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It’s 3:30 a.m. and a headlamp flickers like a firefly in the distance, growing in size. The voice of a volunteer cries out: “A team is coming!”

I can hear a chorus of dogs panting, of harness lines jangling. Then, from out of the darkness, a musher and team of twelve dogs emerge like ghostly figures. The musher steps on his sled’s drag mat, slowing the team, and stomps a “snow hook,” a fish-hook-like anchor that acts like a car brake, into the snow.

“Welcome to Quiet Lake!” a race official says, jotting down the team’s time of arrival into the remote checkpoint in southern Yukon.

I’m here in early February, bundled in a parka, snow pants and beaver-fur mitts, working as a race reporter for the Yukon Quest, an annual sled-dog race that has been running for 40 years. The race, a significant cultural event in the North, was created in 1984 to celebrate the history of sled dogs as a means of transportation in the Yukon and Alaska.

It’s so cold at Quiet Lake that you can hear it. As the musher tosses chunks of bacon to his dogs, the snow doesn’t crunch — it squeaks under the weight of his bulbous Arctic military boots, which are insulated with felt and thick rubber. Originally designed to be worn by American soldiers in the extreme cold, the boots are ubiquitous amongst mushers for their ability to keep your feet warm, even if you plunge into water. 

It’s -40 C, the kind of cold that can damage exposed skin in a matter of minutes. Even the dogs — Alaskan huskies, a mix of husky and hound, bred to pull — are wearing down-filled jackets.

The deep, biting cold has come as something of a relief to mushers, however. Only a week ago, temperatures in southern Yukon hovered above 0 C. Normal temperatures in January in Whitehorse are a high of -14 C and a low of -22 C.

Anne Tayler, board president of the Yukon Quest, worried it would be a repeat of last year when a week of warm weather — 5 to 10 C — forced organizers to reroute the race in two places. The decision came as meltwater led to unsafe conditions, including nearly two kilometres of open water around McCabe Creek on the Yukon River. Mushers are no strangers to navigating their teams through extreme conditions like glare ice, blizzards, whiteouts and overflow (water that pools up over ice that’s been pushed down by the weight of snow), Tayler says, but when it comes to open water, “it’s just not an option.” In 2024, officials shortened the race by 241 kilometres. 

For four decades, the historic Quest followed a 1,600-kilometre trail on the frozen Yukon River, a “deep, fast river,” Tayler says, that flows like a vein between Whitehorse, Yukon, and Fairbanks, Alaska. The cross-border race was considered one of the most gruelling sled dog races in the world for its technicality and the long distances between the checkpoints where mushers can rest and resupply. At its peak in the mid-2000s, the Quest once attracted a roster of 30 mushers and offered a prize of up to $35,000 to the winner. But a 1,600-kilometre race hasn’t happened since 2020. Disagreements between the Canadian and American organizers over mandatory rest times for dogs (the Canadians were in favour of increasing rest times) caused a fissure that resulted in both countries organizing separate, shorter races.

And now climate change is wreaking havoc, forcing long-distance sled dog races to “pivot,” Tayler says. In recent years, sudden warming events — dramatic swings in temperature in a matter of hours or days — are becoming far more frequent, creating major risks and uncertainty for mushers in the Yukon and across North America. 

Last year, organizers made the tough call to abandon the historic route on the Yukon River. They began working with First Nations communities in southern Yukon, including Teslin Tlingit Council and the Ross River Dena Council, to map out a new 720-kilometre trail through their traditional territories that would avoid rivers — and the risk of open water — altogether. The longterm goal, Tayler says, is to find an overland route from Teslin to Dawson City that limits water crossings to small river systems only.

In addition to climate-related challenges, other obstacles, including the rising costs of feeding dozens of dogs, are causing many mushers to drop out altogether. Sixteen teams signed up for the race this year, nearly 50 per cent fewer than in previous decades. But the mushers who’ve come are here for the love of the dogs and the thrill of travelling for four to five days through the Yukon wilderness in the winter. And they’re here despite the challenges — and the uncertain future — they’re up against.

‘Extremes are getting more frequent and harder’ for mushers

Ideal weather for a musher is very different than ideal weather for a dog, but “the dog is what counts,” Sebastian Schnuelle, a retired musher based in Whitehorse, says. Schnuelle won the Yukon Quest in 2009 and has placed second in the Iditarod, an annual 1,600-kilometre race that travels between Anchorage and Nome, Alaska.

“Physiologically, dogs do best at -20 C,” Schnuelle says. “That’s when they don’t overheat and they’re the happiest. It’s their optimum operating temperature.”

Temperature dictates many things in a musher’s world, including what kind of food they give their dogs, who get hydrating foods like fish on warm days and high-fat foods, like pork belly and lamb on cold days. It also determines trail conditions, which in turn helps them decide which type of interchangeable plastic runners they choose for their sleds. (Traditionally, sled runners were made of wood, but plastic versions were introduced in the 1980s.)

Mushers have learned to expect all forms of weather-related risks, Schnuelle says, especially over the course of long-distance races.

“Variable weather has always been a factor,” he says.

Schnuelle recalls hunkering down with his dogs to wait out monstrous storms, travelling through “ungodly overflow” at -55 C, or navigating “jumble ice” — rough ice that forms on the surface of a river due to warming temperatures and the force of the water flowing beneath.

Warming events have been occurring in the Yukon since the Quest’s inception in 1984, Schnuelle says. No one can forget the tragic loss of Bruce Johnson, a Yukon musher who was travelling with his team across Atlin Lake on Nov. 19, 1993, when they hit a weak spot on the ice and plunged to their deaths. It had been a late start to winter that year. Despite the ice being fifteen centimetres thick in most places on the lake, there were patches measuring four centimetres. The hole found by the recovery team measured 60 metres long.

“These super-warm states have always been there, but I do think that the extremes are getting more frequent and harder,” Schnuelle says. “It’s no longer the odd -2 C day, it warms up all of a sudden and you’re sitting at 8 C.”

In 2021, Schnuelle and three others were creating a trail near McCabe Creek on the Yukon River on snowmobiles for an upcoming sled dog race, when one of the machines fell through the ice. The driver survived, though the sled did not. For Schnuelle, it was a wake-up call as to the severity of change.

“I used to be one of those old rough and tough mushers, ‘Oh, I’m not taking an inReach, I can get my own ass out of the bush,’ ” he laughs, referring to the small satellite communication devices increasingly popular in the backcountry. “But heck yeah, I’m carrying one now. The chances are higher. The chances are definitely getting higher.”

Increasing freeze-thaw cycles are bad for races — and for the dogs

Nathaniel Hamlyn grew up being pulled by his family’s Siberian huskies on the ice road in Yellowknife, NWT. But it wasn’t until he heard the stories of adventure from a Yellowknife-based musher named Marcel Marin, who raced in the Quest in 2005, that Hamlyn became “hooked” on sled dog racing.

In 2014, Hamlyn moved to Whitehorse to study environmental sciences at Yukon University and never left. He set up a small dog kennel (a word used by mushers to describe a team of dogs) in the Grizzly Valley, north of Whitehorse, and began training for long-distance races. In 2018, he finished his first 1600-kilometre Quest. 

The following year, Hamlyn signed up again. But that winter was unseasonably warm and the ice on the Yukon River opened up as he was almost in Fairbanks. 

“There were moments when I was running on an island of ice with water flowing on either side of me,” Hamlyn says. After he crossed, the race officials shut down that section of the trail, rerouting mushers.

Today, Hamlyn lives in Mendenhall Landing, west of Whitehorse, with his partner, Louve Tweddell, also a musher. Their combined kennels total 30 dogs, and he trained his team for a 280-kilometre race in the Yukon Quest this year.

Hamlyn has noticed changes on the Yukon landscape in the last decade. He says it’s not so much warming as it is about variability that’s disruptive, particularly an increasing frequency of freeze-and-thaw cycles.

“They come out of nowhere, which makes it hard to be out on the land and enjoying the snow,” Hamlyn says.

When the snow rapidly melts, ice crystals become compacted, “almost like concrete and really hard on the dogs’ joints and paws,” Hamlyn explains. In a sudden melting event, mushers often need to choose between putting cloth booties on dogs’ feet to protect them from abrasion, and making sure they don’t overheat.

Mushers rely on temperature stability for the best conditions to train and race. 

“You need the layering, the many snow events to build up, and if it stays cold, you can build up that base — and the snow has give, which is better for the dogs’ joints,” Hamlyn says.

But regular snowfalls have become unreliable in Whitehorse, challenging mushers’ ability to even train their dogs for races.

Four years ago, Michael Burtnick and his partner Abby relocated their kennel from Teulon, a small town north of Winnipeg, Man., to Mendenhall Landing. They have 26 working dogs and run a tourism company, offering guided sled dog adventures on the land around their property. Burtnick’s passion, however, lies in racing. He and his team travelled on the historic Yukon Quest trail in 2023, competing in the 400-kilometre race. This year, they trained for the 720-kilometre race on the Quest’s new overland route from Teslin to Ross River and back.

“We’re going out training when it’s -40 C and then a week later we’re dealing with rain — that’s been new to us over the past five years,” Burtnick says, noting they began dealing with similar challenges in Manitoba, too. “It’s definitely not an isolated trend [in the Yukon]. You never know what you’re going to get, season to season.”

That unpredictability means mushers need to be constantly paying attention while travelling on the land, especially around water crossings, he says.

