A report issued by Vancouver Coastal Health is providing recommendations they say will help people in key areas facing harm in the face of changing climate.
The report released by chief medical health officer Dr. Patricia Daly highlights projects the projects local governments, Indigenous communities, and community partners are engaged in to mitigate the risks of climate change.
Daly says changing climate is a real concern and every community is being affected in one way or another.
“There is no community within our region that is not at risk of harm because of climate change,” she says. “Risks are different for each community, depending on both geography and the demographics of the population.”
The report illustrates how each community has been impacted while providing several sources of data and analyses to prove her theory of how a changing environment can impact the population’s health.
On the Sunshine Coast, the region declared a state of local emergency after access to drinking water was restricted for nearly 22,000 residents because of a prolonged drought in 2022.
Indigenous areas identified the changes in climate across the VCH region as drastic because of the impact it had on access to traditional foods and medicines, fishing, other animals, berries and roots because of wildfires.
Medical health officer Dr. Michael Schwandt says the report shows how climate change can affect populations in different ways.
“Many communities in our region have already initiated activities to build resilience to the threats and impacts of climate change, but it needs to be accelerated,” he says.
The report is titled Protecting Health in a Climate Emergency and was released today.
