Warming temperatures will devastate Canadian infrastructure across the territories and northern swaths of large provinces, causing billions of dollars in damage to airports, roads and buildings over the next three decades, according to a report by the Canadian Climate Institute.
The report, called Due North: Facing the costs of climate change for northern infrastructure, indicates that in Canada’s North, airport runways are warping, paved roads are cracking and collapsing, and homes and buildings are failing due to permafrost thaw damage and extreme weather.
It is the first analysis to show the extent of the impact and to quantify the cost of climate change for infrastructure across northern Canada. Researchers examined what effect the warming temperatures will have on future viability of winter roads and found half will be unusable in 30 years.
“Infrastructure across the North has been severely under-resourced for decades, and climate change will amplify existing problems with devastating consequences for northerners as it puts their communities, livelihoods, and lives at risk,” says Dylan Clark, senior research associate at the Climate Institute and one of the authors of the 74-page report.
“Because of historic under-investment, there is already an infrastructure gap in the North, and northern communities do not have the same quality of infrastructure as the rest of Canada. When climate change impacts – such as permafrost thaw – are layered on to this existing gap, it causes severe damage to roads, homes and buildings, and airports with devastating consequences for northern communities.”
The report is part of a series being done by the Climate Institute, an independent climate policy research organization, to gauge the costs of warming temperatures.
Clark says that when doing research for earlier reports in the series, it became clear that because Canada’s North is warming three times faster than the global average, the impacts of climate change will be even more extreme than in the rest of Canada.
“This combined with an existing infrastructure gap due to decades of under-investment, demonstrated that a standalone report on the North would be an important part of this series,” he explains.
Northern infrastructure is uniquely vulnerable because of colonialism and historic under-investment, as northern communities do not have the same quality of infrastructure as the rest of Canada, says Clark, and because the North is also warming much faster than the global average, climate impacts are more severe.
