The weather was bound to be bad in 2024, the hottest year on Earth out of the last 125,000 of them.

In Saudi Arabia, temperatures climbed above 125°F during the hajj in June, killing 1,300 people on their annual pilgrimage to the city of Mecca. Across the Arabian Sea, a prolonged heat wave led to hundreds more deaths in southern Pakistan. Hurricane Helene brought 30 inches of rain to an already-waterlogged western North Carolina in September, filling mountain valleys with mudslides and floods that surged through homes in one of the most destructive hurricanes in recent memory. Then, in November, a year’s worth of rain fell on Valencia and across eastern Spain in just eight hours. The floodwaters swept through towns, and flash flood alerts came too late for people already on the road or trapped in garages underground.

As climate change intensifies extreme weather in multiple ways, the kind of push alerts that popped up on phones around Valencia are arriving more and more often. But overwhelm people with too many warnings about heat or flooding or bad air quality and they might start tuning them out, a phenomenon called alert fatigue that’s been troubling emergency managers. “It may be one of the biggest problems facing their field as climate disasters mount,” journalist Zoë Schlanger wrote in The Atlantic this summer.

The phrase comes from medicine, where overworked doctors blasted with hundreds of medical alerts every day got so many false alarms they learned to ignore them. Alert fatigue could also describe the dynamic of becoming numb to warnings about climate change more broadly. Since the late 1980s, scientists have been raising the alarm about the devastation that global warming would bring. Nearly two-thirds of Americans now understand that climate change is affecting their local communities, and yet they reelected Donald Trump, who has promised to boost fossil fuel production and undo much of President Joe Biden’s climate agenda.

It’s a paradox emblematic of an especially turbulent, anxiety-filled time. As 2024 draws to a close, dictionary editors have been sifting through the lexicon to choose a term that encapsulates the spirit of the previous months, with this year’s selections including “brat” and “brain rot.” For us, alert fatigue stood out as the winner in a year in which severe weather – and the accompanying push alerts – added to the chaos. The runners-up, from “climate homicide” to “underconsumption core,” captured other aspects of what it was like to live on our overheating planet in 2024.

Anti-tourism

The opposition to masses of vacationers taking over your town.

Thousands of locals took to the streets across southern Europe this year, calling for tourists to go home. These anti-tourism protests started in Spain’s Canary Islands this spring and from there spread to Barcelona, Majorca and Málaga, then to Venice, Italy and Lisbon. Residents argued that their governments, during a post-COVID travel boom, had started catering to visitors rather than to locals, turning their towns into theme parks and straining natural resources. Environmental groups like Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund supported them. Tourism is responsible for about 8% of global carbon emissions, thanks in large part to the emissions involved with flying. Protesters aren’t calling for an end to all tourism (which plays an important role in their local economies), but for a more sustainable, limited version that allows them to reclaim the souls of their cities.

Carbon cowboys

Those seeking to profit off the carbon-storing potential of other people’s lands.

Companies have been buying carbon offsets for years, paying to protect, say, a forest to claim they’ve cancelled out the greenhouse gases they emit. Yet carbon-offset markets have been riddled with false promises and a lack of oversight, earning comparisons to the Wild West. The metaphor has extended to calling the companies involved in these schemes carbon cowboys. This year, investigations of lucrative conservation projects in Zimbabwe and the Amazon found that companies were failing to distribute money to the locals who were supposed to be rewarded, profiting off lands they often had no right to. “The system is very gameable,” Joseph Romm, a climate researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, told The Washington Post. “And the victim is the planet, and all of humanity who suffers because we’re not reducing emissions, but get to pretend we are.”

Category 6

A not-yet-official classification for ultra-powerful hurricanes.

