Repeated record-breaking heat waves cooked the European continent this summer, delivering the region’s hottest June on record. A simultaneous, though possibly related, drought shriveled rivers to record lows. In addition to their impact on public health, the dual crises put pressure on Europe’s energy system: Wind power struggled under stagnant conditions created by heat waves, and “thermal” power plants — nuclear, gas, and coal plants — had to reduce their output as European waterways warmed and dried, taking away water used for their cooling systems.

Solar power proved the only major energy source that performed better than normal during Europe’s summer of extremes, experts found. When paired with batteries, it helped supply thousands of AC units during historic hot conditions.

Scientists are still trying to understand why so many recurring heat waves materialized this summer, but studies have found that individual heat events are more likely and more intense because of climate change. The intensity of the June heat wave that scorched Western Europe was roughly 200 times more likely in today’s fossil fuel-warmed climate than it would have been two decades ago, one study found. As the continent continues to warm and Europeans install more cooling systems to cope — just 23 percent of households currently have access to or use air conditioning — experts say this summer provides lessons for the future.

Extreme temperatures in late June bumped up Italy’s power demand by 28 percent compared to the previous week, according to the energy think tank Ember. In France, that number was 14 percent. Electricity and natural gas prices spiked in evening hours as demand grew highest and solar generation ended, with some prices hitting their highest levels since the 2022/2023 winter gas crisis following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

As demand and prices were climbing, power generation in some areas was falling. In the United Kingdom, five gas plants reduced their output by a combined 2.5 gigawatts in generation because heat reduced their cooling systems’ effectiveness. At the same time, heat-induced low wind speeds halved the country’s typical wind farm generation in June.

Historic dryness dropped river levels across Europe: England and Wales reported their driest July on record, while water levels in the Danube River in central and Eastern Europe reached record lows, exposing WWII shipwrecks and prehistoric relics. Europe’s hydropower production hit its lowest July level in a decade, and multiple countries curtailed nuclear power generation as warm, low rivers threatened water supplies for cooling. France lost 18 percent of its nuclear capacity to “environmental factors” in mid-July, Ember found, extending a trend of summertime nuclear outages that has plagued the country in recent years. French nuclear plants often use river water as a vital component of their cooling systems, drawing the water in at natural temperatures and then discharging it back into the rivers slightly warmer. Because French law caps the temperature of this discharged water to protect aquatic life, plants must reduce cooling operations and related power generation when the intake water from rivers is already warm because of heat waves or drought.

But where these sources faltered, solar shone through. European heat waves tend to deliver optimal conditions for solar power: clear, sunny days. Europe’s solar panels produced 17 percent more power during the summer’s heat waves than they normally do, stabilizing the grid as afternoon cooling demand climbed, according to Ember. Battery systems helped deliver this solar power into the evening hours, when heat still lingered and air conditioners cranked to allow households to sleep.

“The next challenge is the evening period. Temperatures often remain high after sunset and AC demand can stay elevated, even as solar production declines,” said Walburga Hemetsberger, CEO of SolarPower Europe, an industry group. “This is why battery storage is becoming such an important part of the energy transition.”

For as much as this summer’s extreme heat strained Europe’s grid, the continent’s cooling demand has a lot of room to grow: About half of households in Italy and Spain have air conditioning, and a quarter in France — compared to 90 percent in the United States.

“There are places where we just can’t do without it now,” Marine Tondelier, national secretary of the Ecologist Party, said this June, a reversal in the party’s longstanding argument against air conditioning because of its greenhouse gas emissions.

France’s state-owned utility plans to spend over $10 billion to adapt its nuclear and hydropower plants to warmer temperatures and lower water availability over the next 15 years, including investments in equipment that cools the water nuclear plants discharge into rivers so that it complies with environmental standards. But adapting to that new demand could also take new generation and storage, especially as grids simultaneously increase demand from data centers.

Solar and batteries have already been growing at a breakneck pace across Europe, with 36 gigawatt-hours installed in 2025, a 48 percent increase over new additions the previous year. Battery installations saw their 12th straight year of growth in 2025, according to industry group SolarPower Europe.

