Big-box stores may not be popular with some Van­couverites, but Hadi Dowlatabadi thinks they could play a critical role in helping the elderly survive climate change.

“We know that air-conditioned public spaces are a critical adaptation mechanism for helping the elderly in the event of heat wave,” Dowlatabadi, a Canada research chair in climate change at UBC, told the Georgia Straight in an April 14 phone interview. “The mall is a private entity and a private structure, but its use is for public gain. So why not allow its use but have a rider on it that allows you to use it for refuge against floods and a heat wave? I bet you Wal-Mart would agree to those terms.”

Dowlatabadi said his Burnaby relatives live in a west-facing apartment that reached 40?°?C last summer “with the windows open”.

“They are in their 30s, but if that was a 70-year-old woman, she would be in trouble.”

For Bill Rees, a UBC professor of community and regional planning, a huge concern with climate change is the local food supply. Rees told the Straight that there should not be a “single hectare” of farmland developed in the Fraser Valley, as California will soon struggle to export any more vegetables up to our region. “Food production is beginning to decline and food prices are rising rapidly because of the completely immoral act on the part of wealthy countries—the United States and Canada among them—of diverting food supplies to feeding automobiles instead of people [through the use of biofuels],” he said.

NPA councillor Peter Ladner pushed for 2,010 more community-garden plots by 2010 in a May 2006 motion that council passed unanimously. Ladner told the Straight he did not see community gardens as a big contributor to food security by themselves but added that they are “a step in the right direction”.

“If we can get more community gardens going, then we can move on to the next step of more urban agriculture of other types,” Ladner said. “Also, we have asked our engineering staff to prepare for climate change in any infrastructure improvements they are making.”

COPE councillor David Cadman told the Straight he wants city staff to “produce for Vancouverites a visual” of what different sea-level rises would look like.

“Nobody wants to do it, because it could put…[the city] in the unfortunate position of saying, ‘This is your future,’?” Cadman said.

Cadman said the public should check out Google Maps illustrations showing the expected effects of rising sea levels on various regions of the world.

“It’s the only thing that is going to wake people up,” he said. “People tend to think, ‘Look on the bright side, not in my lifetime or not in my investment framework.’ We are in a case of denial because everything that we are doing is effectively contributing to this.”

Jean-Michel Toriel, a federal Vancouver East Green party official, told the Straight: “We need to find mechanisms to encourage people and empower them to make the change that they would like to see in the world.”

Toriel said he is working to help get the Vancouver Biodiesel Co-operative a new site close to the Main Street SkyTrain station so the group can add a new fuel tank and help more locals reduce their dependency on fossil fuels. The operation should be up and running by 2010, Toriel said.

“We are sourcing out a supply chain that is local and sustainable,” he said by phone. “We are trying to change the current negative image of biofuels, as biodiesel often gets tagged into the negative play that the media has been putting out lately, which is right in many cases when you are looking at corn-based ethanol. But there are different forms of ethanol, such as cellulosic-based ethanol, that we will be looking at putting on line as well.”

What should local governments be doing to adapt to climate change?

Peter Ladner
NPA city councillor

“I think the issue for Vancouver is sea levels. Rising sea levels will have flooding implications and repair and maintenance implications; for example, on the [Stanley Park] seawall and perhaps low-lying properties around Spanish Banks and Southlands.”

Cheeying Ho
Executive director, Smart Growth B.C.

“They should be immediately changing land-use policies and regulations to create more compact communities that reduce the need for driving and make communities more energy-efficient. Municipalities can put into place things like density targets and urban-containment boundaries.”

David Cadman
COPE city councillor

“The first thing they ought to do is take a look at what a one-metre, two-metre, and three-metre sea rise looks like. Then they ought not be building in areas that could be put at risk as a consequence of that sea rise. Then they ought to be looking at places they can be raising dikes.”

Hadi Dowlatabadi
UBC climate-change researcher

“I don’t know if we have plans for how to deal with the elderly in the event of a heat wave. That is how the French lost 15,000 people [in August 2003]. The famous North American examples were 500 elderly deaths under very unfortunate socioeconomic circumstances in Chicago.”

Bill Rees
UBC planning professor

“In their own purchasing areas, cities should not be built to LEED, or any of the standard North American approaches. We should be looking at the European standards around Passivhaus [passive house]. Why are we not building every gosh-darn municipal structure according to the Passivhaus standard?”