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Good afternoon, and welcome to Globe Climate, a newsletter about climate change, environment and resources in Canada.
It’s the best season to experience the outdoors, rather than just reading about it in this newsletter! And while American megabrands dominate the outdoor space, Canada’s top camping-gear companies are quietly making some of the most innovative equipment.
In that spirit, here is your 2025 guide to Canadian outdoor gear for summer camping trips.
Speaking of camping, that’s what I’ll be doing soon. Our agriculture and food reporter, Kate Helmore, will be your climate guide next week. See you later!
Now, let’s catch you up on other news.
Noteworthy reporting this week:
- Coal: Saskatchewan says Ottawa can’t stop it from extending life of coal-fired power plants
- Groceries: For this B.C. beekeeper, gathering groceries is sweet and sustainable
- Environment: Kayaking on Lake Superior, I explored a ‘living museum’ of history in the Slate Islands
- Photo essay: Brazil’s depleted jungle rivers make midwives even more essential when the water breaks
- Whales: Shifts in habitat make North Atlantic right whales harder to track – and to save from extinction
- Roads: Road lines fading faster after environmental rule, say local politicians – raising costs and safety concerns
- Mining: Receiver planning sale of Yukon gold mine involved in contaminant release disaster
- Community: When the power goes out, your neighbours are the grid
- Theatre: Documentary play Eyes of the Beast tells the story of B.C.’s 2021 heat dome
- The Grizzly Return: The U.S. planned to restore grizzlies to the North Cascades. Trump’s return brings uncertainty to that plan.
A deeper dive
North Atlantic right whales are harder to track – and to save from extinction
For this week’s deeper dive, an excerpt from the third story in a series on Canada-U.S. cross-border measures to protect North Atlantic right whales by Jenn Thornhill Verma.
Yards from Herring Cove Beach on a crisp day in late March, a young North Atlantic right whale grazes the surface of Cape Cod Bay’s crystal-blue waters.
As he glides, mouth agape, his fringelike baleen plates filter seawater so he can feast on small planktonic crustaceans called copepods.
“That’s what we call mowing the lawn,” says Daniel Palacios, program director of the Right Whale Ecology Program at the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, Mass., describing the whale’s skim-feeding behaviour as his team surveys from a boat.
For more than eight decades, from winter through spring, these critically endangered whales have returned to feast on an abundance of zooplankton in Cape Cod Bay, which has been seasonally protected to limit fishing activity and vessel speeds since 2015. That includes this young male, identified only by the number #5245, and his family. Sea and air surveys show he first visited with his mother, Slalom (#1245), in 2022, just as she likely did with her mother, Wart (#1140).
Every year, both Slalom and Wart would then guide their calves to the Bay of Fundy, which was once considered the northernmost limit of the right whales’ typical geographical range.
But in 2022, Slalom brought #5245 further north to the Gulf of St. Lawrence – a change that, when it began more than a decade earlier, cued attention to an increasingly urgent problem that still plagues researchers and policy-makers today.
As #5245 and the other whales continue to head to colder feeding grounds in the coming weeks, where they all will go next is a mystery. Climate change is affecting ecosystems and changing the availability of their food in different areas, resulting in the species popping up in new spots.
The consequences of the whales’ shifting habitats are dire: Under threat from fishing gear entanglements and vessel strikes, the dwindling North Atlantic right whale species – with a population of 372 – requires agile protections to survive.
But if researchers can’t find them, then policy-makers don’t know where to put such measures in place.
What else you missed
- Why Canada’s largest battery project is an energy gamechanger
- Rock falls are impossible to anticipate or prevent, experts say
- Quebec dials back emissions projections due to uncertainty caused by Trump administration
- ‘Spectacular’ Bruce Peninsula site to be protected from development
- Rotting fish-sauce plant whose stench torments Newfoundland town will be cleaned up
Opinion and analysis
Amberly Mcateer: The world is burning. Should we tell our kids?
André Picard: Rescuing summer holidays from the clutches of climate change
Gary Mason: B.C. and Alberta are about to renew old hostilities. It could get ugly
Green Investing
Alberta to invest $50-million to help develop oil sands water, tailings technologies
Alberta has earmarked $50-million to boost technologies that can help reduce and manage the massive oil sands tailings ponds in the province’s north.
The cash for the new program will come from the province’s carbon price on large emitters. The program will be managed by Emissions Reduction Alberta through a competition for private companies to develop new and existing technologies that make tailings and water treatment cheaper and more effective.
- Canadian banks increased fossil fuel funding in 2024 despite record heat, report says
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
Protea flower grower Nico Thuynsma opens the door to a greenhouse at his fam in Cullinan, east of Pretoria on June 3, 2025. Thuynsma is experimenting with different seed varieties to find out which ones can thrive in drier, hotter conditions. His farm has become a testing ground for the future of the species, as climate zones shift northward.PHILL MAGAKOE/AFP/Getty Images
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
- Keeping G7 leaders safe from grizzlies
- B.C. cedes provincial park to Nuchatlaht First Nation
- How to fix instead of waste
- Wildfire season is upon us
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