“Extreme price spikes during heatwaves are a blaring signal for regulatory changes that increase power system flexibility,” said Beatrice Petrovich, a senior energy analyst covering Europe at Ember. “Treating this summer as a turning point for energy storage would be an opportunity to remove existing barriers.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/energy/heat-waves-europe-grid-solar-energy/.

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Canada announced yet another expert group to finalize a taxonomy of green investing intended to facilitate the country’s net-zero transition. This has been framed as an urgent policy priority and the subject of many governmental commitments – yet to be realized – for more than a decade. At the same time, advocacy group Investors for Paris Compliance announced that it is closing its doors as climate considerations have receded on the national priority list. Meanwhile, south of the border, the U.S. Air Force pledged to spend billions to improve resilience to climate change for an Air Force base in Tyndall, Florida, despite a vow by the “secretary of war” to “not do climate crap.”

Global concerns about slowing down or preventing climate change have led to lots of talk but relatively little concrete action. A regrettable consequence has been that financing for adaptation and resilience has also lagged. Mitigation and adaptation have often been viewed as conflicting priorities vying for scarce climate finance. Of the two, mitigation – which includes reducing emissions and protecting natural carbon sinks to limit global warming – has received more attention. In the meanwhile, the business of investing in climate resilience is projected to be a US$1.3 trillion global market annually, with vast scope for innovation.

The impacts of climate change are now upon us. Communities and economies are at increasing risk from storms, floods, fires and other climate threats. As a result, Canada needs to shift from climate debates to immediate measures for improving lives – addressing the pressing need for investing in adaptation.

Part of the challenge with mitigation has been that Canada’s efforts may not count for a lot, whether globally or locally. This is largely due to global sharing of the negative consequences of carbon emissions when the largest emitters, and our neighbour, feel little urgency to reduce emissions. In contrast, resilience and adaptation initiatives tend to be more localized in terms of results, directly benefiting those who invest in them more immediately and without nearly as much leakage.

Many adaptation investments are also expected to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Examples include investing in wildfire suppression and response; promoting sustainable agriculture and land use, climate-smart buildings and farming practices; improving mass transit; and protecting coastal wetlands. Many of these investments are ripe for innovation and should create export opportunities for Canadian companies. For example, large power plants dominate centralized electricity grids. An accident at any point in such a vast system can affect the entire network. Shifting toward more decentralized grids powered by renewables (when they can be harnessed closer to their point of consumption), even if backstopped by traditional power sources, can reduce emissions and ensure that communities can better withstand extreme weather impacts.

Concentrating on immediate, tangible benefits and on reducing cross-border leakage of climate investments should make this dual focus easier to achieve, but we will still need to overcome the institutional inertia that has characterized governments’ commitments to climate solutions to date. Hopefully, the attractive economic returns and public-sector focus on investing in infrastructure will help do so.

Nor does focusing on immediate benefits reduce the need to plan carefully, as “maladaptation” can occur within our own borders. One person’s actions can make things worse for others. For example, if someone builds a wall to stop flooding on their property, it may just send water to their neighbour’s. The good news is that this possibility cuts both ways. If someone increases green space on their property, it should also boost the resilience (and value) of nearby properties.

We should be thoughtful about how to prioritize. A recent Canadian Climate Institute report found that investments in adapting Canada’s roads, bridges, storm sewers and water treatment systems for rising heat and heavy rain could result in up to $9 billion in annual infrastructure savings. The results of such early successes should be self-reinforcing – making it easier to build strong community support for similar initiatives.

There remains the challenge of “implementation illusion” – political currency generated by reporting on new projects without being accountable for implementation success. A practical agenda will require meaningful frameworks that define, measure and communicate successful execution.

We have witnessed decades of slow progress on climate change policy in Canada. Facing the reality of actual climate impacts, we now share a growing sense of urgency for moving toward thoughtful action before events take over.

Gerry Rocchi is a corporate director with experience in climate finance.

Ed Waitzer is a senior fellow at the C. D. Howe Institute, a former chair of the Ontario Securities Commission and was a founding director of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board.

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Over the past week, hundreds of thousands of people in France and Spain fled their homes, many in the dead of night, carrying only what they could. In the coming days and weeks, as evacuation orders lift, some will come home to partially destroyed towns. Others will find only ash.

