Kristen Villebrun and Wendy Bush hoped they wouldn't have to pray for Chedoke Creek, but four years after they first raised alarm about the water's condition, they were part of an Indigenous full moon ceremony to do just that. About 50 people showed up near Princess Point on the dark and frigid Monday evening for the monthly ceremony, which was particularly special as it focused on Chedoke Creek. The body of water that runs into Cootes Paradise had about 24 billion litres of sewage and storm water runoff leak into it due to a gate being left open.
The list of destructive post-tropical storms and hurricanes which have tracked through Atlantic Canada over the past few decades is an increasingly lengthy list. From Juan in 2003, Igor in 2010, Dorian in 2019 and Fiona in 2022, plus the many other damaging storms that have moved through, this region is certainly in a period of high tropical-storm activity.
A water crisis is looming because of climate change, a new report warns. Floods and droughts are increasingly on the rise, and the number of global citizens facing water scarcity is expected to soar. Meanwhile, management, forecasting, and financial solutions are thought to be gravely “insufficient”. The report, The State of Climate Services 2021: Water, has suggested that by 2050 more than five billion people will have inadequate access to water at least once monthly, up from 3.6 billion in 2018.
The world is changing rapidly, and the past is no longer a guide to the future in terms of extreme events and floods. That’s one of the findings from a report on the Changing Cold Regions Network (CCRN), a summary of the research program that wrapped up in 2018 and which recently compiled many of its scientific advances in a special issue of the journal Hydrology and Earth System Sciences.