Benoit Turcotte, a senior researcher and hydrologist at Yukon University, encourages people travelling on the land to check for open water by looking at satellite imagery of lakes and rivers weeks before they depart.

“In a normal Yukon winter you’d take your dog, or snow machine or whatever mode of travel and cross a wetland or pond, and you’d have no problem,” Turcotte says. 

But in a year like this one — where Whitehorse received heavy snowfall in mid-October, before the ground, or waterways could freeze solid — he says he’d steer clear of wetlands. Early snow, Turcotte says, insulates the ground, along with ponds and wetlands, preventing the formation of thick ice cover that’s safe enough for travel.

When Burtnick trains his team for races, some of their trails include crossing ice that has formed over running water. He admits close observation can only go so far, however. 

“Even if it’s cold on the surface, underneath the ice could be melting and thinning. There’s no visual indication on top. We find the ice that was good last week, is not good this week. We have to be especially careful.”

In 2024, a musher and their team fell through the ice at Taye Lake, which drains into the Mendenhall River. They survived, but had to be treated for severe frostbite.

This winter, Burtnick began wearing a Mustang survival suit, a one-piece snow suit with built-in flotation, when he crosses larger bodies of water. It was “a gift” he says, from a concerned family member. “When you let that sink in for a bit, it makes you question what’s going on around us,” Burtnick says. “Because it wasn’t like this 10 years ago.”

World’s most famous dog sled race route was altered this year because there is no snow at all in places

Much has changed over the last decade in mushing communities in the Yukon and across North America, too. Even the dogs, themselves, have changed. 

Fast disappearing from the scene are stocky, thick-coated huskies, as mushers opt to mix short-haired hounds and pointers that can better handle increasingly warm days into their kennel bloodlines.

“You can dress a dog up,” Hamlyn quips, “But you can’t dress a dog down.”

Another trend that’s impacting mushers in the Yukon, in part due to climate change and the increasing costs of food and gas, is that sled dog kennels’ are shrinking in size. Kennels of 50, 60 dogs are becoming a “thing of the past.”

Mushers are downsizing rapidly and it’s not a trend unique to the Yukon, Burtnick says.

Hamlyn agrees. He estimates it costs roughly $12,000 to feed his 13 dogs year round. One of his females is currently pregnant, but after raising her litter, he won’t breed again, he says. In 10 years, Hamlyn expects to phase out of the competitive racing game altogether.

As for the Yukon Quest, it’s not likely the historic 1,600-kilometre race that followed the Yukon River will ever make a comeback, Schnuelle says. Too much has drastically changed with weather being only one factor of many. People who once lived along the historic route have moved to larger centres. Fewer locals know how to read the intricacies of the land in localized places — and safely put in trails — than in decades past.

Even the world’s most famous race, the Iditarod, which takes place every March, is grappling with climate change. Over the past decade, mushers have faced increasing frequency of low-snowpack years and above-average temperatures. On Feb. 17, officials changed the start location from Willow to Fairbanks, Alaska, as a result of absolutely no snow — the ground is totally bare following an early melt — over 65 kilometres of trail between Rohn and Nikolai.

Iditarod officials called that section of trail impassable probably hoping to avoid a repeat of 2014, when mushers who passed that section under similar circumstances paid the price in broken sleds, and worse, broken bones. Four-time Quest winner Hans Gatt collided with a tree and endured a nasty wound to the head.

This is the third time in a decade that race officials have changed the start location due to no snow. 

“I am not too certain anymore if we will be able to talk about these long-distance races in 15 years,” Schnuelle says. “Things have changed drastically and the races need to adapt.”

The spirit of the North lives on, in a new form

In February, both Hamlyn and Burtnick ran teams on the inaugural trail of the new Yukon Quest. Despite criticisms of the new trail being “less technical” than the historic one, rolling hills coupled with extreme cold created challenging conditions for teams. 

Hamlyn sweated as he helped his team up and over the steep hills, running alongside the sled. At -40 C, the down insulating material in his parka froze. Meanwhile, Burtnick suffered frostbite to his nose and hands. 

“Your care comes second to the dogs, so you make sure those dogs are fed before you start taking care of your own hands,” he says.

They both had mixed sentiments about the new trail: a sense of loss for the historic route along the Yukon River, and a gain because there’s still a race to train for, Hamlyn says. 

Burtnick described the experience of travelling through the mountainous sections of the new trail, particularly between Quiet Lake and Ross River, as beautiful and humbling.

And for this new generation of mushers, despite the uncertain future of their sport, that’s what it’s all about. 

“I’m still out there with my dogs,” Burtnick says. “I’m still mushing and that’s the spirit of the North.”

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They call it Winterpeg for a reason; winters in the Manitoba capital and across the Canadian Prairies are known to stretch on for months, punctuated by extreme cold spells and big snowfalls. But recent years just haven’t felt as harsh.

A warm spell in December 2024 delayed the onset of winter. January brought frigid, polar-vortex-cold days, but temperatures quickly climbed back to above-average heights. Last winter was the warmest on record in Canada, and while this can be attributed in part to a normal El Niño cycle, which brings warmer, drier conditions, it’s indicative of a creeping trend for winter on the Prairies.

Data from Climate Central, a non-partisan non-profit group of scientists and communicators who publish climate change research, show Canada lost, on average, at least a week’s worth of winter days (defined as days between December and February where temperatures fall below 0 C) each year in the last decade.

Coastal cities in British Columbia, as well as some parts of Ontario, lost upwards of two weeks of winter days in the same time.

While Winnipeg has lost the fewest winter days — just one per year — climate scientists have warned the Prairies will be a “hotspot for climate change” and are expected to warm much faster than the global average. The changes will be seen slowly, over decades rather than individual years, but winters are expected to become noticeably shorter, warmer and drier within most Canadians’ lifetimes.

Here’s what to expect as climate change grips the Prairies.

Are eight-month winters a thing of the past when it comes to Winnipeg weather?

Winnipeg winters, and their accompanying shoulder seasons, are, above all, long. The first frost has historically arrived in the last weeks of September and the last frost melts away in mid-May. That means temperatures are typically frosty for about two-thirds of the year.

Over those long eight months, temperatures historically fall below -5 C — considered a “mild winter day” — for a little more than half the season (139 days), with about a week and a half’s worth of extreme cold days where temperatures drop below -30 C.

Those very cold days are projected to become more rare if carbon pollution continues as normal; the Climate Atlas of Canada predicts Winnipeg will average four extreme cold days by mid-century, and just one by 2080. The coldest temperature of the season, historically averaging around -36 C, will climb to -28 C by the 2080s.

The season as a whole is expected to shrink too, losing more than a month of mild winter days.

Is it a bad thing to have less cold days?

The warmer conditions could be a boon for agriculture — a longer growing season can bring higher yields and better survival rates for livestock. But warmer temperatures could also give crop-damaging pests a better shot at surviving the winter. Ticks and mosquitoes are expected to thrive in warmer conditions, increasing risks of Lyme disease and other insect-borne illnesses.

In urban areas, warm winters tend to bring more frequent freeze-thaw cycles, where snow and ice melt, re-freeze and melt again. Those cycles mean more potholes (something Winnipeg has historically struggled with) and more strain on critical infrastructure like sewage systems.

Will there still be white Christmases?

Another side effect of a warmer winter season: less snow on the ground.

Natural Resources Canada has already recorded fewer days of snow cover country-wide in recent decades, and projects that trend is “very likely” to continue.

Winnipeg historically sees about 65 millimetres of precipitation — mostly snow — through the winter months, per Climate Atlas data. While analysts predict more overall precipitation in the future, up to 77 milimetres by 2080, more of it is expected to come in the form of rain.

Natural Resources data show snow accumulation across Canada has decreased by between five and 10 per cent per decade since 1981, and a further 15 to 30 per cent reduction is expected by 2050. On the Prairies, the report notes, warmer temperatures will “shift the proportion of total precipitation that currently falls as snow toward rain.”

Rainier winter months can strain municipal infrastructure and pose new challenges for farmers, but there are impacts that strike closer to home, too.

“How much snow falls and how much sticks around are declining across North America,” Toronto-based sports ecologist Madeleine Orr, who studies the impacts of climate change on sport, said in an interview. 

“That’s impacting your cross-country skiing, downhill skiing, any kind of tobogganing or making a snowman — the fun stuff we do. It’s going to take a toll, and it already is.”

What does a warming trend mean for winter sports?

It’s a similar situation for ice cover on the lakes and rivers that dot the Prairies. Fall freezes are arriving later and spring break up is happening earlier — especially across small lakes in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Ontario and Southern Quebec, according to Natural Resources Canada.

“The data that we have uniformly shows that access to natural ice is really steeply declining since the 1990s,” Orr said. “We’ve lost, in every part of Canada, somewhere between 20 and 40 skateable winter days in your average season.”

That means there are fewer opportunities to take part in quintessential Canadian pastimes like a game of shinny, or a family skate on the river.

Ottawa’s Rideau Canal has lost about a week’s worth of skating days every decade since the 1970s, and it didn’t open to skaters at all in 2023. Winnipeg’s Nestawaya River Trail was only open for skating nine days last winter.

Researchers at Wilfrid Laurier University’s Rink Watch initiative, which tracks conditions on outdoor rinks across Canada, projects the number of viable outdoor skating days will drop by 34 per cent in Toronto and Montreal and 19 per cent in Calgary by 2090.

Orr notes this lack of ice time has negative implications for health. 

“When the weather’s gross it’s too cold to comfortably run, but if there’s no snow you’re not skiing, if there’s no ice you’re not skating — you’re kind of strapped for options, especially for families,” she said.

