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Good afternoon, and welcome to Globe Climate, a newsletter about climate change, environment and resources in Canada.
White-tailed deer are a crucial species from a conservation and wildlife-management standpoint. Scientists are breaking new ground by following the ultimate boundary crossers across forests, rivers and highways of Ontario. Ivan Semeniuk will tell us more about that research today.
Now, let’s catch you up on other news.
Noteworthy reporting this week:
- Wildfires: B.C. was unprepared to help Lytton rebuild after wildfire, A-G report says
- Oil and gas: LNG Canada sharply boosts exports to Asia as global supplies tighten
- Weather: Vancouver set to close out first snow-free winter in 43 years
- Analysis: The Hormuz crisis instantly exposed the risks of rolling back green and cleantech agendas
- Sustainable finance: Indigenous program to protect Canadian wilderness aims to bolster First Nations’ economies
A deeper dive
Parks Canada veterinarian Dr. Dave McRuer, left, monitors a deer waking up after anesthesia has been reversed, with Aaron Shafer, associate professor at Trent University, on Feb. 28, 2025, at Thousand Islands National Park in Eastern Ontario.Kaja Tirrul/The Globe and Mail
Tracking the ultimate border crossers
Ivan Semeniuk is a science reporter for The Globe and Mail. For this week’s deeper dive, he talks about research to learn about the movement of white-tailed deer.
Biologists know that the warming of Earth’s climate is affecting many wildlife species in different ways. What is harder to figure out is how the climate interacts with other variables to shape the trajectory of an animal population at the genetic level.
That’s exactly the question researchers are asking in a study of white-tailed deer in Eastern Ontario’s Thousand Islands National Park. The park is not a contiguous land area but a series of islands in the St. Lawrence River and properties strung out along the river’s north shore.
Deer are not just plentiful here but “hyperabundant,” which means they are having a significant impact on the local ecology as they consume plants in and around the park. It’s a microcosm of a larger picture in North America as white-tailed deer bounced back from a historic low point at the beginning of the 20th century.
At that time, there were only about 300,000 white-tailed deer left in North America because of harvesting and land clearing. Now their population is estimated to be about 100 times that size. They are now the most abundant large wild animal species on the continent – and a multibillion dollar industry tied to hunting and farming deer.
Park resource management officer Mathieu LeCompte, left, and Prof. Shafer collect data and process a deer before it is collared in the park.Kaja Tirrul/The Globe and Mail
As the climate warms, deer are moving northward, farther into the boreal forest than before. To understand their movements and what that means for the future, researchers with Trent University and Parks Canada are fitting deer with radio collars and also sampling their DNA.
In my recent story on the project, I explore how these data can help illuminate a range of questions that are relevant to climate, human health and transportation (because deer are frequent highway crossers). What I learned is that while deer are all around us, their silent world is one that we are just beginning to understand. It’s information that we need as we prepare to manage a future for Canada’s wilderness that is likely to be quite different in some ways than the past.
– Ivan
What else you missed
- Oldest known whale recording could unlock mysteries of the ocean
- Inside the demanding and dangerous work of aquatic monitoring to protect our ecosystems
- How to experience the ‘coolcation’ trend in Canada’s North
- Strong winds knock out power to thousands in Central Canada, Maritimes
Opinion and analysis
Is it time to rethink heat?
As our world gets hotter, we must obviously respect the heat and the dangers it poses, especially to vulnerable populations such as workers and the elderly. Yet at the same time, I found it calming and even empowering to know that we can harness this powerful stressor to help make ourselves stronger, both physically and mentally.
— Bill Gifford, science journalist
Business and investing
National Bank, CIBC commit to tracking key climate-financing measure
National Bank and CIBC have committed to measuring how their fossil-fuel financing compares with how much money they direct toward renewable energy, but not to making those numbers public.
The measure, known as the energy supply ratio, is meant to provide a simple way to see how much banks are helping, or hindering, the push toward a low-emissions economy.
The moves follow a similar pattern to Royal Bank of Canada, which committed to calculating its ratio after pressure from some major U.S. pension funds, only to announce last year that it wouldn’t be making its findings public.
Photo of the week
People watch the Schneefernerkopf ski lift being demolished at the Zugspitze ski resort in southern Germany on Friday. The lift has been rendered inoperable because the glacier base has melted and the terrain has become steeper.PHILIPP GUELLAND/AFP/Getty Images
Guides and explainers
- We’ve rounded up our reporters’ content to help you learn about what a carbon tax is, what happened at COP30 and just generally how Canada will change because of climate change.
- We have ideas to make your travelling more sustainable, your lifestyle at home more ecofriendly, and to talk to your kids about climate change.
- In a series of essays from Globe writers exploring the role the it has played in Canada’s history, A Nation’s Paper also highlights the journey of the newspaper’s green evolution.
Catch up on Globe Climate
- Ottawa insists it’s holding the environmental line
- Water and oil in the Middle East
- Winds of change
- The one about Greenland