B.C. climate news: Abbotsford hit hard by flooding | Trans Mountain pipeline fined $196K for environmental violations | Trump ban on wind energy projects ruled illegal by U.S. judge

Here’s the latest news concerning climate change and biodiversity loss in B.C. and around the world, from the steps leaders are taking to address the problems, to all the up-to-date science.

Check back every Saturday for more climate and environmental news or sign up for our Sunrise newsletter HERE.

In climate news this week:

• Abbotsford hit hard by flooding
• Trans Mountain pipeline fined $196K for environmental violations on expansion project
• Resurrected B.C.-Washington task force has not solved cross-border flooding
• Trump ban on wind energy projects ruled illegal by U.S. judge

Human activities like burning fossil fuels and farming livestock are the main drivers of climate change, according to the UN’s intergovernmental panel on climate change. This causes heat-trapping greenhouse gas levels in Earth’s atmosphere, increasing the planet’s surface temperature.

The panel, which is made up of scientists from around the world, including researchers from B.C., has warned for decades that wildfires and severe weather, such as the province’s deadly heat dome and catastrophic flooding in 2021, would become more frequent and intense because of the climate emergency. It has issued a code red for humanity and warns the window to limit warming to 1.5 C above pre-industrial times is closing.

According to NASA climate scientists, human activities have raised the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide content by 50 per cent in less than 200 years, and “there is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate.”

As of Dec. 5, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 426.46 parts per million, up slightly from 424.87 ppm the previous month, according to the latest available data from the NOAA measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory, a global atmosphere monitoring lab in Hawaii. The NOAA notes there has been a steady rise in CO2 from under 320 ppm in 1960.

Climate change quick facts:

• The Earth is now about 1.3 C warmer than it was in the 1800s.
• 2024 was hottest year on record globally, beating the record in 2023.
• The global average temperature in 2023 reached 1.48 C higher than the pre-industrial average, according to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. In 2024, it breached the 1.5 C threshold at 1.55 C.
• The past 10 years (2015-2024) are the 10 warmest on record.
• Human activities have raised atmospheric concentrations of CO2 by nearly 49 per cent above pre-industrial levels starting in 1850.
• The world is not on track to meet the Paris Agreement target to keep global temperature from exceeding 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels, the upper limit to avoid the worst fallout from climate change including sea level rise, and more intense drought, heat waves and wildfires.
• On the current path of carbon dioxide emissions, the temperature could increase by as much 3.6 C this century, according to the IPCC.
• In June 2025, global concentrations of carbon dioxide exceeded 430 parts per million, a record high.
• Emissions must drop 7.6 per cent per year from 2020 to 2030 to keep temperatures from exceeding 1.5 C and 2.7 per cent per year to stay below 2 C.
• There is global scientific consensus that the climate is warming and that humans are the cause.

(Sources for quick facts: United Nations IPCC, World Meteorological Organization, UNEP, NASA, climatedata.ca)

Latest News

‘This is insanity’: Abbotsford residents fear flooding just four years after last disaster

As she put her five-year-old to bed, Patti Gerbrand got this question: “What if our house floats away while we’re sleeping?”

The Abbotsford mother said Thursday she was trying to keep calm for her kids while preparing to evacuate to higher ground.

“We’re ready to go, and at one point this afternoon, we’ll leave,” she said, watching as sheets of water slipped down her road and into a nearby field. She was hopeful her house would not flood because it didn’t during catastrophic storms in 2021.

The last flood was on the minds of many in Abbotsford, with weariness and anger written on the faces of those who gathered to watch the water as it surged across the border from Washington State, where the Nooksack River breached its banks Wednesday night. The water arrived in Abbotsford mid-day Thursday, pressing through Huntingdon village before finding lower ground on the edge of Sumas Prairie, a former lake that was drained to create farmland in the 1920s.

From there, the water was expected to push into the western part of the prairie, where about 400 properties are under evacuation order. In the eastern part of the prairie, which is protected by a dike, another 1,800 properties are under evacuation alert. There are about 160 farms in both areas together.

Read the full story here.

—Glenda Luymes

Four years after devastating B.C. floods, little has been done to protect homes, businesses, infrastructure

Atmospheric rivers are again threatening Abbotsford and other southern B.C. communities, yet there has been little progress on reducing flood risks.

