An unprecedented wave of severe weather that hammered national parks and historic sites left Ottawa with a $14.8 million repair bill in 2011.
Storms, floods and hurricanes buried parts of parks under piles of debris and damaged visitor centres, facilities and highways, according to Parks Canada’s most recent quarterly financial report.
The federal department’s report called the amount of emergency response work “overwhelming.”
All of the damage hit parks on the east coast or in Quebec. In the past, most emergency funding requested was to deal with wildfires, until 2008-2009 when the federal government gave the department ongoing funding to deal with wildfire management. The department hadn’t asked for any additional money until 2011.
While such weather may be unprecedented now, some say this could be the new normal as climate change continues to rock Canada’s natural treasures.
“It is certainly consistent with what we expect to see coming, particularly on the East Coast,” said Daniel Scott, Canada Research Chair in Global Change and Tourism at the University of Waterloo. “There they’ve got the combination of sea level rise as well as increased intensity or frequency of severe storms.”
View Damage to Parks Canada sites in 2011 in a larger map
Natural disasters are severely affecting Parks Canada sites across the country, but where and when they’ll hit is still a mystery, according to Mike Wong, the director of Parks Canada’s ecological integrity branch.
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“To really focus that down to a park-specific or historic-site specific event that is very difficult to predict,” he said. “We are working very closely with the academic community, the climate change scientists looking at models and the various predictions.”
Parks Canada manages 42 national parks, 167 national historic sites and four national marine conservation areas, all of which are spread through the country’s vast and diverse geographic regions. The enormity of the Canadian parks system means Park Canada will face an array of different climate change impacts across the country.
The cost and potential benefits of climate change for Canada’s parks is a multi-million dollar question and comes at a time when governments are tightening up budgets. Parks Canada, like every other government department, may have to cut up to 10 per cent of its budget in order to help balance Ottawa’s overall budget.
In an age of scaling back on funds, creativity could pay off for Parks Canada.
Scott suggested that one option could be to build a contingency fund by charging park visitors an extra dollar. Another way of raising funds Scott pointed to was partnering with private-sector players in the tourism industry who have a vested interest in preserving Canada’s local sites.
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“(The tourism industry) will be part of it, but they look for government to lead that,” said Scott, who penned a federally-funded study on climate change and tourism in Canada’s national parks.
Scott questions how prepared Parks Canada is to deal with a future shaped by climate change.
Scott said the agency must look at extreme events, whether it is an unusually warm summer or a devastating storm, and predict their costs and impacts on tourism.
“We can learn from what is going on now because that gives us clues to what is coming,” he said. “Right now, they are not doing that.”
South Africa, on the other hand, has created the world’s first “climate change” national park, a massive swath stretching from sea level to an elevation of 1,700 m that would allow plant and animal species to migrate to higher altitudes as the climate warms.
Wong said Parks Canada’s ecological integrity monitoring system tracks all changes including those due to climate change. The data accumulated will be used to maintain or restore the ecosystems, trails and other infrastructure in Canada’s national parks.
Such action could include building new wildlife corridors to connect parks, monitoring controlled burns to eliminate pests like pine beetles or expanding national parks to preserve rare ecosystems.
The federal government funnelled $2.41 million to boost Parks Canada’s monitoring activities in the far north as part of the last budget. The agency was also handed $5.5 million over five years to establish Mealy Mountains National Park in Labrador.
Wong said Parks Canada will use its monitoring program to identify the most pressing climate change priorities and focus on them if budgets don’t go as far as they used to.
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