Category 5 has been synonymous with the scariest storms for decades. But as hurricanes have started to intensify more rapidly, some scientists have been making the case for expanding the Saffir-Simpson scale to include even scarier ones, creating a new category for storms with winds that top 192 miles per hour. A paper published earlier this year found that at least five storms had already passed the test for the Category 6 label, the strongest of which was Hurricane Patricia, which slammed into Mexico’s Pacific Coast in 2015 with winds peaking at 215 miles per hour. Tropical storms are fuelled by warm waters, meaning that as climate change warms the atmosphere and oceans, more and more powerful storms could be headed our way. One objection some experts have with creating a Category 6 is that it might double down on what’s already the biggest communication problem with hurricanes: flooding, not wind speed, is the deadliest risk of these storms.

Climate homicide

A new legal theory proposing that oil companies could be guilty of actual murder.

Climate change has killed roughly four million people since the year 2000, by one estimate. Some legal scholars are now making the case that oil companies like ExxonMobil, which have long understood that burning fossil fuels could have lethal consequences, could be charged with every type of homicide in the United States, except for first-degree murder. In a paper in Harvard Environmental Law Review this spring, David Arkush, the director of the climate program for the advocacy group Public Citizen, and Donald Braman, a law professor at George Washington University, wrote that fossil fuel companies have been “killing members of the public at an accelerating rate.” While it’s unusual for criminal law cases to be brought against corporations instead of individuals, climate homicide could open up a new flank for fighting climate change in court. It has already gotten attention from law schools at Yale, New York University and Vermont Law School, along with district attorneys’ offices around the country.

Hot droughts

When extreme heat and drought happen at the same time

Combine a stretch of scarce rainfall with rising temperatures and you get what’s known as a hot drought – a double whammy of dry conditions, because heat enhances evaporation. According to a study published in the journal Science Advances in January, hot droughts have become more frequent and severe across the western United States, which is enduring its driest period since the 1500s. The Great Plains and parts of the Colorado River Basin are the most affected, the study found, with consequences for ecosystems, farming and city planning. “It is clear that anthropogenic drying has only just begun,” the study’s authors wrote.

Semi-dystopian

A term to describe a future that’s nearly as bad as some authors have imagined.

In May, The Guardian released the results of a survey that hundreds of climate scientists had participated in, showing that almost half of them thought greenhouse gas emissions would push the world at least 3°C (5.4°F) hotter than the preindustrial era by the end of this century. “I expect a semi-dystopian future with substantial pain and suffering for the people of the Global South,” one South African scientist, who wished to remain anonymous, told The Guardian. Ecological catastrophe has long been in the backdrop of dystopian fiction, like Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, a 1993 novel set in a future California replete with raging infernos, scarce water and mass migration to more fertile lands. These days, what once sounded outlandish is looking more and more like reality – as climate fiction authors themselves are beginning to admit.

Snow-loss cliff

The point at which snowpack begins to disappear at an accelerating pace.

About two billion people in the Northern Hemisphere rely on snowmelt as a source of water. As winters warm, however, parts of the United States and Europe are close to a tipping point that could lead to a disastrous loss of snow, according to a study published in Nature in January. This snow-loss cliff sits at the point where the average winter temperature hovers around 17°F. Any warmer than that and snowpack loss begins accelerating irreversibly. While most of the Northern Hemisphere’s snow is in the far north and safe for now, millions of people live in places that have already crossed the temperature cliff. Regions like the western United States are on track to see a sharp decline in snowpack – further straining a region already struggling with drought.

Supercommuter

Someone who travels a very, very long distance to get to work.

The news site Fast Company did some back-of-the-napkin math and calculated that Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol’s supercommute would emit 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide each year, equivalent to the annual energy use of 118 homes. He’s not the only supercommuter out there, with some people flying to high-paying jobs in New York City from places with lower housing costs, like Charlotte, North Carolina, and Columbus, Ohio. Long driving commutes also have a significant climate cost, with so-called gasoline superusers, the 10% of drivers who use the most fuel, guzzling more than a third of the country’s gas. Even though data suggest that working remotely instead of in an office can halve a person’s carbon footprint, businesses have been going in the opposite direction, forcing employees back to the office.

Underconsumption core

A social media trend with a new take on minimalism.