So are extreme cold and winter storms a thing of the past?

Not exactly.

While the overall trends point to warmer, shorter prairie winters in the future, it doesn’t mean extreme cold spells and other severe winter weather events will disappear altogether.

At the heart of natural weather cycles are the jet streams: narrow bands of strong wind that circumnavigate the upper atmosphere helping form the boundary between masses of warmer and cooler air. The polar jet stream — which typically rests around Manitoba’s northern border — has been weakening as the Arctic warms up faster than other parts of the globe. A weaker jet stream can bring surprise blasts of unseasonable weather as it distorts from its usual shape. These events tend to create “weather whiplash,” a term for rapid shifts between weather extremes, and storms that can damage infrastructure and ecosystems.

In 2019, for example, a severe Thanksgiving snowstorm rocked southern Manitoba, downing more than 30,000 trees in Winnipeg alone and knocking out power for an estimated 250,000 people. Earlier that year, a shift in the polar vortex — a pool of Arctic air usually resting high above the North Pole — plunged much of Western Canada and the United States into a record deep freeze. Another record-breaking polar vortex struck the Prairies in 2021. 

While shifts in the polar vortex are natural, climate scientists believe they will be more common as a result of climate change. 

Taken all together, that means the Prairies could be in for a bit of a mixed bag: warmer, shorter winters — yes. But also colder cold snaps and more severe storms.

Julia-Simone Rutgers is a reporter covering environmental issues in Manitoba. Her position is part of a partnership between The Narwhal and the Winnipeg Free Press.

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When Barry Timpany looks out his window, he can see clear across the Creston Valley: the mountains lined with trees and the valley bottom dotted with farms. He lives in Wynndel, B.C., a community of about 650 people. One day last November, he opened the local paper and saw a notice that a private logging company was applying to use forest service roads to access the Duck Creek watershed, up the hill right beside Wynndel, which supplies water to people’s homes, farms and a sawmill. 

Timpany was instantly concerned. Prior logging on private land had already left a large clearcut looming over Wynndel. He worried how logging would impact their water supply, especially because private lands are subject to less regulation than logging on Crown land. Other community members were concerned as well. But they learned there was little to be done — since it’s privately owned, members of the public have no say on how or whether it proceeds.

Wynndel is about halfway between Nelson and Cranbrook in the Kootenays in southeast British Columbia. Private logging is widespread in the region. Some communities have tried pushing back, but their efforts have run up against private ownership and lax regulations. After residents of Glade, a nearby community, mounted a legal challenge to private logging near their community water supply, a B.C. Supreme Court judge concluded British Columbians do not have any inherent right to clean drinking water.

Timpany says forestry has gotten out of hand, and the lack of management has led to forestry becoming a “corporate slaughter.” 

Timpany worries the impact on the watershed could be “devastating” to local homes and businesses. His farm has never had an issue with water, but he worries reducing trees in the watershed will reduce how much water it can hold and cause it to dry up.

And the operation is just one more example in the long line of frustrations he has with how forests are being managed in the province. Forestry companies and the government will “scream it’s about jobs,” Timpany says, but he’s not convinced. He points out many raw logs are exported rather than being processed in the province by Canadian workers. A study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives estimated that over 3,600 jobs could be created in B.C. if exported raw logs were processed here instead.

“They don’t give a flying farmer about jobs,” Timpany says. “They’ll shut down mills to mothballs, as quick as they can.”

Private and Crown land logging planned within Wynndel’s water supply

The Duck Creek watershed is 5,221 hectares, 854 hectares of which is owned by Blue Mountain Forest Land Ltd. and operated by forest management company Monticola Forest Ltd. Another 505 hectares are controlled by the Wynndel Irrigation District for the community. The rest — 3,827 hectares — is Crown land, licensed to Canfor, one of the biggest forestry companies in the province. Both Canfor and Blue Mountain are moving towards logging in the watershed.

There’s nothing community members can do to stop the logging in Duck Creek — but Blue Mountain was required to consult the public as part of its application to use forest service roads to access its land. Blue Mountain also plans to apply to build roads that would need to cross private property.

The Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship told The Narwhal a decision on Blue Mountain’s application is not imminent, and a decision may take one to two years.

Eddie Petryshen is a conservation specialist with Wildsight, a Kootenay-based nonprofit focused on protecting biodiversity and sustainability. He says the majority of private logging in the province occurs on the Sunshine Coast and Vancouver Island and in the Kootenays, due to land being given to settlers as payment for rail construction. The land was sold despite the fact that First Nations had never ceded it to the Crown, a legacy that continues to impact Indigenous Rights today.  

According to the province, five per cent of land in B.C. is private land, which amounts to 4.5 million hectares. Of that, it says just over one million hectares (or around one per cent of the province) is privately managed forest land.

‘No requirement for a sustainable harvest’ in private logging: Wildsight

Brian Churchill, branch board president of Wildsight’s Creston chapter, is also a retired wildlife biologist. He says private logging is highly visible in the Kootenays. He saw a piece of private land between Creston and Wynndel was clearcut this winter.

“Nobody knows who did it, nobody knows who owns it, nobody knows where the wood went to, nobody knows what the long-term plans are.”

Even without delving into the thorny issue of giving away Indigenous Peoples’ territory, private logging brings challenges to communities today, Petryshen says. Private logging is not subject to annual allowable cut, stumpage fees or restoration measures that logging on Crown land is. The Private Managed Forest Land Act regulates private logging, and critics like Petryshen say it lacks environmental protections.

“There’s no requirement for a sustainable harvest,” Petryshen says. “They can harvest as much as they want.” He says it’s easy to switch the land designation when they want to sell it — meaning that for a fee, the land previously meant to be kept as forest can easily be switched to land to be sold for other purposes like real estate.

“It’s a strip and flip mentality.” 

This is Petryshen’s biggest concern. Forests can regenerate, even if restoration isn’t the best — but when the land is converted for other uses, the forest is gone forever.

“There’s just a lack of regulation and a lack of protection for downstream communities,” Petryshen says. “It makes Crown land logging look very good, and that is something that scares me.”

‘It’s not logging anymore, it’s just deforestation’

The big clearcut that looms over Wynndel was logged years ago by Mike Jenks, who has earned a notorious reputation among some B.C. communities for clearing forests on private land. 

“You can see it from all over the valley, this bald-ass mountain,” Timpany says. 

Timpany emphasizes he is not against logging. “I come from a logging family … But the way we log now is just deforestation.”

Stephen Aryan, a mechanical engineer who grew up in Creston, bought the land that had become “a highly visible scar on the landscape.” He’s been experimenting with an autonomous agricultural robot arm and practices to reduce waste and use less fertilizer and water. His sister runs a farm-to-table restaurant; together, the siblings create juices, wines and ciders for their business, Pippin Point. Aryan’s dream is to scale up their operation into a system they can share with others to make farming more economically feasible and less labour intensive. 

His other dream is to eventually bring back forest to the hillside and stabilize the landslides and water fluctuations caused by the clearcut.

The Blue Mountain and Canfor operations mean that trucks will be driving through a forest service road that already cuts through Aryan’s property. The dust they’ll kick up near the restaurant is not ideal, but is manageable, he says. He’s more concerned that the narrow, steep road won’t be safe for logging trucks.

“[The road] is serving residents. There are kids around. It’s not a road set up for adequately handling semi traffic, especially with blind corners,” he says. “In my mind, it’s inevitable an accident will happen.”

Aryan says he wants to support local loggers. He knows businesses are struggling to access quality trees — a challenge created by historic logging practices, which cleared out ecosystems and neglected to replant robust forests. “These companies are trying to make a living,” he says. “There’s an economic benefit to the area and all that. I don’t want to block people from having jobs. But it would be nice if it was done in a manner that still enables a forestry industry for generations to come.”

He also acknowledged that the state of the land he’s trying to revitalize, logged by Jenks, has put Blue Mountain in a tough position. “The very first major private logging [in Wynndel] … is very visible, it is very ugly, and it came with quite a few problems.”

Monticola plans selective logging, says water changes will be ‘minor’

Rainer Muenter, owner of Monticola, says he sees how the previous clearcut instilled distrust in the community.

“It is common that some logging contractors buy larger pieces of private land and then slick it, and that has happened to Wynndel,” he says. “But it’s not what we are doing.”

Muenter says two-thirds of Monticola’s operations is selective logging, and the company plans to remove 30 to 40 per cent of the trees in Duck Creek. “There will be changes, but they will be relatively minor,” he says, adding that they haven’t gotten that far yet.  

“We only have applied for road access,” he said, without providing a timeline for when logging was likely to begin. The long-term goal, Muenter says, is to manage the forest for generations. Because of forest fires in the first half of the 20th century, the majority of trees are relatively young.

Muenter says he has not heard complaints about the roads application, which he attributes to the fact most jobs in the area come from the Canfor mill, logging and farming. “That’s how everybody makes a living around here,” he says. 

In response to residents’ concerns about water, Muenter pointed to the 2020 hydrology report by APEX Geoscience Consultants Ltd., commissioned by Blue Mountain, which concluded the company’s plans to selectively log the watershed have “low risk” of impacting peak flows. It found moderate to high risk of impacts to water quality due to turbidity associated with landslides. The report concluded the company must also do an assessment of terrain stability or landslide risk. 

