Blair Feltmate

As Canada’s premiers reckoned with housing, health care and their contentious relationship with Ottawa during meetings last week in Halifax, many of them remained consumed by climate change-related natural disasters that have only escalated since they returned home.

The mother of a boy who died a year ago in a Nova Scotia flood says her grief returns daily, along with frustration over what she considers the province's slow pace in reforming its preparations for climate disasters.

After last summer's heat waves, deadly floods and record-breaking wildfires, some scientists are urging Canadian health professionals to help their patients better prepare for climate change-related extreme weather and natural disasters.

As summer heat waves intensify and advocates sound the alarm on the lack of protections for the most vulnerable populations, one extreme weather expert is calling for access to cooling to be treated as a human right.

Canada is set to have a new national climate adaptation strategy, outlining the government's intention to eliminate deaths from heat and forest fires, protect homes and businesses at the highest risk of flooding and help get people forced to flee extreme weather back home faster.

As she stood near the remnants of flattened homes in Port aux Basques, N.L., Denise Anderson said the thought of continuing to live next to the ocean is hard after a deadly storm foreshadowed the violence of weather to come.

A broad coalition on climate adaptation and disaster resilience says air conditioning should become a human right on par with winter heating — one of a series of hard targets it says Canada needs to meet in the next few years as climate change impacts increase.

William Gaikezheyongai has lived outside long enough to know where to get water in times of extreme heat.

"This was a wake-up call, and we're probably going to need a few wake-up calls before we start getting ready for it," Peter MacGillivray said on Wednesday after two culverts on Highway 245 near his home in northern Nova Scotia were taken out by the latest storm.

In an era when the intensity of hurricanes is expected to increase across Atlantic Canada, experts say major changes are needed to utility grids, shoreline defences and even the types of trees being planted.

Worrying figures released this week on the rising seas in Atlantic Canada should prompt governments and citizens to move more swiftly to protect coastal buildings and vital transport links, say flooding experts.

Forest fires like the ones currently burning in Ontario can have long-term impacts on the environment, experts say, noting that increasingly warmer and drier weather conditions are making such blazes more common.

The scorching heat wave that set records in Ontario and Quebec over the Canada Day long weekend can't be directly attributed to climate change — but neither can the likelihood of a connection be ignored outright, says a University of Waterloo climate scientist.