B.C. climate news: Eby hints at second pipeline in Vancouver that wouldn't require lifting tanker moratorium | Food prices to rise as much as six per cent

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.

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In climate news this week:

• Eby hints at second pipeline in Vancouver that wouldn’t require lifting tanker moratorium
• Food prices could rise by as much as six per cent amid trade war, changes to foreign worker program, climate change
• Militaries come to aid of Asia flood victims as toll nears 1,000

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 Nov. 13, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 424.87 parts per million, down slightly from 425.48 ppm last 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.

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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)

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Latest News

Premier Eby hints at being open to second oil pipeline to Vancouver

Premier David Eby would be less hostile to the prospect of a new pipeline from Alberta to the B.C. coast if it were to a port that didn’t require lifting Canada’s moratorium on oil tanker traffic off the North Coast, he said Sunday.

Shifting destinations to the South Coast, however, wouldn’t overcome questions about long-term demand for a new oil pipeline or how well it would fit in the already busy Port of Vancouver, according to resource industry expert Tom Gunton.

“That’s a question that would require a fairly detailed feasibility assessment, whether (the port) could handle it or not,” said Gunton, director of the resource and environmental management planning program at Simon Fraser University.

Gunton said Canada’s oil industry has expansion options on existing infrastructure, including the recently completed Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, that it would likely want to exhaust before contemplating an expensive new pipeline.

Read the full story here.

—Derrick Penner

Family of four can expect to pay nearly $1,000 more for food in 2026: report

A family of four can expect to pay nearly $1,000 more on food in the coming year than it did in 2025, according to Canada’s Food Price Report 2026. Overall, food prices could rise by as much as six per cent next year, with meat expected to see the largest increases at five to seven per cent.

The 16th edition of the annual report, produced by Dalhousie University’s Agri-Food Analytics Lab in collaboration with other universities across Canada, looks back at highlights from 2025, forecasts food inflation for 2026 across categories, and explains the factors that could affect food prices in the coming year.

The report found that a sample four-person household can expect an annual food cost of up to $17,571.79 — up to $994.63 more than in 2025 — and an overall price increase of four to six per cent.

If the estimates prove accurate, “That would mean that food prices will have gone up by more than 30 per cent since 2020, which is quite a bit,” says lead author Sylvain Charlebois, director of the AAL.

The report identified several factors as potential contributors to price increases. Trade disputes with the U.S., the consumer-led “Buy Canadian” movement, and changes to the Temporary Foreign Workers Program were among the highlights for 2025.

Charlebois expects factors such as climate change, geopolitics and the upcoming Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement review — “because I think that supply management will be back on the table” — to attract attention in 2026.

Read the full story here.

—Laura Brehaut

UBC students sing on the beach and record music to raise money for ocean protection

University of B.C. student and a cappella singer Emiko Wijeysundera is ending the year on a high note.

The fifth-year engineering physics and honours human geography student recently recorded a song that she put together for dozens of students to sing for the Ocean Song Project, a UBC student-led ocean stewardship project funded by Ocean Wise and in collaboration with other international groups.

“I’ve always loved singing. I’ve been involved with choir since I was little, and then at UBC, I got involved with the a cappella club, which is where I started doing these bigger arrangements and directing groups,” she said.

“But this project definitely felt out of my comfort zone, so I am really happy with how it turned out.”

Saltwater, the project’s inaugural track, is a mash-up of six popular songs that include ocean lyrics such as Astronaut in the Ocean by Masked Wolf, Salt Water by Ed Sheeran, the Beatles’ Octopus’s Garden and Ocean Eyes by Billie Eilish.

It’s a not-for-profit project and any proceeds they raise will go toward planting mangroves. Mangroves are natural barriers that can help protect against rising sea levels and erosion. They also filter pollution and are crucial habitat for marine life.

Read the full story here.

—Tiffany Crawford

Militaries come to aid of Asia flood victims as toll nears 1,000

Sri Lanka and Indonesia deployed military personnel on Monday to help victims of devastating flooding that has killed nearly 1,000 people across four countries in Asia in recent days.

Separate weather systems brought torrential, extended rainfall to the entire island of Sri Lanka and large parts of Indonesia’s Sumatra, southern Thailand and northern Malaysia last week.

Arriving in North Sumatra on Monday, Indonesia President Prabowo Subianto said the government’s “priority now is how to immediately send the necessary aid.”

“There are several isolated villages that God willing, we can reach,” he added, saying the government was deploying helicopters and aircraft to aid the relief effort.

Much of Asia is currently in its annual monsoon season, which often brings heavy rain, triggering landslides and flash floods. But the flooding that hit Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia was also exacerbated by a rare tropical storm that dumped heavy rain on Sumatra island in particular.

Climate change has also increased the intensity of storms, and produced more heavy rain events because a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture.

Read the full story here.

—AFP

Australian authorities urge thousands to flee New South Wales bushfires

Wildfires in Australia’s New South Wales burnt through thousands of hectares of bushland on Saturday, prompting the authorities to urge evacuations at the highest danger rating for thousands of residents in the nation’s most-populous state.

The alert was for the Phegans Bay and Woy Woy area in the the state’s central coast region, with a population of more than 350,000 people, about 45 kilometres north of the state capital Sydney, Australia’s largest city.

As many as 16 homes were lost as bushfires burned across the region, the Australian Broadcasting Corp reported.
“Leave now if the path is clear toward Woy Woy,” the state’s Rural Fire Service said on its website.

 — Reuters

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