Muenter says Blue Mountain is part of the private managed forest land program, established under the Private Managed Forest Land Act. The program, which is voluntary, includes regulations on water like stream buffers — though critics say the environmental protections don’t go far enough. “We have chosen to become a managed forest,” he says. “The Ministry of Forests oversees us and comes for audits and inspections,” he adds, explaining that each managed forest is audited every five years.

Muenter said he hears some support selective practices, but he’s also heard opposition from others, who say to get logs out faster and not leave so many trees behind. “There’s a big crunch for trees,” he says. 

Ministry of Forests says it’s still working to modernize private logging laws

In 2019, the province announced a review of the Private Managed Forest Lands Act, but no amendments to the act have been made. The ministry said it is still working with the Private Forest Landowners Association and Managed Forest Council “to modernize the Private Managed Forest Land Program.” 

“Many of the issues raised during the review are being addressed through government’s work to make sure forestry supports ecosystem values – including through the $1-billion Nature Agreement – as well as reconciliation, wildfire prevention, local community benefits, and made-in-B.C. wood manufacturing and innovation,” the Ministry of Forests told The Narwhal in a statement.

It said private landowners are subject to inspections and legislation like the water sustainability act.

“B.C. is making watershed security a priority. The Watershed Security Strategy being developed by B.C. and partner First Nations will ensure that the province’s watersheds are well managed and resilient in the face of climate emergencies, drought and competing needs for water,” it said.

According to a Government of B.C. website, public engagement on the watershed strategy began in 2021. The strategy was scheduled to launch in the winter of 2023-2024 and begin implementation in the winter of 2024, but no updates have been shared since the public feedback period concluded.

B.C. doesn’t answer whether British Columbians have a right to clean water

The private logging in Wynndel also raises questions around British Columbians’ right to clean drinking water, as potential water scarcity in the future looms. 

“There just is nowhere in the law where you can look and say, ‘There it is — there’s my right, I have a right to clean water,” Justice Mark McEwan said in 2019, ruling against the community of Glade in a dispute with timber companies.

Herb Hammond, an ecologist and retired forester who lives in the Slocan Valley, assisted residents of Glade in their fight. 

When he thinks about the decision, he says, “I’m as disgusted today as I was then.” 

In 2023, the Canadian Environmental Protection Act was amended to recognize every individual in Canada has a right to a healthy environment.

The Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship and Ministry of Health did not answer The Narwhal’s question if British Columbians have a right to clean drinking water.

In a joint statement, the ministries said clean drinking water is “critical” and that there are regulations around treating water.

“If a person considers that there is a threat to their drinking water, the person may request the drinking water officer to investigate the matter,” the statement read.  

The provincial government has warned that worsening drought across B.C. can impact households and businesses. In 2024, the province recorded the lowest April snowpack level since 1970, following “persistent, severe” drought conditions that had gripped the province since fall 2022.

Beyond bringing water to communities, watersheds are integral to ecosystems. Tree cover in watersheds slows snowmelt so the land isn’t run over by floods and landslides, Hammond explains. Older forests are also more resilient to wildfires. They also provide habitat for wildlife like caribou. The Purcells-South herd of southern mountain caribou was once in the region but are now locally extirpated. 

Muenter says some management in the Duck Creek watershed is needed because “the fuel loads and the fire risk are high.” As well, the proposed roads could be used to get to the source of the fire and “protect the watershed from larger-scale wildfire, because we will be able to keep the fire small,” he says.

Speaking generally, Hammond agrees that selecting areas at high risk of wildfire and thinning between the trees can help — which means removing “fire ladders,” shorter trees that fire travels up to reach the crowns of big trees.

But wildfire prevention is “not taking the best trees,” he emphasizes. 

“Wildfire risk has been adopted by some people as an excuse to log,” Hammond says, but there’s no evidence that it’s an effective strategy. “There’s no such thing as fireproofing… You get the right conditions, and any forest will burn.”

Poor private logging operators leave communities fearing the next one 

Blue Mountain is “a pretty good operator,” Churchill says. To him, the bigger question is whether logging in community watersheds should be happening at all. 

He wants to see B.C. come up with a water sustainability plan to manage logging in watersheds. He also emphasized he is not anti-logging, the communities aren’t anti-logging — but he wants to see more public accountability and planning to address uncertainty around water supply.

Churchill and Petryshen also want to see an updated, more stringent Private Managed Forest Land Act.  

For small scale landowners, maybe the existing regulations are relevant, Petryshen says. But “If large landowners are operating industrially and at that scale, they should be subject to the same regulations Crown operators are.”

Timpany says “if we want to fight climate change, we need to leave forests to do the work they’re meant to do,” still managing them to mitigate fires and doing some logging, but avoiding clearcuts in key watersheds and increasing oversight of forestry operations. 

The trees are here “for all of us,” Timpany says. To clean the air and provide habitat — not make a select handful rich, he argues.

“There’s just too much greed.”

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White-throated sparrows teach each other new songs on migration stop-overs. Dainty Tennessee warblers make unexpectedly long stops in Quebec’s semi-urban forests to replace their flight feathers. Sandpipers use temporary wetlands created by flooding farm fields in the Mississippi Valley.

These are some of the discoveries researchers have made from strapping tiny solar-powered backpacks to migratory songbirds.

For the past 10 years, scientists, educators and organizations across North America and beyond have been contributing to a program that follows the paths of migratory birds on their epic journeys by outfitting them with solar-powered “backpack” trackers no bigger than a dime. It’s an ambitious international network called Motus, which is Latin for movement or motion. 

“Essentially Motus uses radio telemetry to track small flying animals,” Amie MacDonald, a migration scientist with Birds Canada who works on the network in British Columbia, tells The Narwhal. “Mostly that’s birds, but it’s also been used to track bats in a number of studies and there’s even been some work on large insects like monarch butterflies or darner dragonflies.”

Birds Canada, a national conservation group, launched the project about a decade ago, partnering with individuals and organizations around the world. Today, 34 countries contribute to the Motus database and researchers have produced more than 200 publications based on the data. MacDonald says the collaborative nature of the project means it’s easier for researchers to leverage limited conservation funding, which often comes with restrictions based on geographical location. 

Migrating species don’t care about political borders — and neither does climate change. Every year, tens of millions of birds take to the skies along major migratory routes like the Pacific Flyway, an aerial artery that stretches from Alaska to Patagonia. 

Climate change is causing cascading and, in some cases, catastrophic effects on birds’ seasonal stopover locations, breeding grounds and wintering sites, which are also under threat from habitat loss. Drought in California, for instance, reduces available habitat for birds that call both Colombia and British Columbia home for part of the year.

And at home, MacDonald notes there is increasing interest in using the Motus network to study the impact of renewable energy projects. In December, for example, B.C. announced it had approved nine new land-based wind projects, exempting them from the environmental assessment process.

“We’re starting to look at potential opportunities to co-locate Motus stations with offshore wind energy, seeing how Motus can help to understand potential impacts, in terms of placement,” she says. 

From backpacks to towers: how Motus works

The Motus network allows researchers to share information about individual birds as they cross borders using radio tags that operate on the same frequency; each one has a digital identifier. 

“That’s what enables the scale of the system because all of the receivers can be listening for these shared frequencies,” she says. “So animals that get tagged, say, in northern British Columbia, can be detected not only by stations set up by those same projects that I’m working on but also by other stations in Costa Rica that are set up by other folks who are not directly collaborating with me necessarily, but are part of the same Motus network.”

If a bird with a solar-powered backpack flies past a Motus receiver, the data will be recorded and shared to the entire network, including with participants thousands of kilometres away. Scientists and conservationists can start to piece together the details of where birds are going, what their specific needs are and where they might be running into trouble.

“Understanding where birds are going across their full annual cycle can give us more insight into threats they might be facing,” she says.

White-throated sparrows show ‘cultural transmission of song’

Beyond practical applications, the network is providing fascinating insights into bird behaviour. MacDonald says they tracked the migration routes of white-throated sparrows from northern B.C. to develop a “potential hypothesis” on how the birds are sharing songs.

“It’s not necessarily related to climate or directly related to conservation, but it’s an interesting way that being able to track small birds at long distances can give us some insight into why these things might be happening,” she says.

Different breeding populations — sometimes separated by hundreds of kilometres — somehow learned the same songs, which was initially a head-scratcher for scientists observing the populations. 

“They started singing different variations of their song and then it spread quite quickly,” she says. “But they’re overlapping on migration. On the non-breeding grounds they may be learning these different song variants and then bringing them back to their breeding territories — which is just kind of neat. You can call it kind of a cultural transmission of song.” 

Tracking birds can help answer questions about how drought affects migration

MacDonald started studying birds as a way to spend more time outdoors. One of her current projects is in the Fraser River estuary, collaborating with researchers in California and Mexico, to understand how shorebird physiology and movement is affected by drought in California’s Central Valley. 

“We can work together to track birds in those different locations and hopefully compare how the physiology of the birds differs among the different sites where they spend the non-breeding season and then link that to any potential differences in movement patterns.”

Researchers can use Motus to answer questions about how drought and other factors affect migration — and whether the birds that make it are breeding in sufficient numbers to sustain the population. 

Some of their research feeds into unique conservation projects in California and other states, where rice farmers are paid to flood their fields at specific times of year, creating temporary wetlands that benefit migrating shorebirds and other species. MacDonald is hopeful the work will feed into existing programs to support the birds.

“In B.C., we are tagging birds at another site along the coast that hasn’t been experiencing that level of drought to compare.”

