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Good afternoon, and welcome to Globe Climate, a newsletter about climate change, environment and resources in Canada.
Award-winning photographers Shane Gross and Cristina Mittermeier are using their images to aid global marine and freshwater ecosystem conservation efforts, and to bring public attention to the importance of our oceans.
Gross and Mittermeier joined journalists Jenn Thornhill Verma and Ryan MacDonald in a pair of conversations at a Globe and Mail event in Toronto in partnership with Rolex. Catch on up their discussion about the power of photography to spur change, responses to some of the best-known images, and current areas of focus.
Now, let’s catch you up on other news.
Torrents of cardinal fish race past the lens of photographer Cristina Mittermeier to avoid a Galápagos sea lion overhead. The shoot was the culmination of a multi-year campaign of work with Colombia, Costa Rica, Panama and Ecuador to create the world’s first interconnected marine protected area.CRISTINA MITTERMEIER/SUPPLIED
Noteworthy reporting this week:
- Wildfires: Sparks from an RCMP vehicle mishap ignited fire threatening Lytton
- Policy: In Ontario’s north and south, Indigenous groups protest new laws designed to fast-track infrastructure
- Technology: Canadian-built waterbomber gets upgrade for global wildfire fight
- Federal spending: Ottawa spending $21.5-million to develop five Alberta carbon-capture projects
- EVs: Automakers ask Carney to repeal zero-emission vehicle mandate
- Water: Minister planning to table First Nations water bill despite provincial opposition
- Oil and gas: LNG Canada starts exports to Asia and explores pathways to expansion
- From The Narwhal: What an effort to save Arctic sea ice means to the people who depend on it
A deeper dive
Mason Tanner, right, 8, who has been diagnosed with Lyme disease, sits with his mother Stephanie, and sister Emily, 6, in front of their home in Mahone Bay, N.S. on June 11. Both Mason's mom and dad have contracted Lyme disease.Darren Calabrese/The Globe and Mail
Not quite out of the woods
For this week’s deeper dive, Nova Scotians watch their backs – and each other’s. Health science reporter Jennifer Yang writes that as temperatures warm, tick populations, and their diseases, do as well.
With each year that passes, Canadian seasons are getting warmer, for longer, and ticks are expanding their range. And as tick populations have taken off, so, too, have the diseases they can spread through their bites.
Nova Scotia’s South Shore has become home to some of the country’s densest populations of blacklegged ticks – a vector for the bacterium that causes Lyme disease.
“People who haven’t even seen ticks before are seeing them, and seeing many,” says Donna Lugar, founder of the Nova Scotia Lyme Disease Support Group, which she formed in 2013. “I’ve never heard such horror stories as I’ve heard this year.”
And climate change is making this a reality for more and more people.
“Canada’s heating probably faster than anywhere else in the world, and the ticks are moving into those places as they warm,” says Nick Ogden, director of the modelling hub division with the Public Health Agency of Canada, who has studied ticks and Lyme disease since the 1990s.
“The range expansion of the tick has happened faster than the modelling we did a decade ago. Because it’s actually warming faster than the climate models were telling us back then.”
Communities like Lunenburg County in Nova Scotia offer a glimpse of what lies ahead for many other swaths of the country, where temperatures are rising and the ticks are inching in.
Meanwhile, nationally reported cases of Lyme disease have climbed from 522 in 2014 to a preliminary count of 5,239 last year.
Until a vaccine is a possibility, Canadians are finding other ways to fight back. Pesticides are being developed and could help, if it too can adapt to warming temperatures.
What else you missed
- Members of First Nation in northern Ontario to return home after wildfire evacuations
- Prairie farmers face ninth year of droughts, killing crops and reducing yields
- Eight people die in European heat wave amid record June temperatures
- Want to take a dip in Paris? River Seine reopens to public swimming for first time in a century
Opinion and analysis
Cathal Kelly: Under blistering summer temperatures, sports power through
Peter Kuitenbrouwer: With classroom temperatures soaring, schoolyards need more trees
Steve Flamand: Ottawa, bring back Canada’s EV incentive program
Clayton Thomas-Müller: Wab Kinew’s development dreams threaten our people’s way of life
Green Investing
Trump’s green-bashing is precisely why it’s a good time to buy green
When you live so close to Washington it can feel like it sets the world’s agenda, but on the energy transition, it doesn’t, writes John Rapley. He says that while Trump rambles on anti-renewables, the energy transition proceeds. Plus, the reduction in the price of assets and products (because of Trump) creates a golden opportunity for both investors and consumers.
The Climate Exchange
We’ve launched the next chapter of The Climate Exchange, an interactive, digital hub where The Globe answers your most pressing questions about climate change. More than 300 questions were submitted as of September. The first batch of answers tackles 30 of them. They can be found with the help of a search tool developed by The Globe that makes use of artificial intelligence to match readers’ questions with the closest answer drafted. We plan to answer a total of 75 questions.
Photo of the week
Local residents survey the wreckage left by the flooded Guadalupe River in Louise Hayes Park in Kerrville, Texas, on Saturday, July 5, 2025. Nearly 70 people died in fast-moving floodwaters in Central Texas, including children.JORDAN VONDERHAAR/The New York Times News Service
Guides and Explainers
- Want to learn to invest sustainably? We have a class for that: Green Investing 101 newsletter course for the climate-conscious investor. Not sure you need help? Take our quiz to challenge your knowledge.
- We’ve rounded up our reporters’ content to help you learn about what a carbon tax is, what happened at COP29 and just generally how Canada will change because of climate change.
- We have ways to make your travelling more sustainable and if you like to read, here are books to help the environmentalist in you grow, as well as a downloadable e-book of Micro Skills – Little Steps to Big Change.
Catch up on Globe Climate
- From loss to life
- Shifts in habitat
- Keeping G7 leaders safe from grizzlies
- B.C. cedes provincial park to Nuchatlaht First Nation
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