Behind the funny cat videos and chaotic cooking fails on TikTok, there’s a whole ecosystem of ads designed to make you spend money. In 2023, the push against out-of-control consumerism brought “deinfluencing.” In 2024, it morphed into even more of a mouthful: underconsumption core. The budget-friendly trend emphasizes buying only what you need and celebrating the old tank top or water bottle you’ve treasured since skinny jeans were the thing. (“Yes, being normal is now trending,” The New York Times quipped.) It’s a rejection of fast fashion, which has turned into a mounting climate and pollution problem. Well over half of Gen Z and millennial adults surveyed by Deloitte this year reported either avoiding fast fashion or wanting to do so in the future. Underconsumption core, TikToker Jade Taylor told Grist last month, is “a response to the type of normalized overconsumption that influencers have pushed with their marketing, but also due to climate anxiety and economic instability.”

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In July, a torrential downpour led to flash flooding across the Greater Toronto Area, causing extensive damage to homes, businesses and infrastructure. The costs of that single downpour are projected to exceed $1 billion, with the government and homeowners on the hook for a large part of the bill.

On the other side of the country, warm temperatures and low rainfall have led to severe or extreme drought conditions across much of British Columbia, Alberta and the Northwest Territories. The Mackenzie, Canada’s longest river, has seen an unprecedented drop of two metres, hampering navigation and access to remote Indigenous communities along its shores. The lack of rainfall is also contributing to increased fire risk, driving another record wildfire season, including evacuation of and extensive damage to the historic townsite of Jasper.

Estimates suggest that climate-fuelled water risks – droughts, floods and storms – could result in a loss of US$108 billion to Canada’s gross domestic product between 2022 and 2050, with multibillion-dollar losses projected for manufacturing, retail, banking and other key sectors. Flooding alone is expected to cost the Canadian economy more than US$30 billion over this period.

These are all just numbers. The lived reality is that climate change and nature loss are disrupting the global water cycle to a dramatic degree. This is changing the relationship of Canadian communities to water and exposing infrastructure vulnerabilities that have long been ignored. It’s also forcing us to consider an approach that works with the water cycle, rather than try to suppress it.

Floodplains naturally flood. Wetlands are naturally wet. They are well-equipped to absorb heavy rains. And yet we pave over and build housing in these spaces regularly. Introduce a downpour into an extensively drained and highly urbanized landscape and it will return to its old channels. (A map of buried stream systems beneath major Canadian cities – some in pipes, others in culverts – was compiled by CBC earlier this year.) Impervious surfaces such as pavement amplify these processes, preventing water from filtering into the soil.

Widespread flooding in British Columbia’s Fraser Valley in 2021 served as a dramatic illustration of this fact. Much of the flooded low-lying area – Sumas Prairie – was previously a lake, which was drained and converted to farmland in the 1920s. When heavy rains caused drainage infrastructure to fail, Sumas Lake returned to its previous footprint, forcing the evacuation of 1,100 homes and causing the loss of 630,000 livestock animals, and cutting off all highway routes between Vancouver and the rest of Canada.

A recent study by researchers at the University of British Columbia, along with members of the Sumas First Nation and other partners, suggests that returning the lake to its natural state would support climate adaptation, endangered species restoration and Indigenous reconciliation. This would involve buying out low-lying properties at a cost of around $1 billion, less than half of the $2.4-billion price tag of repairing dikes and installing a new pump station.

Whether they are framed as restoration, low-impact development, managed retreat or otherwise, the solutions are quite simple. Give water space on the landscape and build in a way that works with the natural water cycle.

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Erica Gies, author of Water Always Wins, refers to this as the Slow Water movement, working with local landscapes, climates and cultures to support local water supply, flood control, carbon storage and biodiversity. Counter to the established “grey infrastructure” paradigm of controlling water through dikes and pipes, Gies advocates for restoring a multitude of small areas for water to slow and stall throughout a region, analogous to a decentralized electrical grid.

Canadian cities are beginning to embrace this way of thinking.