The fourth heat wave of a broiling summer is underway this week, and Europe has already seen one of its most destructive wildfire seasons on record, leading to one of the largest evacuation of people on the continent since the Second World War. It’s also the latest consequence of climate change, according to a study released on Thursday by World Weather Attribution, a scientific non-profit that analyzes the role of global warming in extreme weather events. Human-induced climate change made the likelihood of fire-prone conditions in France at least twice as likely, and at least 20 times as likely in central Spain.

“This is not an isolated event; it is part of a pattern,” says Maria Alcazar Castilla, the deputy regional director of the International Federation of Red Cross in Europe. The Red Cross is helping coordinate the disaster response effort in both countries and providing supplies and temporary shelter for thousands.

For months leading up to the recent wildfires, Western Europe had been scorched by back-to-back heat waves and an extended drought that dried out trees, shrubs and farmland, turning the landscape into a tinderbox. Climate change makes the confluence of these extremes more likely, scientists say.

Last year, similar conditions created Europe’s worst wildfire season in history, with more than two million hectares burned by September. This year could be on track to surpass that: some 430,000 hectares have burned so far – roughly 100,000 more than this time last year with two months left to go. In Spain alone, the burned area is roughly equivalent to the size of London.

With heat waves projected to continue in the coming weeks, the risk of more fire looms over the continent. Other research on Southern Europe, also released on Thursday, found that summer days with conditions making them prone to extreme fires have more than doubled in recent decades.

At the height of the disaster this week, more than 300,000 people had been displaced across France and Spain. Rural areas that rely on farming and tourism have been the worst hit, Alcazar says. “The impact to the livelihoods of people will be huge.”

The high temperatures that set the stage for these fires had their own devastating consequences. This June was the hottest ever recorded in Western Europe. In addition to causing nuclear reactors and train lines to shut down, the oppressive heat killed thousands of people across the continent in the span of a few weeks.

This summer has shown that climate change is a “national security emergency facing Europe and threatening our way of life,” officials from the United Kingdom and Spain said in a joint statement on Thursday.

Scientific research that links climate change to weather events is a relatively young field known as attribution science. Groups like World Weather Attribution skip the typical publishing process in science and use rapid analysis methods to get answers faster. The goal is to give the public an understanding of the role climate change plays in an extreme event before the news cycle has moved on.

Clair Barnes, a research associate at World Weather Attribution who led the analysis, says this particular study was completed more quickly than the organization’s usual studies. It drew from the group’s earlier research on heat and drought, which, along with wind speed, are key components in so-called fire weather. The group also analyzed historical weather data to compare this year’s fire conditions with those from past summers, as well as with simulations of a world without climate change. “As long as we continue to emit fossil fuels into the atmosphere, those greenhouse gases are going to continue to warm the planet more,” Barnes says. “This is just the beginning of how bad it’s going to be.”

One significant factor, the group found, was a rainier than usual winter in January and February, which prompted a burst of vegetation growth in the spring. Then, as the monthslong drought set in, those plants dried up, becoming the tinder that fuelled these fires.

I don’t think it’s an issue of firefighting capacity or investment. It’s fundamentally an issue of landscape management in the face of global warming.

– Robert Field, fire and climate researcher at Columbia University in New York

This phenomenon, sometimes called “weather whiplash,” is a direct result of climate change. As the atmosphere warms, it gets spongier and thirstier, sucking up more moisture from the land and holding on to it for longer periods of time. That, in turn, leads to more intense rainfall that happens less frequently.

How people use the land can also make wildfire conditions significantly worse, says Robert Field, a fire and climate researcher at Columbia University in New York.

In both France and Spain, abandoned farmland and a shift away from cattle, which graze on plants, might have played a role in fuelling the fire. In France, the wildfire outbreak was centred in the Landes de Gascogne, a coastal region with an abundance of planted pine forests. Research on wildfires worldwide has shown that timber plantations like these can be twice as flammable as natural forests. “I don’t think it’s an issue of firefighting capacity or investment,” Field says. “It’s fundamentally an issue of landscape management in the face of global warming.”

