The local impacts of climate change

Anil Dash writes about the ongoing impacts of Hurricane Sandy in his New York neighbourhood:

“I still see buildings with the high-water mark outlined on them, and I still remember which places stayed open to serve people in those incredibly dark nights when we didn’t even have street lights to show the way. Any day now, they’ll be shutting down the most essential subway line in our neighborhood for massive tunnel repairs that are expected to take years to complete. This is all still recovery from a storm that most of the country has already forgotten about, that the popular memory remembers as ‘not as bad as they thought it was going to be’.”

Does that ever resonate. Earlier this summer I drove south for the first time since the 2017 wildfires which were (until this year) the worst on record in British Columbia. Looking at the charred landscape along the side of the road I realized that while for me those fires were out of sight, out of mind, for the people living in the Cariboo they were still very much a physical presence, and will be for years to come.

Speaking to people in the industry earlier in this year, I was told that we still don’t have a good sense of how that 2017 wildfire season will affect the economies of forest dependent communities, as the amount of trees allowed to be harvested has to be reduced and readjusted to allow for recovery of local ecosystems. And even so, we have news this week that not enough was done to protect rare fishers following those fires, making them even more at risk— and all this is before we factor into this year’s wildfire seasons, which burned even more than 2017.

Meanwhile, drought conditions in northwestern B.C. continue to worsen, prompting warnings that fish might not be able to successfully spawn, which means the whale populations off the southern coast will continue to die off. In the wake of the J50 orca dying this summer I listened to an interview with a researcher putting together all the puzzle pieces contributing to the problem from the United States north through the province, connecting issues that we tend to isolate into localized problems into a much larger catastrophe.

The trouble is it’s really, really hard to put all of this together. Lord knows media organizations have been trying. That said, I’m issuing myself a personal challenge to better contextualize these seemingly isolated stories in my neck of these woods as part of the larger picture of what’s happening all around the world.