In Montreal (which was flooded at the time of writing as a result of a large water-main break), a multi-year project is underway to construct more than 30 “sponge parks,” designed to help rainwater filter into the soil. These spaces offer numerous benefits, including a buffer against flooding and drought and cooling during heat waves. Scaled to the level of entire cities, as is currently being demonstrated in China, this represents an ambitious leap in the design of resilient municipal infrastructure that works with the water cycle rather than against it.

Similarly, the City of Vancouver has set a goal of capturing and treating 90% of its rainfall through green infrastructure. Green roofs, permeable pavement and rain gardens – all part of Vancouver’s strategy – aim to replicate natural water processes, drawing on plants, soil and built structures to capture and filter rainwater before returning it to waterways. All the while, working to keep water off city streets and out of basements.

Beyond cities, rural regions across Canada are beginning to explore green infrastructure opportunities, such as wetland and grassland restoration, shoreline stabilization and agricultural water-management projects. These initiatives have been driven as much by future planning as by near-term economic benefits. A recent analysis of natural infrastructure in the Prairies estimated the sector’s direct contribution to the region’s GDP as $4.1 billion, employing more than 33,000 people in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

These solutions present opportunities not only for communities and governments, but also for technology and business. Green infrastructure requires a network of advanced tools to model climate risks, monitor performance and manage assets. Just as Scope 3 reporting is driving companies to address greenhouse gas emissions in their supply chains, so is the focus on water for leading companies shifting upstream. In 2018, Anheuser-Busch InBev, one of the world’s largest brewers, set a water stewardship goal for all of the regions where they operate that are located in high-stress areas to have measurably improved water availability and quality by 2025. This has included a multilateral project to restore ancient water-harvesting systems upstream of Lima, Peru – the world’s second-largest desert city.

Canadian insurers such as Co-operators and Aviva are similarly looking upstream, exploring partnered restoration and stewardship initiatives to mitigate downstream flood risks for their clients.

As the impacts of climate change intensify, we must work with the water cycle to bring water back into our cities and onto our landscapes, (un)paving the way to a resilient future.

Alan Shapiro is principal at environmental consultancy Shapiro & Company and an instructor in the British Columbia Institute of Technology’s Sustainable Business program.

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Evolved over thousands of years and cultures, wine is something we all take for granted. But that is all about to change.

Recent publications on climate volatility have painted a bleak picture of the future for this beloved alcoholic beverage.

It is now clear that global warming is affecting most of the crops that are essential to feed the world. Climate change is impacting the production of both staple food crops like wheat, rice and corn and also commodity crops including coffee, cocoa and grapes.

Most of the world’s vineyards, including its most venerable names, are facing incredible existential challenges that pose essential risks to their very survival if they don’t adapt to the changing environmental conditions. Canadian wine is by no means exempt from these changes.

Signs of things to come

In January 2024, the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia experienced a devastating cold snap, with temperatures plummeting below minus 20 C. This unprecedented climatic event inflicted severe damage to all the grapevines in the region and could result in a 97 to 99 per cent decrease in annual grape and wine production across the region — with projected revenue losses over the next few years in the $440 to $445 million range.

It is still too early in the season to assess the full extent of the damage and, while many vines will need replacement, there is still hope that with careful management some vines will bounce back within a few years.

The Okanagan cold snap is merely the latest climate change-induced climatic event to rock the Canadian and global wine industry in recent years.

Drought conditions, heat waves and smoke from forest fires have heavily impacted grape yields and resulted in variations in wine quality across regions. The cumulative effect of these climate-related events underscores the undeniable influence that climate change is already having on wine production and quality.

The viticulture industry must confront and adapt to these challenges to ensure its sustainability and resilience in the face of ongoing environmental changes.

The future of wineries

In order to adapt, the wine industry will need to embrace new production methods and technologies while promoting collaboration between researchers and growers.

Agriculture technologies — ranging from precision viticulture tools to high-resolution spatial information and AI — offer invaluable insights into vineyard management, grape quality optimization and environmental practices.

