The summer of 2024 in Alberta is one for the record books. The forest fire that destroyed a third of Jasper, shattering lives and livelihoods, was the ninth most expensive natural disaster in Canadian history, with insured losses costing an estimated $880 million.
Then, on August 5, a violent windstorm bashed Calgary and rained down golf ball-sized hail that severely damaged buildings, planes, and vehicles and injured people.
Insurers say the storm resulted in 180,000 claims and $2.8 billion in insured damages. That makes the storm the second-costliest disaster ever in Canada after the devastating 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire, with a whopping $4.5 billion price tag.
“Back in the 1980s, ’90s and early 2000s, my industry was paying out on average annually hundreds of millions of dollars in severe weather,” Rob de Pruis, national director for the Insurance Bureau of Canada, told Jasper Council in late August. “But over this past decade, that number is well over $2 billion.”
Home Insurance costs increased by a significant amount after the vast disaster-related costs in 2023 | deeded.ca
We Can’t Afford to Wait Any Longer
Climate scientists have been sounding the alarm for years about the increasing intensity and frequency of storms and forest fires resulting from global warming.
If the ever-increasing number of extreme weather events worldwide isn’t enough to convince us, then the hit to our pocketbooks should be.
The financial cost of weather disasters has quickly soared into the stratosphere. And that doesn’t include the human cost in terms of destroyed businesses or lost lives, like 24-year-old Morgan Kitchen from Calgary, who died fighting the Jasper wildfire.
Adapting to climate change and moving away from planet-warming fuels and industries simply can’t wait any longer.
We literally can’t afford it, and no government should be turning a blind eye to this fact.
Cancelled Renewables
Yet extreme disasters and a record-breaking 2023 wildfire season didn’t stop Alberta’s UCP government from announcing a sudden moratorium on renewable energy projects last summer.
“Our research finds 33 projects that were in the queue prior to the announced moratorium have since cancelled,” the Pembina Institute said in a news release. “These projects would have generated approximately the same amount of power as is used by 98 percent of Alberta homes annually.”
That’s a lot of ‘climate-friendly’ energy Albertans are missing out on that could have helped our overtaxed and expensive electrical grid. Meanwhile, Alberta continues to favour and promote continued oil and gas production, happily recording record oil and gas production.
The Costs of Delaying
The Canadian Climate Institute recently tallied the climbing costs of climate change-related disasters in a study called Tip of the Iceberg. The numbers are truly daunting.
For example, the average disaster cost has jumped more than 1,000 percent since the 1970s and is now equal to five percent of GDP (Gross Domestic Product, or the value of all goods and services produced yearly in Canada).
Currently, 1.8 million houses are at “very high risk” of flooding.
Reckless and senseless decisions like the Alberta government’s kibosh and development restrictions of renewable energy projects are a slap in the face to people on the front lines of these disasters.
After the recent wicked hailstorm in August, Calgarians were in shock.
“I don’t think anyone buys a house expecting … their house could get damaged every second year,” Ward 5 Coun. Raj Dhaliwal told the Calgary Herald. “What I think is happening is people are looking for answers. How do we make sure we have more resilient built homes?”
You don’t have to look further than Alberta’s borders to see what continued inaction on climate change will cost us.
Since 2013, eight of the most expensive natural disasters in Canadian history have occurred in Alberta.
We simply can’t afford to maintain the status quo.