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Like climate change itself, conspiracy theories and misinformation are growing crises. And where they intersect with the environment, the problem seems to spread like wildfire — one that might be caused by laser beams, eco-terrorists or the Canadian government, depending who you ask. 

Year after year, poll after poll has consistently shown a majority of Canadians believe in human-caused climate change. But across the country, Conservative politicians are fomenting weariness and skepticism about climate science to appeal to their bases and undermine their opponents — and it appears to be working. 

The BC Conservative party, which won 44 seats in the recent provincial election, narrowly losing to the embattled NDP, is led by John Rustad — a man who has called global warming due to carbon emissions “a lie” and said climate action was part of an agenda to reduce the world’s population. 

During the election campaign, Rustad acknowledged climate change was “real” but stressed that in his view it was “not a crisis”. His party, which had not held a single seat since 1979, shot from 1.9 per cent of the popular vote in 2020 to 43.3 per cent in 2024, cannibalizing support from the imploded BC United party and winning over scores of voters furious with the status quo.

Rustad’s strong showing came just over a year after a national poll conducted in July 2023, in the midst of Canada’s worst wildfire season on record. It found 58 per cent of British Columbians were convinced human activity was responsible for climate change — a lower share than residents of Ontario, Quebec or the Atlantic region.

What’s more, the same poll found the number of Canadians who believed humans were responsible for climate change declined by nine percentage points from the previous year. There is a clear political split on views regarding climate change, with Conservative voters less likely to believe in climate change than NDP or Liberal voters. And as climate change falls out of favour, even progressive politicians appear willing to compromise on their values — as the federal NDP party did in September when they took up Pierre Poilievre’s refrain to axe the carbon tax.

In Alberta, Premier Danielle Smith has repeated misinformation, attributing wildfires to arsonists rather than climate change — a theory her own fire service has refuted, saying “It’s not an emerging trend that we’re concerned about right now.”

Even climate-adjacent policies spark conspiracy theories. Take the 15-minute city, an urban planning strategy that focuses on walkable neighbourhoods, incidentally decreasing driving-related emissions: the idea triggered an outcry in Edmonton from residents who believed it was a leftist plot to restrict their freedom of movement. 

These measures are not widely understood as efforts to protect the environment or mitigate climate change — they’re spun as sinister plots to curtail personal liberties. 

Rustad, speaking at a May 2023 conference held “in recognition of the 2022 Freedom Convoy,” stoked this underlying fear. Referring to a food manufacturing plant “built in Ontario, I think in the Ottawa area,” he suggested Canadians would be forced to eat bugs in the name of climate change. 

While the plant is real, there’s no evidence it’s part of a nefarious plot to insinuate insects into the Canadian diet, as its main customers are pets. That didn’t stop Rustad. “It will destroy our quality of life …” he said, attempting to draw a vague but alarming connection between bug diets and public transit and walkable neighbourhoods. “Limiting our ability to move around in the name of climate change just makes us vulnerable to more government control. It takes away our freedoms.” 

For Conservative politicians, it seems rejecting climate change policies is not about the environment at all — it’s convenient shorthand for championing individual rights, while offloading the government’s responsibility for addressing carbon emissions, by framing climate change as either a natural, benign phenomenon or a leftist plot. Instead of addressing climate change — the worsening impacts of which are impossible to ignore, no matter how deep your head is buried in the sand — our politicians argue over the inescapable facts in front of them. 

For the average Canadian voter, it’s infuriating: how can we extinguish the misinformation that’s torching an increasingly large share of reality? And how did it ever get this bad in the first place? 

When conspiracy theories met climate change 

Denying the severity or existence of climate change is not new, but the role of conspiracy theories is. For her most recent bestselling book, Doppelganger, Naomi Klein, a professor of climate justice at the University of British Columbia, studied how conspiracy theories surged during the COVID-19 pandemic, dividing and polarizing Canadians.

The disinformation channels that developed during the pandemic “now spring into action after every extreme weather event … it’s as if conspiracy culture has replaced traditional climate denial,” Klein observed in a recent webinar organized by the Centre for Climate Justice. Understanding how and why that misinformation spreads, Klein argues, is critical to combatting it.

Anatoliy Gruzd, a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University and director of research at its Social Media Lab, points at social media platforms designed to make content go viral. “And what’s the most engaging content? It’s controversial content. It’s polarizing content,” he says. 

When someone shares an outrageous claim on social media, it’s common for people to weigh in and debunk it. It’s tempting to believe the best way to combat a falsehood is with the truth, but the reality isn’t so straightforward. Gruzd points out fact-checking is labour-intensive, which makes it difficult to scale. 

What’s more, it can actually contribute to virality, spreading misinformation further. “Sometimes, from the studies we’ve seen, you can have this backfire effect — where if [a claim] is fact-checked, it actually gets more eyeballs,” he says. 

Researchers call this the “illusory truth effect.” Repeated exposure to a claim makes it seem more convincing. This effect is especially powerful over a short period of time — for example, when a false claim blows up on social media. False claims accompanied by images are even more persuasive, like when videos from the B.C. Wildfire Service were manipulated to show helicopters setting wildfires instead of extinguishing them, fuelling rampant theories about government-engineered disasters. 

The other problem, Gruzd says, is hyper-individualized information streams. “We used to kind of tap the same information environment, the same news cycle,” he says. “But now we’re across multiple social media platforms, and even within the social media platforms, we’re in our own bubbles.” 

And for Canadians, regardless of political orientation, those bubbles contain less news than ever. Since August 2023, news accounts and content have been banned on Instagram and Facebook, but fewer than one in four Canadians is aware of that — and more than half still say they read, watch and listen to news on these platforms. Meanwhile, since Twitter was purchased by Elon Musk and renamed X, its limited protections against the proliferation of misinformation have been dismantled. Mechanisms that ostensibly protect users from misinformation are inadequate, and at times part of the problem, as when X’s “Community Notes” feature — a fact-checking tool that relies on user submissions — was used to discredit a meteorological projection of Hurricane Beryl in June.

These false claims have real-world consequences: a Quebec man who bought into wildfire conspiracies was convicted in January 2024 of 14 counts of arson, which he described as “tests” of whether or not the forest was truly dry. In the United States, meteorologists now face a spike in death threats after major weather events from individuals who believe in climate denialist conspiracies, including that hurricanes or tornadoes are engineered by the government. Their jobs will only become more difficult soon: the Trump administration has vowed to dismantle the federal weather-monitoring service over what it calls “climate alarmism.”

As always, maybe the solution to the problem is spending less time online

In an ideal world, the social media platforms we rely on for communication and information would put guardrails in place to control the spread of harmful conspiracies. But as the standoff between the federal government and Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, demonstrates, Canadians have little power to influence the agenda of these tech behemoths — even if our politicians wanted to stem the conspiratorial tides. 

The best place to resist online conspiracies might be in the real world. In the webinar with Klein, Erin Blondeau, director of communications for the Climate Emergency Unit — a solutions-focused project of the David Suzuki Institute — pointed out that nuance and complexity can’t flourish online. She sees more opportunity in placing skeptics and those who simply have questions face-to-face with people they trust and are facing the same challenges they are.

“I think bridging segregated realities needs to be on an interpersonal level, with in-person community events, spaces where people can ask questions and be educated in ways that won’t push them away further.” 

“It’s easy to dehumanize people in these situations,” Blondeau added. “And we have to work really hard not to.” 

Online, it’s especially easy to dehumanize seeming opponents by trying to win an argument. It’s in person where we have the best chance of reaching one another, and the politicians who represent us. 

As we brace ourselves for a federal election, our energy would be better spent offline: connecting with one another, showing up to campaign events and talking to political leaders in person. At least it’s an opportunity to inhabit the same reality for a while.

Updated on Jan. 2, 2025 at 10:57 a.m. PT: This story has been updated to correct the proportion of British Columbians who believe climate change is human-caused. A previous version of this story said 58 per cent did not believe in human-caused climate change.

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When Hurricane Helene hit the U.S. southern Appalachia region in September, my social media feeds were inundated with photos of the devastation: crumbling roads, washed-out bridges, entire blocks of houses swept away. I grew up in rural Virginia, near communities hit hard by the storm. I’d never seen anything like Helene in the 20 years I lived in Appalachia or the 20 years since. It seemed impossible these remote mountain communities could be so vulnerable to a hurricane. But here was tangible evidence of what I already knew to be true: a changing climate meant a new scale of weather-related disaster and no community was invulnerable. 

In the days that followed, another kind of story began to emerge online: one of neighbours helping neighbours. People were looking out for one another: sharing food, clearing debris, taking each other in. The tightly knit social fabric of these communities — the thing that made me want to run away to the anonymity of the city as a teenager — became the foundation of the recovery process. 

I thought a lot about my life in Vancouver as I read these stories. Now, as an adult with two small kids, I long for more community in my life. I am lucky to have close friends in the city but I couldn’t tell you the names of more than three or four people who live in my building. I like my neighbourhood but I don’t feel especially connected to the people around me. Beyond my nuclear family, I’m not totally sure who I would turn to if disaster struck. When I’m in the elevator of my building, studiously avoiding eye contact with someone who lives down the hall, I wonder if they feel the same longing for connection. 

In the past couple of years, the Metro Vancouver region has seen extreme rain and flash floods from atmospheric rivers, wind storms from bomb cyclones, heat waves, fires and even a tornado. As extreme weather becomes more common, I wonder if this infamously lonely city has the kind of social connections we need to support one another. 