Providing more support to viticulturists can help incentivize sustainable farming practices and eco-labelling. At the same time, providing access to resources and education can significantly enhance the industry’s resilience and sustainability over the long term.

Meanwhile, forward-thinking new policies could encourage research and development in areas like climate change adaptation, disease management and alternative grape varieties more suitable for changing environmental conditions. Policymakers should promote the adoption of renewable energy sources and more climate-resilient approaches to the vines and the soil.

Canadian governments should provide financial incentives and support the wine industry’s transition to a more sustainable future. The recently announced $177 million, three-year extension to the federal government’s Wine Sector Support Program is a good start.

Climate change not entirely to blame

Grapevines are often cultivated in areas that are incredibly vulnerable to changes in climate and while global warming is the greatest challenge the wine industry faces, it is not the only one.

The last 20 years have seen a significant drop in wine consumption as changing lifestyles, price hikes and health concerns push consumers — particularly young people — to cut back on alcohol. When people do indulge in wine, they are increasingly splurging on pricier bottles, choosing quality over quantity.

Data shows that Gen Z is sipping far less alcohol (around 20 per cent less) than previous generations and more young people than ever are jumping on the no or low alcohol “NoLo” movement.

China, long a major wine market, has so far seen a 25 per cent drop in wine sales in 2024 as rising prices and economic slowdown has left fewer glasses clinking than ever. Simply put, the wine world is experiencing a sobering moment.

Turning challenge into opportunity

Wine is one of life’s great pleasures and an intrinsic part of human cultures — likely almost as old as civilization itself.

For those of us who drink wine, it is imperative that we try to be mindful of how we can all support our local viticulture industry in these challenging times.

As consumers, our role is pivotal in supporting resilience. Actions ranging from embracing local products, visiting vineyards, buying new wines crafted from climate-resilient varieties and staying informed about the challenges confronting the winery sector all can contribute to a brighter future for the industry.

We need to believe that the Canadian wine industry can not only adapt to change but can also thrive by producing great wines and developing the wine tourism that will educate consumers about the tradition and cultural heritage of Canadian wine making.

While global warming news can often seem all doom-and-gloom there remains a ray of hope. Using adaptation strategies and embracing agritech innovation, we can mitigate the impacts of climate change as much as possible. This adversity could catalyze a heightened focus on sustainability, adaptation and innovation within the viticulture sector. That, if nothing else, would be a positive outcome.

Laila Benkrima is agronomy consultant, at the B.C. Centre for Agritech Innovation, at Simon Fraser University. 

This article was first published by The Conversation. Read the original story here. 

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In Madagascar, where children are skipping school to dig into bone-dry river beds, and Argentina, where corn husks come up hollow. Across the parched Mediterranean, subject to another blistering heat wave in April, and in massive reservoirs in the United States, where dangerously low water levels threaten power generation. Canada is already staring down what officials say is one of the worst wildfire seasons on record because of drought and high temperatures.

Hundreds of blazes are active from B.C. to Nova Scotia, and hazy plumes of ochre smoke stretching into the United States have triggered dozens of air quality warnings. “We must prepare for a long summer,” said Steven Guilbeault, Canada’s minister of environment and climate change, this week.

These conditions underscore the urgency behind the UN’s first water conference in 46 years, held in New York in March.

“Water is a human right,” said United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres. “But water is in deep trouble. We are draining humanity’s lifeblood through vampiric overconsumption and unsustainable use, and evaporating it through global heating.”

Nearly three out of every four natural disasters on this planet are linked to water, and one in four of us live without safely managed water services or clean drinking water, the UN says. Water usage has been increasing by roughly 1% every year for the last 40 years, according to a new UN report released for the conference – World Water Development Report 2023: Partnerships and Cooperation for Water – a pace that is expected to continue until 2050. At this rate, the number of people facing water scarcity could double, from 930 million in 2016 to between 1.7 and 2.4 billion by 2050.

