Ontario: Adapt now to climate change, panel warns
Toronto Star / Tanya Talaga / 23 February 2010
Ontario needs to construct flood-proof roads, improve building guidelines and enact local emergency response plans to cope with extreme weather threats, warns a blue-ribbon report on combatting climate change.
That grim news comes from Ontario's 11-person expert panel on climate-change adaptation, which includes Dr. Ian Burton and Dr. Barry Smit, who shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. vice-president Al Gore.
They are urging Premier Dalton McGuinty's government to use their 96-page report [PDF], the culmination of two years of work, as the province's template for coping with the changing climate.
Temperatures are steadily on the rise and flooding, droughts and severe weather scenarios need to be considered in most infrastructure planning, they say. The latest projected climate scenarios for Ontario in 2050 show an increase in the annual average temperature of 2.5 C to 3.7 C compared to what was seen from 1961 to 1990.
The Far North will be hit the hardest by climate change, experiencing more snow and greater flooding, affecting roads, bridges and First Nations communities.