Following devastating flooding in 2021, the B.C. NDP government released a 10-year flood mitigation plan in the spring of 2024, but it had no price tag, no project priorities, and no timelines.

In September, when Metro Vancouver representatives met with Randene Neill, B.C.’s minister of water, land and resource stewardship, and Kelly Greene, the minister of emergency management and climate readiness, they were told there is no new funding for the flood strategy because of the province’s financial woes.

B.C. has a projected deficit this year of $11 billion.

Dylan Kruger, a City of Delta councillor and the former chair of a Metro Vancouver flood task force, said this recent atmospheric river is another reminder for the region and province that the cost of inaction could be in the billions.

Read the full story here.

—Gordon Hoekstra

Trans Mountain pipeline fined $196K for violations on expansion project near Abbotsford

Trans Mountain has paid $196,000 in fines for repeatedly failing to protect the environment during a 2024 storm at its pipeline expansion project near Abbotsford.

The Canada Energy Regulator had initially fined the company $292,000 in October, but that was reduced after a review. The maximum daily penalty is $100,000.

In a statement, the regulator said the $196,000 is the largest cumulative fine it has issued to date.

The violations include four separate penalties for failing to implement environmental protection measures during severe weather between Jan. 28 and Jan. 31, 2024, according to the statement.

Inspection officers determined evidence of monitoring gaps in the maintenance, inspection, and functionality of drainage, erosion and sediment control measures.

These observations, supported by inspection records, demonstrated that the required environmental protection measures were not carried out by Trans Mountain on “an ongoing and consistent basis,” the regulator said.

—Tiffany Crawford

Resurrected B.C.-Washington task force has not solved cross-border flooding

A resurrected B.C.-Washington state group created to find solutions to flooding from the Nooksack River into the Abbotsford and Sumas, Wash., areas has so far produced no recommendations or fixes.

The Nooksack and Sumas watershed transboundary flood initiative was created following extreme flooding in November 2021 on both sides of the border.

It resurrected a similar group that was started after a major 1990 flood. In both cases, the border group was created to come up with a mitigation plan for the Nooksack River overtopping its banks at Everson, about 10 kilometres south of the border, with the floodwaters travelling north through farmland and exacerbating flooding in B.C.

The flooding has happened again this week, triggered by heavy rains from a so-called atmospheric river, which are huge plumes of moisture from tropical storms carried across the Pacific Ocean.

Read the full story here.

—Gordon Hoekstra 

Trump ban on wind energy projects ruled illegal by U.S. judge

Less than a year after U.S. President Donald Trump banned new wind projects, a federal judge ruled the president’s executive order was illegal.

U.S. District Judge Patti Saris said Monday the order is “arbitrary and capricious and contrary to law,” siding with more than a dozen U.S. states and a clean energy group that had challenged it.

The president’s directive — issued in January, hours after he returned to the White House for a second term — effectively halted federal approvals of wind farms on land and sea pending a federal review. The order froze dozens of clean energy projects, including massive installations planned off the Eastern seaboard. Developers warned of job impacts and billions of dollars in lost investments.

Trump’s campaign against renewables — and offshore wind, in particular — has whipsawed industries boosted by former President Joe Biden. Whereas Biden pushed to green U.S. electric grids, Trump has moved to prop up traditional fuels, including natural gas, coal and nuclear that are capable of providing round-the-clock power at a time of surging electric demand from data centres.

Read the full story here.

—Bloomberg News

Green stocks are big winners as tech boom drives energy demand

It was supposed to be a glum year for green stocks as U.S. President Donald Trump pushed his Big Oil agenda. Instead, the sector is booming as artificial intelligence powers massive demand for all kinds of energy.

The S&P Global Clean Energy Transition Index has rallied 44 per cent this year, handily beating a 16 per cent advance in the S&P 500 Index. It’s also outpacing an 11 per cent gain in the S&P Global Oil Index, which was expected to be a big winner on the back of Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda.

That’s an outperformance few had expected going into 2025, when investors had fled from stocks such as solar and wind producers on worries that Trump would abandon green policies and boost production of fossil fuels.

While the U.S. has indeed taken steps to overhaul energy policy — including trying to block wind farm projects and dropping out of a global pact to reduce greenhouse gas emissions — other countries such as Germany and China have shored up the sector by committing billions of dollars in spending on grid development and infrastructure for the energy transition.

Read the full story here.

—Bloomberg News