“If we don’t address it, there definitely will be a global crisis,” said Richard Connor, the lead author of the UN report. Population growth, socio-economic development and changes to our consumption are the key factors behind the accelerating usage. Most of this is happening in middle- and lower-income countries, where economies are growing. Climate change is exacerbating the complexity of the problem, driving seasonal water scarcity in parts of the world where it is currently abundant, such as Central Africa, East Asia and parts of South America, the UN warns. In places where water is already in short supply, such as the Middle East and the Sahel region of Africa, it will get worse.

 

We are draining humanity’s lifeblood through vampiric overconsumption and unsustainable use, and evaporating it through global heating.

 

–  António Guterres, United Nations Secretary-General

Darkening forecasts, the World Meteorological Organization reported in May that it’s more likely than not that the planet will eclipse 1.5°C of warming by 2027.

The numbers are so big it can be hard to fathom – but the urgency demands it. In 2021, the UN Economic and Social Council estimated that desertification threatened the livelihoods of nearly one billion people in 100 countries. In the Horn of Africa, where three years of extreme drought has displaced 1.4 million Somalis and killed 3.8 million livestock, dozens died this spring in flash flooding in Somalia and Ethiopia.

“It’s not that one flood season undoes a period of drought. In some ways it creates more challenges,” says Caroline Wainwright, a climate scientist at Cardiff University in Wales who studies Africa. “The temperature has been a big factor in the recent drought,” she says. “Soils are sort of baked hard, so when rainfall does occur, we get a lot more runoff. The water doesn’t infiltrate the soil, so we get more of this flash flooding, and therefore crops still don’t respond to it very well.”

Climate change means more intensity, Wainwright notes – the heat is hotter and storms are more fierce. Parts of the U.S. and Canada experienced an unusually hot, dry spring, which helped trigger raging wildfires in Alberta, Quebec and Nova Scotia, while a recent study of satellite imagery found that Europe’s groundwater supply is precariously low after four years of drought. Punishing heat across the Mediterranean region this April conjured up memories of last summer, when riverbeds ran dry, draining wildlife of their ecosystems and causing a domino effect for energy production. This year, protracted dry conditions in Spain and France are fuelling conflicts between farmers and environmentalists over water usage.

In Argentina, farmers are still reeling from a record drought that ravaged this year’s harvest. “The ground profile is very dry,” says Walter Malfatto, who harvests 700 hectares of soybean, barley and wheat in the typically fertile soil of Buenos Aires Province. He lost 100 hectares of crops to the dry conditions. “You dig down a metre, and there is no humidity in the earth. The lagoons are dry. The drought has been terrible, and it’s not over,” he says.

 

Soils are sort of baked hard, so when rainfall does occur, we get a lot more runoff. The water doesn’t infiltrate the soil, so we get more of this flash flooding, and therefore crops still don’t respond to it very well.

 

– Caroline Wainwright, climate scientist at Cardiff University

 

Agriculture consumes on average 70% of water use every year. And in some cases, it’s in direct competition with the cities it feeds for the water it needs to feed them. Agriculture is a sector hit hard by the scarcity, which brings economic consequences, along with an imperative to adapt. In the southwestern U.S., federal officials are developing a plan to cut water usage of the Colorado River, which is at dangerously low levels and used to irrigate crops like alfalfa and almonds. The UN report notes that the only real way to safeguard and manage water supply is cooperation. Of the 153 countries that share nearly 900 rivers, lakes and aquifer systems, more than half have signed agreements regarding usage.

Innovation will be key to withstanding the volatility. In Cambodia, for example, solar-powered water pumps are providing a steady irrigation system that is helping small-scale farmers maintain their rice paddy fields, and may have the added benefit of reducing water waste. Across Africa, more countries are deploying early-warning systems that help forecast dry or rainy seasons and plan water-management strategies accordingly. This is especially important given the competing priorities for the precious resource.

“Where we cooperate on water in partnership, in solidarity, we can leverage additional benefits – for water management, for food, for energy and for climate change mitigation and adaptation,” said Johannes Cullmann, the vice-chair of UN Water, at the water conference in March. “Water is a connector. People don’t see it, but it connects us, in an immensely powerful way.”

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