We are health care workers. We’re already seeing the impacts of climate inaction

The summer of 2025 will be remembered in Canada as the year that wildfires threatened our health and our homes, from coast to coast to coast, from Northwest Territories to Nova Scotia, from Manitoba to BC. The area burned this year is larger than the country of Ireland. 

Worsened by climate change, wildfire and extreme heat are harming the health of Canadians and putting our healthcare system at risk. Dangerous air quality warnings have resulted from catastrophic wildfires burning across the prairies, and tens of thousands of Canadians have been evacuated from their homes. Regardless of how wildfires start, climate change-enabled hot and dry conditions dramatically increase their risk and spread.

When it comes to the healthcare systems that care for us, recent reports show that even under low-emissions scenarios, heat-related hospitalization rates are expected to increase by 21 per cent by 2050, while the costs of death and reduced quality of life from heat events are projected to be $3 billion per year. Mental health challenges, such as depression and anxiety, are currently associated with productivity losses of $51 billion per year in Canada. Experts expect this to increase due to climate change and add significant strain to the healthcare system. Recent research from British Columbia found heightened feelings of anxiety and distress among youth due to climate change, echoing findings of global youth studies on this topic.

As nurses and nurse practitioners, we have seen the direct impacts of climate change on our patients’ health and on our healthcare system. We are deeply concerned that Canada is not moving swiftly enough to shift patterns of investment, creating green jobs and green infrastructure.  

In Canada, this year is the first time that “zombie fires”—fires that smoulder over the winter and return in the spring—have lasted two winters. These fires are not typically visible as they are buried underground, spread slowly with little oxygen, and then flare again in spring with higher winds and dry weather. 

Climate scientists expect that wildfires will transition from being seasonal occurrences to year-round burning. The impacts on the communities near wildfires, and on the communities and healthcare systems receiving evacuees, and the air quality (and respiratory health) of the country cannot be understated.

A recent actuarial report lays the economic case out very starkly. “The risk of Planetary Insolvency looms unless we act decisively. Without immediate policy action to change course, catastrophic or extreme impacts are eminently plausible…” Framing the issue even more bluntly, U.S. politician Sheldon Whitehouse noted, “Climate risk makes things uninsurable. No insurance makes things un-mortgageable. No mortgages crashes the property markets. Crashed property markets trash the economy. It all begins with climate risk.”

Author John Valliant writes that our current global economic system is an unsustainable one whose collapse is inevitable—a system leveraged against the viability of our future world. He notes that since around the year 2000, global temperatures have been rising noticeably, and our carbon “debt” has become unsustainable. We are now facing the consequences.

All of us want to promote health for Canadians, a robust healthcare system and a strong economy. This cannot be achieved while our leaders are failing to consider the short- and long-term costs of climate change. While we can and must take steps to adapt to climate change (by creating stronger emergency preparedness systems, etc.) we must also work at mitigation, containing the problem upstream by moving rapidly away from fossil fuels. 

Experts advise that while “deep, rapid, and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions would lead to a discernible slowdown in global warming within around two decades,” failure to do so may lead to irreversible impacts on our food and water systems.

World economic leaders posit that taking strong action to address climate change will increase countries’ economic growth, rather than slow it, and that setting bold targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and creating the policies to achieve them, “would result in a net gain to global GDP by the end of the next decade.”

It is urgent that politicians not only acknowledge these true costs but fund solutions to the climate crisis. Governments must make major investments in renewable energy now, so that we can transition away from fossil fuels. Climate scientists argue that we must “prioritise earth system health over short-term economic metrics.”

As nurses and a nurse practitioner who have committed our careers to promoting health, we urge Canada’s leaders to protect population health, our economy and our healthcare system by urgently addressing upstream causes of climate change, acting swiftly to cut emissions, and protecting future generations.

The authors are members of Canadian Association of Nurses for the Environment (CANE-ACIIE), which represents nurses dedicated to the improvement of planetary health across all domains of nursing practice, policy, research and education.