Since Tuesday, firefighters have managed to partially contain many of the fires, and authorities have allowed more than 100,000 evacuees to return home in southwest France. A weak cold front is also on its way to Europe, potentially providing a small window of relief, according to Jason Nicholls, a meteorologist and international forecasting lead at AccuWeather.

But another surge of heat could come as soon as this weekend, with more heat expected by mid-August, forecasts show. “I don’t see any drought relief in the near term, which would mean the wildfire risk will stay very elevated,” Nicholls says. The drought and heat will continue to smother France, Spain and other parts of Central and Western Europe, like Germany and Hungary.

“I’ve been doing international forecasting for 20 years,” Nicholls says. “These wildfires have been some of the worst I’ve ever seen.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/wildfires/study-monster-wildfires-spain-france-attribution/. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style.

Grist is a non-profit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change.

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While it’s tempting to imagine the majestic Ents stalking Middle Earth in The Lord of the Rings, this migration is the more subtle result of seeds dispersing by way of wind, animals and water. Indeed, the movement of tree species echoes other migratory patterns that are also influenced by a warming planet.  

The movement of trees is not new. Scientists have long tracked how these shifts occur, describing them as proof of the resilience of species. But they are happening more quickly because of temperature changes in the planet. One pattern observed is the move away from heat. Some move to higher altitudes, others to areas with more moisture. A new study published in the International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation paints a more nuanced picture, finding that both climate and anthropogenic factors have to do with tree movement. Between 2000 and 2020, 42% of treelines shifted upslope, while 25% shifted downslope. “The rate of treeline shifts was strongly influenced by anthropogenic disturbances,” the study found, in particular from fires.  

Unsurprisingly, trees are short on speed. They simply may not be able to migrate quickly enough to keep up with the pace of environmental changes. Some scientists are calling for “assisted migration” as a way to help smooth out the adaptation process. In Canada, the practice is taking root. The provinces of British Columbia and Alberta have extended seed transfer zones 200 metres higher for most species, and in B.C., planting of the western larch is now permitted outside of its previous range.  

Assisted migration is not without risks or controversy, and some scientists consider it another example of human meddling. New species may become invasive in a new ecosystem, or they may be ill-equipped to adapt to local soil conditions and sun exposure. “The idea that humans can help fill the gap between the ability of species to migrate and the rate of change in climate conditions is increasingly being considered and debated as a possible management option,” Canada’s Ministry of Natural Resources stated in a 2025 briefing note.  

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New findings from the popular tourism website Booking.com released in April show that more people – nearly three-quarters – factor in extreme weather, in particular heat, when choosing where to visit. The findings are based on a survey of 32,500 people living in 35 countries or territories that include North and South America, Asia, Africa and Europe. Some 55% of the respondents said that certain destinations had become too hot to travel to when they wanted to visit them.  

The toll of recent dramatic summer heat waves in Europe is lodged in our memory. There were more than 47,000 heat-related deaths in Europe in 2023. Rising temperatures are the main engine behind the so-hot coolcation trend.

Hotter summers are also linked to other environmental consequences that are affecting tourism, such as wildfires, drought and water shortages. Parts of Europe are in the midst of historic wildfires this summer. Hundreds of thousands of people have been forced to evacuate in Spain and France, which has been described as one of the biggest evacuations since the Second World War. And another heat wave is expected to set in this week, making the work of tamping down the blaze all the more fraught. Officials in Europe are warning that the wildfire season could stretch into October and November. Wildfires are also raging in Canada, with nearly four million hectares burned so far this year.  

Even before the grim season got underway, Norway was outright marketing its coolcation potential – noting its “lush, green forests” and “crisp, fresh air.” But other Nordic and northern countries have also become magnets.

A 2024 survey by Virtuoso, a luxury travel website, found that travel to northern Europe and Canada went up 44% that summer, while Italy, Greece and France dipped by half a percent. For the typically warmer locales in the northern hemisphere, data from the European Travel Commission show that while the summer months still are the favourite – with 25% of European travellers picking July and August to take a trip – September is a close second, at 22%. 

The coolcation is often billed as a more sustainable form of travel, because it takes the pressure off the typical hot spots and does not strain certain kinds of energy consumption, such as air conditioners. However, the distance travelled is another factor to consider in that calculation.  

