When it comes to climate change mitigation and adaptation, cities need to lead
This article was previously published in the Vancouver Sun on October 4th, 2023.
Author: Matt Brown
At the beginning of the summer, New York City, the centre of the universe, was blanketed in deadly smoke from wildfires, which are not unprecedented anymore, but our new reality. As the seasons change again, the city, again not unprecedented, is grappling with flooding that has wreaked havoc on its millions of residents and visitors.
I am not a scientist, nor pretend to be one. I do, however, work in the environmental orbit as, what I like to say, a storyteller. So it was not hard to see the antagonist in this chapter of New York City versus Mother Nature: climate change.
New York is the social equator of our global attention. So seeing hazy sunsets over its skyline made the world pay more attention to the tinder box that is Canada’s north. Recent images of New Yorkers wading through sewage pollution highlight the dire impacts of inadequate infrastructure. It should make our leaders act faster to start cleaning up our own sewers. The streets of New York took in a months worth of rain in a single day in September, overflowing their sewers.
Canada has experienced those rains as well — once proclaimed in headlines as once-in-100-year storms, they are now the new normal.
Many North American cities are built on antiquated sewer systems from the 1960s that are long overdue for upgrades. Combined sewer systems — connected pipes that transport both sewage and urban runoff together to a sewage treatment plant — can experience a combined sewer overflow with one good rainfall. During such storms, those pipes are over capacity and all of that runoff and sewage goes into basements, streets, creeks, rivers, lakes and oceans. Cities are at ground zero of this because the same cities dealing with a housing crisis and needing to rapidly build more homes also need sewer infrastructure upgrades as thousands of more people tap into these sewers.
Toronto Water’s Wet Weather Flow Master Plan Implementation said nearly exactly that last May when it gave an update to city council, saying: “Without new financial and policy tools, the city will not be able to construct the sewer infrastructure required to support growth.”
Remember that when Toronto is next going through what New York is experiencing now.
Some cities are showing the way, though. Kingston, Ont., aims to separate 100 per cent of its combined sewers by 2043.
In Vancouver, a city also subject to climate change’s wrath, as seen from the atmospheric rivers in 2021, a new city council this year approved a $656-million investment in the city’s Healthy Waters Plan to separate combined sewers — currently, only 56 per cent of Vancouver’s mainline sewers are separated. This may not sound sexy, but this type of investment will prevent billions of litres of sewage from ending up in the Pacific Ocean. The completion date of this work is slated for 2050, but in the meantime that same team has started to divert wastewater from the ocean to heat new buildings, and is working to daylight urban streams that were once salmon bearing.
As former Toronto Mayor David Miller argues in his book Solved, adapting and mitigating the worst impacts of climate change is work best done by our cities.
Our federal and provincial governments are moving more and more toward the dogwhistles of our current politics, window dressing our newscasts and papers with solution-ism, while the reality is that true action in addressing climate change is nowhere to be found.
I recently attended a conference about the status of B.C.’s lakes, where scientists continued to sound the alarm about the impacts that rising carbon emissions have had, continue to have and will have on life that depends on the lakes around B.C. This is no different for freshwater around the globe, and why Environment and Climate Change Canada recently announced a $420-million investment in the Great Lakes.
Working in communications in the environmental sector, you used to have to really pull on the climate change thread to explain to the public that things were bad, getting worse and about to be catastrophic. But now, we need only a gentle tug at that thread to see that climate change is the devil holding together our new hellscape.
It’s where we live, in our cities, that leaders are going to make the biggest difference.
Matt Brown is Director of Western Watersheds for Swim Drink Fish Canada. He lives in North Vancouver.
