Ashley Wohlgemuth remembers smoke, haze and chaos during the 2003 forest fires in her hometown of Barriere in British Columbia.
“During the fire here, it was like driving through a war zone. Everything was hazy. And all you could see was army vehicles and fire trucks everywhere,” said the fire chief.
Throughout the course of the 75-day-long fire, houses, businesses and jobs were lost. Air quality was extremely poor, and she remembers people noticing how it worsened their asthma.
Australia’s fossil-heavy state of Queensland is committing A$2 billion to create what Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk called a “self-reinforcing cycle of investment—a job-generating clean energy industrial ecosystem”.
When you go to a restaurant, a menu helps you select what to eat and how much you might pay for it. The Cost Menu for Climate Change Adaptation Measures (Part I), released today, helps communities figure out how to keep themselves safe from two expected impacts of climate change – wildfires and extreme precipitation – and what it might cost them.