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We all remember that initial shock in 2020, when our systems of trade and transport – previously understood as untouchable, and nearly always reliable – were thrust into disarray. Suddenly it mattered more where our purchases originated from, and what materials they were generated from. Travelling abroad became more difficult, if not outright impossible. Planes were grounded all over the world, and the return to “normal” seemed like a distant dream.

And it all unfurled while we were collectively confronting an unknown and deadly virus.

We adapted, and as a result of this tremendous upheaval, certain good ideas gained widespread traction: embracing a better work–life balance, baking sourdough bread and making the most of the region where you live. It became the age of the “staycation.”

Now, in the summer of 2026, we’re witnessing the return of some of the markers of those disease-ridden summers. The war in Iran, and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, has triggered a massive fuel shortage. Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency, has called it “the greatest global energy security threat in history.”

Some 13,000 flights were cancelled in May alone. The implications have been felt around the world. In Europe, governments have called on citizens to limit their car trips, while European airports, including Paris’s Charles de Gaulle and Amsterdam’s Schiphol, have seen some of the highest flight-cancellation rates globally. In Asia, which was the recipient of 90% of the oil coming through the strait, fuel shortages have meant that families have no fuel with which to cook, let alone travel. Canadian airlines have discontinued flight routes, with several airlines cancelling nearly all U.S.-bound flights. The Middle East and South America are also grappling with the fallout.

Even before the fuel crisis, Canadians were choosing to stay closer to home. Political tensions with the United States, historically their preferred travel destination, and a weak Canadian dollar are among the factors cited in a recent Léger poll that found that 67% of Canadian travellers planned to keep it domestic.

This shift lines up well with the conditions required for an increased interest in sustainable, nature-focused vacations, according to a research paper in the Journal of Outdoor Recreation and Tourism co-written by Michelle Rutty, assistant professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Management at the University of Waterloo. The findings, based on a survey of 753 Canadians during the pandemic, indicated that Canadians showed a preference for sustainable, regenerative tourism (including staycations) for post-pandemic travel, due to changes in their motivations, values and behaviours.

Current conditions will make many hesitate to book a trip, Rutty says. “It’s important to note that Canadians won’t stop travelling, but rather [will] change the way they travel,” she adds, and will instead consider more local destinations.

This shifting approach to vacations is already being reflected in numbers from parks throughout Canada. BC Parks registered a 60% increase in reservations for the May long weekend this year. Banff National Park notched a record-breaking 4.5 million visitors in the fiscal year 2025/2026. In Quebec, the most recent data available show a 25.3% increase in natural parks visits, reaching 9.4 million in 2023/2024, while total Ontario Parks visits surged to 12.4 million in 2024.

The increased interest in outdoor adventures has led to upgrades in park facilities across the country. In 2025, the Ontario government committed nearly $60 million to add up to 300 new campsites and improve 800 campsites by providing electricity. BC Parks has changed its booking system, which now allows visitors to book just three months in advance instead of four. In Quebec in May, provincial cycling organization Vélo Québec released a new digital platform to encourage more “bike-cations” using the province’s many interconnected bike routes.

Jax Jacobsen is a Montreal-based journalist who specializes in mining, business and climate.

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Vibrio bacteria are invasive pathogens that thrive in brackish and warmer water. They have been recorded in areas that used to be too cold for their taste, including the northeastern coast of the United States. Vibrio causes an infection called vibriosis, whose symptoms commonly include diarrhea, vomiting and fever. But an aggressive “flesh-eating strain” can be deadly, causing severe infections within days when coming into contact with open wounds.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, 3,743 cases of vibriosis were reported in 2024, including 222 cases of the particularly dangerous Vibrio vulnificus. Atlantic Coast states accounted for the largest share of infections. The CDC cautions that these figures likely underestimate the true toll because many infections are never diagnosed or reported. Not to mention that these numbers are only growing as the warming of oceans continues.

Scientists have long warned about the numerous consequences of warming oceans. Water has a remarkable capacity to absorb heat, but that buffering effect comes at a cost.

According to NASA, about 90% of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases over the past century has accumulated in the ocean, making ocean heat content one of the clearest indicators of climate change.