In her book A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit chronicles the many ways people come together after disaster. She argues that, despite the very real trauma of these events, disasters often create a renewed sense of solidarity. People turn toward one another and take charge of their communities in ways that are generous, resourceful and imaginative. “Disasters provide an extraordinary window into social desire and possibility,” Solnit writes, “and what is seen there matters elsewhere, in ordinary times.” 

It’s hard to feel like these are ordinary times, given we know extreme weather events are only going to increase in the years to come. But Hurricane Helene does offer a visceral lesson in “social desire and possibility.” I think about the lesson this way: the loneliness I sometimes feel in my apartment building is really a longing for a different kind of urban life — one where we acknowledge that we need one another, because, as it turns out, we do. 

Building social infrastructure is a form of climate resilience

This need isn’t theoretical. The heat dome in June 2021 killed a staggering 619 people in B.C. alone. The majority of those who died lived in the Metro Vancouver area. More than half lived alone and many lived in what researchers call socially deprived neighbourhoods: places characterized by fewer close social connections. In many ways, these deaths are a product of two overlapping crises: extreme weather brought on by climate change and high levels of social isolation.

It is easy to feel overwhelmed by the sense that we are facing not two but many overlapping crises right now: problems that are environmental, social, political and economic. Historians have a term for these times: polycrisis. But they are also moments when immense change is possible. 

A statistic I frequently come across in climate writing is that 75 per cent of the infrastructure we’ll use in 2050 has yet to be built. This number is often cited to inspire designers, urban planners and policy makers to dream big about building communities that are more just and more resilient in the face of a changing climate. Rethinking our roads, transit systems, green spaces and energy grids is essential. But, in this moment of flux, we also have the opportunity to build a more robust and resilient social infrastructure.

With Hurricane Helene, we saw how an entire region’s physical infrastructure can be destroyed in a day. But social infrastructure is far more durable — and arguably more critical. Instead of waiting for a disaster to renew our sense of solidarity and interdependence, we would benefit from considering how to create that shared sense of community and belonging now.

How do we inspire neighbours to look out for one another?

To figure out exactly how this might work, I spoke to Stacy Barter, executive director of the non-profit Building Resilient Neighbourhoods and co-director of the Hey Neighbour Collective, two organizations devoted to creating social connection in British Columbia. 

Barter said over the course of her career in community development, one question continually puzzled her: “Why, when things get hard, do some communities respond proactively while others really struggle?” 

She and her colleagues began investigating and found community resilience often came down to relationships at the level of a single city block or apartment building. “Your neighbours are your first responders,” she explained. “We need to know folks right next door.” 

In 2018, Barter and her colleagues launched the Connect and Prepare program in collaboration with the City of Victoria. Since then, it’s been piloted in Vancouver, New Westminster and North Vancouver. The program uses facilitators to bring neighbours together with the goal of creating emergency preparedness plans. The program is designed to work at the intersection of increasing climate pressures and increasing social isolation.

In many ways, Barter sees the two issues as fundamentally inseparable: social connection boosts our resilience, and the act of preparing for crises deepens our sense of community and connection. Participants typically come out of the process with projects and action plans in place. But, Barter said, “it is the process of actually coming together and building those relationships that makes the big difference.” People meet their neighbours and start looking out for one another in small ways. They start to feel a sense of shared responsibility for their collective well-being.

Michelle Hoar, who directs the Hey Neighbour Collective with Barter, cites Connect and Prepare as an example of multi-solving, explaining that in times of polycrisis we need solutions that solve multiple problems at once. Another example, she explained, is designing an apartment building with a shared central courtyard; it provides better temperature regulation in extreme heat and it creates a shared social space where neighbours can see and connect with one another. Both Barter and Hoar agree small interventions like these can have surprisingly significant impacts, but figuring out how to create social infrastructure on a broader scale is a more complicated question. 

Can we create social connection at a broader scale?

In a city like Vancouver, which struggles with both affordability and a dearth of housing supply, it can be difficult for residents to feel settled. Making the time and energy to invest in your neighbours is hardly going to be a priority when you’re struggling to pay rent. Creating a durable sense of connection — especially among the region’s most vulnerable — requires policies that can substantially improve the cost and availability of housing. 

This is where Hey Neighbour’s collective impact model comes in. They work to connect multiple partners with the shared goals of building community and social connectedness, especially in multi-unit housing where neighbours are the least likely to know and look out for one another. They bring local and regional governments together with housing providers, researchers and health authorities. “Our partners work on different parts of the problems in different ways,” Hoar explains. This kind of comprehensive approach can help mitigate some of the fragmentation that often exists between different interest groups.

Ultimately, building social connection requires a culture change: one where we shift the norms that put privacy and self-reliance above collaboration and interdependence. This may be the piece of the social connection puzzle that takes the longest to solve. Despite my own longing for community, I can sense an internal resistance to turning toward others and asking for help.

When the heat dome struck in 2021, I was five months into a high-risk twin pregnancy. I’d seen the warnings about extreme heat and pregnancy, but I assumed I would be able to tough it out. Eventually, though, the thermometer in our apartment climbed to 34 C, and I felt a level of exhaustion I’d never before experienced. I gave in and texted a friend to see if I could come over and lie on the couch in her basement, which was a few degrees cooler. I still think fondly of that long nap in a (relatively) cool, dark room. Now I wonder: why was I so reluctant to send that text? And what would it take to make asking for help easier? 

This kind of culture change feels daunting to me, but Barter disagrees. She believes it’s easier to shift our norms than we think. Sometimes all it takes is a few people behaving differently: that sense of warmth and connection can ripple outward and change an entire community. 

The biggest challenge to programs like Connect and Prepare might be funding. Both Hoar and Barter point out that social connection has long been thought of as something that is nice to have, but not urgent. But a dawning awareness of the health impacts of extreme weather is starting to shift our priorities. Barter explains that, when it comes to social infrastructure, scaling means thinking both up and deep: “Part of what I’d like to see more of is institutions recognizing the importance of ensuring that there is support down to that micro-micro scale.” This means funding those building or block-level interventions while also shifting policy. 

Barter says part of the value of a program like Connect and Prepare is that it functions as a kind of Trojan horse to legitimize asking for and accepting help: “We’re naming that community matters and that we’re thinking as a collective, not just our individual households.” It gives people a reason to knock on their neighbours’ doors, to share their vulnerabilities, and to see their collective strengths.

It may be this sense of ourselves as part of a collective that matters most going forward. Climate change is, after all, a collective problem — one that can’t possibly be solved by individual solutions. Our relationships offer an essential sense of belonging — to our communities and to the world around us — and, within that belonging, a sense of possibility that, despite everything, the future can be a place we want to live, a place we can build together.

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Vancouver International Airport is at risk of flooding due to climate change, according to a new Senate of Canada report that looks at critical transportation infrastructure across the country to assess how it will fare in the changing climate.

Vancouver’s airport, Canada’s second busiest airport, sits on Sea Island in the Fraser River delta, surrounded by 22 kilometres of dikes to keep the river and sea water at bay. But with sea levels estimated to rise by at least one metre in the next 75 years and an anticipated increase in extreme precipitation and storm surges, the report says the island could be flooded.

“The state of the Vancouver Airport is Vancouver’s problem, it’s Richmond’s problem, but it’s also a problem for every person in Western Canada who drives through there — and it’s a really important freight airport, too,” senator Paula Simons, one of 10 members of the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications, which wrote the report, told The Narwhal. 

“This isn’t just a question of your ability to go to Maui. It’s a question of how we get goods and services across the Pacific to Asian markets and how we bring our imports in.”

Simons was shocked to learn the bustling, economically vital airport is at risk.

“As an Edmontonian and a Westerner, I had no idea how vulnerable the Vancouver airport really was,” Simons said. “I was absolutely thunderstruck to realize how vulnerable it is because it’s built on an island. And it’s lovely, but it creates an inherent risk at a time when sea levels are rising.”

Making bridges, buildings, roads and airports better able to handle extreme weather events driven by climate change — often referred to as climate resilience — is an increasingly pressing concern, reflected in the report’s title: Urgent: Building Climate Resilience Across Canada’s Critical Transportation Infrastructure.

“It was too big to do all the infrastructure in all the country, so we chose five areas that we thought were a microcosm of different challenges,” Simons explained.

The committee’s review included two pieces of crucial transportation infrastructure in B.C.: Vancouver International Airport and the Port of Vancouver.

“Their locations make them susceptible to sea-level rise, storm surges and earthquakes that may significantly impact their operating capacity,” the report states. It recommends the federal government “immediately begin consultations on protecting [Vancouver International Airport’s] Sea Island location against storm surges and rising water levels.”

The report also zeroes in on the ways melting permafrost is impacting transportation options in northern Canada and how severe weather and rising sea levels threaten the highways and rail lines that cross the Chignecto Isthmus connecting New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

“If there is a storm surge at a high tide, it could be a disaster,” Simons said about the low-lying strip of land in Atlantic Canada. “There’s the potential for Nova Scotia to become an island.”

On a brighter note, the report says climate change is extending the St. Lawrence Seaway’s shipping season — a trend that could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions by increasing the volume of goods transported by ship rather than by truck. 

Vancouver airport to spend up to $80 million to raise dikes and upgrade pumps

The Vancouver airport authority is aware of the challenges climate change poses to the airport. Christoph Rufenacht, the vice-president of airport development and asset optimization, told the senate committee the airport  has “remained largely resilient to weather impacts thanks to careful planning and proactive investments.”

