking about whether or not we'll be able to communities will be able to adapt to future.
- [30:49]
Margo Parks
I get a bit frustrated the way that climate change can completely dominate the conversation when in fact some of the things that we're caring about warrant our attention anyway in terms of those ecosystem relationships. It's not that it's only important to be preventing, it's really important to be preventing. There's a lot of things we can do regionally, up to the global scale to be making the case for addressing and preventing climate change. But at the same time we can be working at the within our organisations, within our communities, within our own personal life. So I find that enabling rather than overwhelming.
- [31:28]
Johanna Wagstaff
Thinking creatively will play a huge part in what our society looks like by mid century. While cities are nimble and Vancouver set an example for cities around the world, not every place has the population to support this kind of change. From high density housing that creates its own power to public transit to get people out of their cars. And as Margot mentioned, climate change will unbalance those subtle things we know about our environment. Things like that moment in late fall when you get that first hint of the crisp smell of winter. That time of year, you know it's safe to get back out there and hike your favorite trails. When the fish you want are biting at your favorite spot, or even when you can plant your backyard garden. It might take a few years to really notice these changes, or maybe it will be a sudden shift from one year to the next. In some cases, it will be dramatic. And nothing, perhaps is as dramatic as fire.
- [32:25]
Ava (AI assistant)
They're at the mercy of unrelenting forest fires. In all, more than 850 continue to.
- [32:30]
Doug Smith
Burn across the province.
- [32:32]
Johanna Wagstaff
It's crazy. It's devastating, it's ugly.
- [32:36]
Doug Smith
Over 10,000 people have been moved from their homes and thousands of others remain on alert. Everything, all that side of the hill is on fire. The other side, on the highway, everything is on fire. Flames.
- [32:46]
John Vanderden
All in all, we can see longer fire seasons. Lots more fire on the landscape and.
- [32:50]
Johanna Wagstaff
The consequences of that in our next episode. Fire and forests and how we interact with nature and how it affects us decades from now. I'm meteorologist Johanna Wagstaff and this is 2050 Degrees of Change, a CBC Vancouver podcast that explores how climate change will shift our province by the year 2050. You can find us at CBC CA podcasts or on itunes. If you enjoyed this podcast, we would love it. If you would rate it or leave us a review. Special thanks to UBC and the Collaborative for Advanced Landscape Planning. For additional sound in this episode, meet you back in our future next time. For more cbc podcasts, go to cbc ca podcasts.