Vibrio bacteria are particularly sensitive to these changing conditions. Naturally found in coastal waters around the world, they multiply rapidly as temperatures rise and salinity levels shift. Researchers have increasingly documented the appearance of Vibrio bacteria in places once considered inhospitable. In a landmark 2012 study published in Nature Climate Change, scientists linked unusually warm conditions in the Baltic Sea to the emergence of Vibrio infections at higher latitudes and warned that continued warming could expand the pathogen’s range even further.

A growing body of research suggests Vibrio may serve as a blueprint for understanding how climate change can reshape the spread of infectious diseases more broadly. A 2024 review in PLOS Pathogens argues that the Vibrio bacteria can be used as a model organism to illustrate the complex ways in which environmental change, ocean warming, pathogens and diseases, as well as human health more broadly, intersect.

The oceans’ ability to absorb humanity’s excess carbon and heat has slowed the pace of atmospheric warming. Yet the same process is transforming marine environments in ways that can have immediate consequences for human health. The appearance of Vibrio bacteria in new waters raises difficult questions for health authorities: how to recognize emerging threats early, communicate risk without causing alarm and protect populations that may no longer be as insulated from these infections as they once were.

Natalie Alcoba is a Buenos Aires-based journalist and senior editor at Corporate Knights. Alexandre Paquet is a Toronto-based researcher writing about video games and culture industries.

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But climate change has turned this transient phenomenon into a moving target. Tokyo’s sakura peak this year was around March 19, which is up to a week earlier than usual. Early arrivals between 2021 and 2023 in Kyoto smashed 1,200-year-old records. The main culprit is rising temperatures, but erratic winters may also threaten a tree’s ability to bloom at all. Research suggests that under a medium emissions scenario, peak bloom may move up another week by 2100.

“To me, the cherry blossom record really captures how extreme these changes are,” Elizabeth Wolkovich, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia who studies plant communities and climate change, told National Geographic.

The study of recurring biological events such as flowering and leaf emergence, known as phenology, has arguably become one of the most powerful tools for understanding climate change. Studies by Wolkovich show that rising temperatures are advancing spring biological events across the globe, with plant phenology shifting by roughly four to six days for every degree Celsius of warming. Her research has also found that experimental studies often underestimate how rapidly plants respond to warming compared with long-term observational records.

For more than 1,200 years, Kyoto’s cherry blossoms have been documented in imperial court diaries, temple records, aristocratic journals and historical chronicles, creating one of the world’s longest continuous phenological datasets. Yasuyuki Aono and Shizuka Saito, two researchers affiliated with Osaka Metropolitan University and Fujicco Co. Ltd., have reconstructed temperatures of medieval Kyoto by “gap-filling” cherry blossom records beginning in 812 CE. Their research suggests that peak bloom dates remained relatively stable around mid-April throughout the medieval period, making the recent string of record-breaking early blooms especially striking against a millennium of historical precedent.

This shift is changing how people experience one of Japan’s most important seasonal traditions. Hanami, the centuries-old practice of gathering under blooming cherry trees, is traditionally timed around the short window of peak cherry blossom, often coordinated through workplace outings, school calendars and travel itineraries. As flowering now arrives earlier and with greater variability, these social rhythms are increasingly strained. Visitors and locals alike rely on increasingly precise forecasts, yet even small temperature fluctuations can shift peak bloom by days, compressing or displacing long-planned gatherings. What emerges is a subtle reordering of seasonal life: a cultural calendar once anchored in predictable natural cycles is now being recalibrated in real time to a climate that is less stable, making hanami not only a ritual of appreciation, but also one of adaptation.

If current warming trends continue, the timing of cherry blossoms may keep shifting beyond familiar seasonal boundaries, leaving a tradition once anchored in predictability to unfold within an increasingly uncertain climate future.

Natalie Alcoba is a Buenos Aires-based journalist and senior editor at Corporate Knights. Alexandre Paquet is a Toronto-based researcher writing about video games and culture industries.

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In her keynote speech at the flagship event, Diana Fox Carney called climate change “the biggest challenge of our lifetime” and said the movement’s task is to convince people “that a more climate-friendly future is not only possible, it’s the one everyone wants” – safer, more inclusive and more just. But subsequent speakers charged that Canada is backsliding on climate performance, weakening standards and putting its own zero-emission targets beyond reach.