He also said the airport, also known as YVR, will continue to “aggressively invest in our local infrastructure,” over the next two to three years. “That includes increasing the height of our dikes and upgrading the eight pump stations on Sea Island to install new equipment with improved efficiency and capacity,” he said during his December 2023 committee appearance.

By the end of the decade, the airport anticipates spending up to $60 million to raise its dikes and as much as $25 million to upgrade pump stations, according to Rufenacht. 

“We feel very confident that the planning and infrastructure investment that we have now will serve us for those decades into the future,” he said.

Simons said it’s worth planning now for the more severe climate scenarios Canadians could face in the coming decades.

“I’m not saying that the Vancouver Airport is about to sink into the sea. I’m saying that we need to be preparing to make sure it doesn’t sink into the sea.”

The report, released this week, says the Port of Vancouver is better positioned to withstand climate impacts than the airport because it is built to withstand volatile ocean conditions. But traffic to Canada’s largest port could still be impacted by flooding on the roads and highways that connect to its terminals. Following the November 2021 atmospheric river, damaged highways and bridges made it impossible for goods from the Vancouver port to be transported out of the Lower Mainland for more than a week, the report notes.

Jurisdictional issues could hamper urgent action to protect infrastructure: senator 

Coordinating the actions needed to protect Canada’s critical infrastructure from climate impacts may prove difficult, since it often involves jurisdictional overlap that can leave gaps in responsibility, Simons said.

“What really struck me in every part of this report is that people are working earnestly on their little bit of the problem, but nobody is looking at the whole elephant,” she said, adding, “Canada doesn’t do very well when it has to solve problems that are complicated by jurisdictional turf-guarding.”

B.C.’s Ministry of Transportation declined to answer questions from The Narwhal about the province’s involvement in climate resiliency efforts at Vancouver’s airport, saying the federal government is responsible for airports.

According to Rufenacht, any discussion about moving the airport would likely involve “Transport Canada, the provincial government, regional agencies, businesses and customers.” Neither the Vancouver Airport Authority or Transport Canada responded to requests for comment by publication time. 

Simons did get the opportunity to question Kaye Krishna, B.C.’s former deputy minister of transportation, during a senate hearing in December 2023. When the senator asked Krishna whether the ministry has done any planning for a potential new location for the airport, the deputy minister said, “That’s not something that we are currently engaged in.”

Krishna told Simons and other members of the senate committee the ministry works closely with the airport authority to ensure resilient road access to the airport. The province is also participating in an effort led by Transport Canada and Infrastructure Canada to map out critical hazards and risks to infrastructure, according to Krishna.

After studying the threat climate change poses to Canada’s infrastructure, Simons hopes to see more collaboration between all levels of government to address the threats immediately and in the long-term.

“None of this gets solved if only one order of government comes to the table,” she said.

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Light pushes through the cloudy October afternoon as George Harry walks up to Malahat Nation’s community freezer on southern Vancouver Island. Behind the silver padlock is a cherished supply of sockeye salmon that “you don’t really get that often,” he says of the red-fleshed fish whose populations fluctuate.

The freezer is just one of the nation’s tools for making future use of nature’s plenty. 

Another will soon sit steps away in an unremarkable grey shed the size of a small kitchen. If all goes as planned, the shed will soon house the nation’s new battery storage system, built to store electricity from the community’s growing fleet of solar panels for darker days.

The battery system will be made in the community, a 10-minute walk up a footpath.

That’s where the nation plans to build a 9,000-square-metre battery storage assembly plant in partnership with the Vancouver-based technology company Energy Plug. The plant will import ready-made lithium iron phosphate battery cells to be manufactured into storage systems designed for electricity systems in B.C. and beyond. 

Canada has seen a boom in battery manufacturing plants in recent years, particularly in Ontario and Quebec. But most focus on making batteries for electric vehicles. The Malahat Nation’s project will make batteries specifically for buildings and power grids.

The $75-million project, which will create about 210 jobs, aims to manufacture enough batteries to store one gigawatt-hour’s worth of energy, roughly enough to supply backup storage capacity to 91,000 homes. Those batteries could provide power during blackouts, or store power from home solar panels. The project will also build larger-scale storage options, helping utilities like BC Hydro balance power demand. 

“We want to be able to produce things that help people,” says Harry, community energy coordinator for Malahat Nation and former chief, who sees battery storage as a key part of a resilient energy supply.

Battery storage can act like a Swiss Army knife for electricity grids, a handy tool for fixing problems. It can smooth out fluctuating power from renewables like wind and solar, making them more efficient. 

The nation will be the majority owner of the battery storage plant. It’s in the process of securing funding and credit agreements, aiming to begin operations later next year. 

Kwatuuma Cole Sayers, executive director of Clean Energy BC, an industry association promoting clean energy use, says the project reflects “the evolution of Indigenous equity.” 

“First Nations want to be owners of industrial projects in their territories and they also want to be leading projects,” he says. “When that happens to be leading us to a new clean economy, it’s even better.”

Malahat Nation needs more power for economic growth 

As we head south down the road, walking parallel to the Saanich Inlet, Harry points to the large buildings to our right, their entrances framed by thick cedar posts. Among them are a health centre, a daycare, a gymnasium and a building that houses the nation’s environmental team, which recently started tracking whale populations with underwater microphones installed throughout the inlet. Each building sports a band of gleaming black solar panels on its roof. 

None of these buildings were here a decade ago, signalling the Malahat Nation’s booming growth. A newly opened 18-hectare business park now houses a French defence technology firm, a construction company, a fuel retailer and a company making biodiesel.

For Harry, the business park represents a critical step toward the nation’s broader goals, including creating long-term housing in the community. The nation currently has around 370 members, and roughly half live on reserve. Housing investments are critical if more members are to move there, combined with infrastructure upgrades to water, sewage — and electricity, since transmission lines hooked up to the community are almost at capacity.

“We’ve identified electrical servicing as one of the main bottlenecks for development plans,” Tristan Gale, Malahat Nation’s director of economic development, tells me. A major hurdle, he says, is that BC Hydro estimates it would cost the Malahat about $10 million to upgrade the powerline system that carries electricity to the community so it can receive more power. (BC Hydro was unable to respond to detailed questions from The Narwhal before a new government takes office following the final results of the B.C. election.) 

All electricity grids are subject to a golden rule: they need to supply enough power to meet demand. Failure leads to brownouts and blackouts, something utilities work to avoid. So they design the system to handle “peak demand” — often during the evening in B.C, when people get home from work and turn on appliances. 

Batteries can help smooth out the peak by stashing power during non-peak hours. They also assist in other ways. By lowering the grid’s peak energy use, batteries can help utilities avoid costly transmission upgrades that might otherwise be required — making power cheaper. 

Think of battery storage like a rapid transit system added to a major highway; it gets more people — or in this case, energy molecules — where they need to go while reducing congestion on the highway, or the transmission line.

When the nation started to look at more affordable options to increase its electricity capacity, battery storage seemed promising. 

Gale says that’s partly because battery storage is aligned with the nation’s long-held plan for the sustainable use of its natural resources. 

“That means not relying on finite resources like fossil fuels, and finding ways to make use of the natural resources that are available on the lands,” he says. 

That’s when the nation started having conversations with Energy Plug, which was interested in opening a battery plant in Western Canada. “When we were introduced to Energy Plug we instantly recognized those aligned values,” Gale says. 

In August, the nation’s new partnership with Energy Plug, Malahat Battery Technologies Corp., broke ground on the future battery storage plant, including a blessing ceremony from Elders in the community. 

The future plant will import ready-made battery cells made in Asia, sourced in partnership with the Taiwanese company Enwind Power. From there, it will assemble those cells into five- and 100-kilowatt battery packs, which will be built into storage systems, ready to be used by homes, businesses or utilities. Broderick Gunning, Energy Plug’s president and CEO, says the company is working with BC Hydro to develop a new storage tool called the energy pole, which will attach directly to power lines. 

“We’ve got a lot of utility interest in that product on the global scale,” Gunning says. “Utilities have this light bulb go off and they’re like, ‘Wow, this can help us.’ ” 

Battery storage is still relatively new across Canada 

Keith Brooks, programs director for the non-profit group Environmental Defence, says adoption of grid-scale battery storage is “still in its infancy” across Canada. Yet that might be about to change. Ontario completed the largest battery storage procurement in Canadian history in the spring, purchasing more than 2,000 megawatts of storage capacity. Globally, battery storage in the power sector doubled last year, and the International Energy Agency expects another sixfold increase will be needed to reach global 2030 climate targets.

In the ecosystem of tools that utilities have at their disposal to meet customer demand, battery storage is among a growing contingent of smaller, more localized options. Sometimes called “distributed energy resources,” they include things like home solar panels, or water heaters set to activate during the night when power demand is low.

The distributed approach is a departure from historic energy planning in places like B.C., which has relied on costly, centralized, often controversial megaprojects like large hydro dams to store and generate energy. By localizing electricity systems, utilities can also cut down on energy loss that results from transporting power over large distances through transmission lines. Losses in Canada average about nine per cent, according to the International Energy Agency. 

“More demand-side solutions are key in terms of making our grid smarter,” Sayers from Clean Energy BC says, adding that a more responsive grid could play a key role in cutting carbon emissions by making renewables more reliable.

A report from the David Suzuki Foundation found Canada needs far more low-emission power to achieve its commitment to a net-zero electricity grid by 2035. 

Renewable energy sources like solar and wind are often the cheapest, fastest ways to make up the shortfall, but they come with a drawback; they only supply power when the conditions are right — when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. Fossil fuels like gas and coal can supply power anytime.

