The pace of climate change across Canada is outstripping the projections federal scientists published less than a decade ago, according to an extensive new government report that paints a sobering picture of a country in environmental flux.
Released on Thursday, Canada’s Changing Climate Report 2026 — running to nearly 1,500 pages and authored by more than 100 experts over three years — is only the second comprehensive national assessment of its kind ever produced by the federal government. It documents how flooding, wildfires, heatwaves, vanishing glaciers and thawing permafrost are reshaping the landscape, and how those trends are set to intensify.
“Warming temperatures have driven wide-ranging, interconnected, and sustained changes across Canada,” the report states bluntly.
The findings land at a politically awkward moment. In late June, Prime Minister Mark Carney conceded Canada will fall short of its 2030 greenhouse-gas emissions targets. A statement from Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin’s office, who was not made available for an interview, did not address the report directly. It pointed instead to the government’s commitment to reaching net zero by 2050 through “a pragmatic and durable approach,” citing clean-energy investments, $2.1-billion pledged to the National Adaptation Strategy and a fresh goal of $13-billion in international climate finance over five years.
Unlike the 2019 edition, whose release was accompanied by minister-led press conferences and technical briefings, the second assessment was quietly posted online ahead of a late-summer holiday weekend.
A Faster, Hotter Canada
The numbers are stark. Canada has warmed by roughly two degrees since 1948, with Northern Canada heating up by about 2.6 degrees. Since 1970, the country has warmed nearly twice as fast as the global average. The Canadian Arctic has warmed three times faster.
Precipitation is up 9.7 per cent nationally since 1949, and 18.9 per cent in the North. Human activity, the report concludes, is the only explanation for the collective changes observed.
“We have fundamentally altered our climate system, and even if we do succeed at limiting warming to a certain threshold, there are parts of our environment that will continue to change,” said Chris Derksen, director of the Climate Modelling Research Division at Environment and Climate Change Canada.
Some of those changes are now locked in. Sea level rise, glacier melt and permafrost thaw will continue even if temperatures stabilise. Western Canada’s glaciers, the report warns, will largely disappear by the end of this century.
Three Scenarios, Three Different Futures
The report models three potential trajectories. Under current global policies, Canada warms by five degrees above preindustrial levels by the century’s end. Without any climate policies, warming reaches 6.9 degrees and the area burned by wildfire climbs by 287 per cent. Under a net-zero scenario, warming stabilises after 2050 and tops out at 3.5 degrees.
“Every increment of warming will cost us more in damages,” Dr. Derksen said. “It will cost us more to adapt to those changes.”
The extremes are already being felt, and the rarer the event, the more dramatic the shift. A once-in-50-years heat extreme now occurs nearly four times as often at two degrees of global warming. Droughts and flash floods are becoming more frequent and severe. Fire seasons are stretching longer.
The warming now projected for Canada is greater, on comparable scenarios, than the last assessment estimated.
From Predictions to Receipts
If the 2019 report laid out the warnings, the 2026 edition delivers the evidence that those warnings were justified. The inaugural assessment flagged more intense heat, heavier rain, deeper drought and worsening fire risk. Since then, Canada has endured the 2021 British Columbia heat dome, the catastrophic floods that washed out the province’s highways that November, years of drought across the Prairies and the record-breaking 2023 wildfire season.
The new report puts those risks in plainer language — heat extremes, flooding, drought, fire weather — and adds marine heatwaves to the catalogue. Summer sea surface temperatures have risen everywhere in Canadian waters, most sharply in Atlantic Canada and Hudson Bay, by as much as 2.5 degrees. Off Nova Scotia, marine heatwave conditions have persisted more than 100 days annually on the Scotian Shelf almost every year since 2012. The ocean is also acidifying and losing oxygen below the surface.
A United Nations Environment Programme report published this week concluded the world will cross 1.5 degrees of warming within the next few years — the tougher of the two limits nearly 200 countries, including Canada, agreed to in Paris a decade ago.
An Uncomfortable Truth
The report is clear that Canadians are stuck with some of these changes, according to Sabine Dietz, executive director of CLIMAtlantic, one of five regional climate service providers. “Every point of a degree that we can bring the temperature back down or we can reduce the increase, we will benefit from it,” she said.
That Canada can see these changes coming at all is a function of its own scientific capacity. Dr. Derksen noted his department runs one of roughly 15 Earth system models in the world.
Much of what Canadians can expect from the climate over the next 10 to 20 years is largely determined by past choices. The scenarios diverge more widely when projected further into the future.
“We made a lot of effort to show that end-of-century climate changes are still very much dependent on political decisions that are made now,” said Damon Matthews, a climate scientist and professor at Concordia University in Montreal who co-led the chapter on future projections.
The report, like the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s physical science volumes, describes the changes under way and what models project. It stops short of prescribing solutions. “The big question is, so what? So what do we do with this?” said Alain Bourque, head of Ouranos, the Quebec climate services consortium whose scientists contributed to the assessment.
That question takes centre stage at Adaptation Canada 2026, a national conference in Toronto later this month where the report’s authors will meet practitioners.
“Canadians and Ontarians must prepare for a hotter future and act now to avoid the worst impacts,” said Ewa Jackson, director of the Ontario Resource Centre for Climate Adaptation.
“Ultimately, warming in Canada will stop only when global emissions reach net zero,” said Sherilee Harper, a professor and Canada Research Chair in climate change and health at the University of Alberta. “Until then, every fraction of a degree we avoid will quite literally save lives.”
Why it Matters
This report is not a forecast of what might happen — it is, in many respects, an account of what is already happening. The 2019 assessment warned of a Canada transformed by heat, fire and flood; the 2026 edition documents that transformation in unflinching detail, from acidifying Atlantic waters to glaciers on the brink of extinction. The choices made in this decade will determine whether the country warms by 3.5 degrees or closer to seven, a difference measured not just in temperature but in lives, ecosystems and economic stability. With the 1.5-degree threshold likely to fall within years, the window for limiting the worst outcomes is narrowing fast — and Canada, the report makes plain, has more to lose, and less time to act, than almost anywhere else on Earth.