Fox Carney is a well-known economist, policy expert and adviser on climate issues to global investors – and her husband is Prime Minister Mark Carney, who has faced criticism from environmental groups on his climate agenda thus far. The former central banker has been a powerful proponent of sustainable finance, but his response to growing global protectionism has been, in part, to unleash Canada’s fossil-fuel industries, roll back emissions caps and support new pipelines.

In her opening remarks, Fox Carney did note that economic concerns such as “security and affordability” have been edging out climate concerns. Nonetheless, she added, “we need a shared sense of purpose around these issues.” Climate champions need to act fast, she said, and offer “solutions that are affordable, practical and able to improve people’s lives now.”

“It’s hard to overthrow legacy systems,” Fox Carney observed. Even so, “the question is not ‘Is change coming?’ The question is ‘Will Canada lead this change?’” she concluded, to loud applause.

Canada’s climate crawl

Rick Smith, president of the Canadian Climate Institute, received even more applause for calling out Canadian complacency. Why, he asked, is Canada ignoring the climate threat? Forget the United Nations’ 1.5°C target for global warming, he said: Canada has already warmed by 2.5°C over previous levels, and the wildfire summers of 2023 and 2025 demonstrated the urgent need to prevent even greater destruction.

Smith noted that only one-third of recent media stories about flooding in Canada refer to the longer-term climate trends. He also challenged the country’s overarching focus on the costs of climate action, rather than the true costs of inaction. In the past decade, forest fires have caused $37 billion in insured damage, two and a half times more than in the previous 10-year period. And uninsured losses, Smith said, are usually double those of insured properties.

Canadians are also falling behind on electric vehicles, Smith said. “Globally, 30% of cars being sold today are EVs. But the story of gasoline-car decline is not something we absorb as Canadians.” In the last quarter of 2025, just 11% of the cars sold in Canada were electric.

Between the past and the future

While Canadians line up at the gas pumps, the electric future is already here. According to Smith, 75% of new demand for electricity last year was met by solar sources. Battery storage in 2025 grew faster than ever. Last year, China exported $22 billion in green and solar technologies.

With the United States’ energy transition struggling under Trump, Canadian innovators have a chance to stand out on world markets. But that advantage may not last long. Smith predicted that a Democratic win in the midterm elections in November will rekindle the U.S. sustainability economy: “The North American focus on climate change is about to kick into gear, again.”

But some speakers pointed out that climate inaction is not an incidental failure of Canadians not paying attention, but a deliberate result of lobbying campaigns run by the resource-extraction industries. “Fossil-fuel disinformation is driving a lot of these rollbacks,” said Laura Tozer, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Toronto. While many other countries are racing ahead on climate issues, she said, in Canada and the United States, “fossil-fuel owners are using these times of turmoil to double down.”

Signs of progress

How to get beyond this impasse? One of the most effective messages came from Joannah Lawson, a principal of the Brian + Joannah Lawson Family Foundation, the platinum sponsor of Toronto Climate Week. A former business consultant, Lawson’s opening remarks offered clarity. Beneath an image of the earth hanging alone in space, she said, “The atmosphere is the only thing keeping us alive.” But now, she says, “we’re putting too much carbon into the atmosphere.”

In response to this crisis, Lawson offered four reasons why she remains hopeful:

1) Climate change is caused by humans, which means humans can also fix it.

2) The transition to clean energy is well underway. (In fact, she said, renewables production has tripled in the last 20 years.)

3) Regenerative agriculture, or holistic farming that focuses on soil health, is a powerful lever to reverse climate change by capturing carbon from the atmosphere.

4) Canada has huge nature resources to preserve – and we’re doing it! Last month, for instance, the Carney government released Canada’s first national strategy for protecting nature, which came with $3.8 billion for conservation and protection.

Transforming climate change from existential crisis to solvable problem could be key to creating consensus and investing in the future. With Canada falling behind, Fox Carney noted, “We must stop arguing amongst ourselves.” The current struggle, she said, “will shape the economic prospects of our country for years to come.”

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