VIEWPOINT: The hidden link between affordability and climate change
VIEWPOINT: The hidden link between affordability and climate change
Published 5:00 am Saturday, December 20, 2025
By Julia Beatty,
Contributor
Canadians hear a lot about the affordability crisis – soaring grocery bills, rising insurance premiums, higher taxes and the growing cost of simply staying afloat.
What we hear farless about is one of the key drivers behind these pressures: climate change.
The connection is not abstract.
In November 2021, catastrophic flooding struck the Sumas Prairie in B.C.’s Lower Mainland. Triggered by a stalled atmospheric river that delivered record-breaking rainfall and accelerated snowmelt, the event caused morethan $1 billion in damages.
Streamflows exceeded what was once considered a “one-in-100-year” event. Scientists later concluded that human-caused climate change made the flood 60 per cent more likely, effectively transforming a rare disaster into a recurring risk.
Environment and Climate Change Canada warned that as the planet warms, storms of this magnitude could return every 10 years, dropping to every eight years at 1.5 C of warming and every five years at 3 C. Those projections proved soberingly realistic.
OnDec. 8, 2025, only four years later, another similarly powerful atmospheric river slammed the Pacific West Coast.
Severe flooding along Washington State’s Nooksack River forced the evacuation of more than 100,000 people and again inundated theSumas Prairie, displacing residents and livestock and inflicting enormous economic losses.
These floods are not isolated incidents.
Over the past decade, British Columbia has endured droughts, wildfires, heat domes, extreme cold snaps and repeated flooding. Each event leaves behind a trail of destruction and a bill that someone must pay.
That bill increasingly lands on households.
The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives estimates the combined costs of the 2021 heat dome, floods and wildfires in B.C. atbetween $10.6 and $17.1 billion, much of it borne by taxpayers.
Climate change shows up in everyday expenses: increased gas bills, higher food prices due to crop losses, rising home insurance premiums, costly repairs from extreme weather, lost wages and higher taxes to cover disaster recovery and improvements to infrastructure.
A University of British Columbia study estimates these climate-related costs already average $720 per household per year, a figure expected to rise as warming accelerates.
When politicians speak about affordability without addressing climate change, they are ignoring a central cause of the problem. Effective climate policy must reduce emissions while also investing in adaptation to protect communities from worsening impacts.
Ultimately, accountability matters.
Fossil fuels are the dominant driver of global warming, responsible for roughly 70 to 90 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
The coal, oil, and gas industry knew decades ago that their products would dangerously warm the planet. As climate change continues to erode affordability, it is time the costsfall where they belong – on the polluters who caused the crisis, not on the families struggling to pay for it.
Julia Beatty, Shuswap Climate Action Society
Read more: Flooding creates new Coquihalla River channel through Hope golf course
Read more: Evacuation orders lifted as B.C.’s Fraser Valley emerges from atmospheric river