Adding a battery storage system to a solar farm or a wind power facility can help smooth out power fluctuations. “Battery storage makes the renewables more valuable,” Kate Harland, research lead in mitigation for the Canadian Climate Institute, says in an interview. When attached to a battery, renewables like solar and wind achieve many of the benefits offered by fossil fuels, but without the greenhouse gas footprint. TransAlta Corporation, for example, runs a battery storage facility next to one of its wind farms in Alberta. 

According to the International Energy Agency, batteries could play a major role in ratcheting down global carbon emissions; it estimates that under a net-zero scenario, 60 per cent of emissions reductions in the energy sector will be associated with batteries, “making them a critical element to meeting our shared climate goals.”

Malahat Nation will use house-made batteries to expand solar system 

The Malahat Nation plans to use its house-made batteries to expand its solar power system. So far, the nation has sent its excess solar power into BC Hydro’s grid through the utility’s self-generation program, but the nation’s solar power production will soon exceed the program’s limit of 100 kilowatts, and that leftover energy currently has nowhere to go.

“If you have solar, you need storage,” Harry says, “and you need to be able to run constantly with no worries.”

Harry says the nation is also interested in creating its own microgrid — a local electricity grid with enough power and storage to sustain itself, and potentially the businesses and communities surrounding it.

To support that vision, Gale says the nation plans to upgrade its own infrastructure to bring more power to its microgrid. The nation has a right of way to a decommissioned high-voltage power line, he says, and they plan to bring it back. 

“That’s a large project that’s probably next on the docket,” he says, “but the batteries really provide the bridge between what we need right now and having the resources to build out the larger scale infrastructure long-term.”

Because batteries can help lower the cost of clean energy, they could help make the transition from fossil fuels more affordable. 

According to the International Energy Agency, battery costs have fallen by 90 per cent since 2010. The agency expects costs for lithium ion batteries to fall by another 40 per cent by 2030. During Ontario’s call for battery storage capacity this year, a storage project powered by gas cost 40 per cent more than the battery projects.

Despite their climate benefits, batteries still have global consequences for people and ecosystems. 

The lithium iron phosphate batteries Malahat Battery Technologies plans to use for its battery packs, at least for now, are “somewhat new to the markets,” according to Jason Wang, a senior analyst with the non-profit Pembina Institute. The formulation doesn’t require cobalt, a critical earth mineral whose mining process is often linked to human rights abuses.  

But the project’s batteries will use lithium, whose supply chain has been linked to human rights abuses in China, including instances of forced labour in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. “We’re trying to steer clear from that,” Gunning says, adding Energy Plug has not yet announced which battery suppliers the project will use. Gunning notes transparency issues make it difficult to confirm entire supply chains.

New technologies are emerging, including batteries that use sodium instead of lithium and batteries that replace conventional batteries’ liquid electrolytes with ones that are solid. If combined, these technologies could reduce or eliminate the use of lithium and potentially mean batteries last for decades. But they’re not at a commercial scale yet. Gunning says his company is committed to researching novel technologies and figuring out how to use them over time. 

“Things change quickly, and we’re very on the pulse in respect to technology,” he says. 

Nation sees battery storage as step toward self-sufficiency 

Seen in the late afternoon, the Malahat battery storage plant site is a vast expanse of freshly tilled dirt and some rocks, set against the striking backdrop of Yos, also known as Malahat Mountain. A thin line of clouds circles the peak. The stillness contrasts with the flood of activity underway below. 

The nation has recently finished negotiating its treaty agreement with B.C. through the Te’mexw Treaty Association. It’s been a long, tough path, Harry says, but he’s hopeful changes will ensue. 

“We’re still run by the government,” he says. “Once treaty comes, we’ll be the government.” 

Harry sees battery storage as another step on the path toward self-sufficiency, in part because of the revenue it brings, but also for the energy options it offers. “Solar has come a long way,” he says. 

“My parents, they’re not worried about what I will have,” Harry says. “They’re worried about what their grandchildren will have.” 

“They look towards the future. I think that’s what really drives this place.”

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The setting of nail polish, acetone-free remover and a cuticle pusher may not be one typically associated with environmental science and knowledge production. And yet it’s here, over manicures and nail clippings, that a deep understanding of a changing climate is articulated precisely, grounded in generations of lived experience.

Last September, on Truth and Reconciliation Day, residents of Tuktoyaktuk, NWT, gathered at the local community centre for an evening of self care, including nail art. Conversations flowed in many directions, including toward the environment. One participant, Blair Nuyaviak, used stickers and adhesive rhinestones to carefully craft jellyfish designs on her nails. While she worked, she described how jellyfish are increasingly seen floating near the shores in Tuktoyaktuk. As the ocean warms and currents alter, the sea ice breaks up earlier and forms later, which leads more jellyfish to find their way here. The increased presence of jellyfish, Blair noted, has in turn led to a decrease of other fish and marine mammals. Between layers of clear gel-paint the conversation moved to other climate-related issues such as the eroding shoreline and relocation plans facing community members of Tuktoyaktuk. 

For Eriel Lugt, an Inuvialuk youth born and raised in Tuktoyaktuk, nail art is an important living practice in her community. When she travelled to Coast Salish Territories last October for the Inuit youth climate action summit, her nails were immaculately painted. Many Tuktoyaktukmiut love to do their nails, particularly during the long winters. It’s an intimate practice that brings people together in one another’s homes to chat, often over food, and talk about their days. In the wake of a recent suicide epidemic in Tuktoyaktuk, community members organised a series of wellness events focused on nail art as a way to check in on and take care of one another.

But nail design is not simply a cosmetic practice or social pastime — it’s also political.

Inuvialuit youth embracing creative methods of climate testimony

Western science models have long dominated the exploration of Arctic environments. The early 19th century saw various colonial expeditions aimed at extracting scientific data from northern regions to map and seek imperial expansion and prestige. These models often depend on laboratories and experts located far away in southern geographies to process and translate Inuit Nunaat, the lands of the Inuit.

A new Inuit co-led project joins a growing effort to resist extractive approaches that rely on foreign expertise and ways of knowing. Instead, “Carving out Climate Testimony: Inuit Youth, Wellness & Environmental Stewardship” supports young Inuvialuit leaders in their desire to enhance wellness and environmental stewardship in their own community of Tuktoyaktuk, where the effects of climate change are particularly acute. 

As the Arctic warms up to four times faster than the global average, the residents of Tuktoyaktuk face an uncertain future. Tuktoyaktuk, like many Inuit homelands, is built on permafrost. Permafrost is harder than concrete, but rapid thawing has led to dramatic erosion. Tuktoyaktuk is one of the first communities in what is recently known as Canada to face relocation.

Our research team, which comprises Inuit artists, activists, community members and academics from Canada to the UK, aims to understand how a changing climate is understood by Inuvialuit youth — on their own creative terms.

Following the work of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the organization representing Inuit in Canada, and its vital National Inuit Strategy of Research, our project centres Inuit self-determination and Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (Inuit knowledge). The project established an Inuit youth advisory who are responsible for developing the project’s key questions and agendas. As a member of the advisory, Lugt helped to design a communication strategy, determining which stories get told and — just as importantly — which ones do not. This strategy identifies risks associated with sharing certain personal stories, which may inadvertently cause harm to the community, and alternatively, the ways other stories can amplify important struggles. 

The key question our project asks is: how can unikkausivut (embodied and artful forms of Inuit storytelling) articulate Inuvialuit concerns about changing social and physical environments in Tuktoyaktuk? And how are various forms of storytelling — from carving, to film, to murals — playing a role in identifying how climate change shapes daily life and a sense of the future? One surprising answer to this question: nail art.

Participants use nail art to document profound changes in environment

Nail art connects with a deeply held tradition of Inuit hand art, such as tattooing. Brian Kowikchuk, creative lead for “Carving out Climate Testimony,” led a workshop at the local Mangilaluk School last September, where hands also featured prominently. In the art produced, hands represented both connection and resurgence. Nail art is a natural extension of these traditional artful processes that emphasise hands as a canvas of connection and creativity. 

Last Truth and Reconciliation Day, we organized the pop-up nail bar to further explore and experiment with nail art as a form of storytelling. 

This nail bar included various stickers and decals with Arctic iconography, such as polar bears, ice and snowflakes. There was also pink and purple gel polish, a lamp to cure the gel polish and templates for participants to map out their nail stories.

As Blair Nuyaviak painted her jellyfish, another participant crafted a design inspired by the flowers she gathered on the tundra. A third juxtaposed images of fire and snow, reflective of the wildfires that have advanced farther north in recent summers.

As part of the “Carving out Climate Testimony” project, Inuvialuit youth travelled in March to Coast Salish Territories (Victoria, BC) to share observations about what they’re seeing and experiencing in Tuktoyaktuk with Canada’s leading climate scientists. Their testimony and artwork will be shared in Environment Canada’s Changing Climate Report 2025. Kowikchuk emphasized that the transformation is profound. “Aside from things that are being taken away by climate change, there are also things that are coming,” he says. “Like salmon. Aside from language and culture, our diet is going to change.” 

Moving forward, our research team is exploring possibilities for exhibiting nail art both in Tuktoyaktuk and beyond. Finding ways to communicate climate change is important work. And we’re excited how nails can be used for community care and to beautifully share our stories about our changing environments.

Updated on July 24 at 3:10 PM PT: This story has been updated to remove a quote from a member of the project team.

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