VANCOUVER — As summer heatwaves continue to sweep the globe and wildfire smoke fills the air in many parts of the world including British Columbia, it is the country’s poorest residents that are at greatest risk of suffering and fatality due to environmental factors, say experts.

Jeremy Hunka, public relations specialist and homeless advocate with the Union Gospel Mission in Vancouver, said dehydration, heat exhaustion, heat stroke and respiratory failure are all more likely to affect British Columbians living in poverty, whose ability to manage extreme weather is curbed by their ties to their local environment.

“Lives are on the line,” Hunka said in an interview, noting that, aside from Metro Vancouver’s homeless population of more than 3,600 individuals, thousands more residents are low-income, underhoused or live in homes which are unequipped with technologies like air conditioners, purifiers and weatherproof windows which can help mitigate the worst impacts of extreme weather.

“These are massive (issues) for people whose lives are already hanging in the balance,” he said.

More than 13 per cent of British Columbians currently live in poverty, according to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Of these roughly 650,000 residents, one in five are 18 years old or younger. And many of these hundreds of thousands of people, said Hunka, simply don’t have the purchasing power to care for their health in the ways middle-class British Columbians might.

Lori Daniels, associate professor at the UBC Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences, said the record-breaking fire seasons reported in the province every year over the last near-decade point to extreme weather as a new normal for region.

“Climate change is here with us,” Daniels said in an interview. “We have seen repeatedly that fire behaviour has been exceeding the ability of our modern methods to control it.”

Hot, dry weather and the success of past fire suppression efforts have compounded to make current wildfires particularly fierce, she said. When forests are prevented from burning in naturally-occurring cycles, they become denser and more mature, making them vulnerable to a more intense blaze, Daniels said.

The growing presence of the mountain pine beetle — a native insect which overwinters in tree bark and can kill host trees by disrupting their healthy functioning — is another factor in making B.C.’s forests more vulnerable to wildfire, she added.

B.C.’s formerly cold winters used to be one natural way the pine beetle population was kept in check, she said, but the province hasn’t had a winter cold and long enough to kill the insect since the mid-1990s.

All of these factors contributed to 2017’s record-breaking 70-day Provincial State of Emergency, which saw 1.2 million hectares of the province consumed in flame, she said.

“I thought, to be honest, we would have a few more decades to adapt,” Daniels said. “(But) I would say the urgency is on us.”

That 2017 season, she said, saw air quality deterioration far beyond what B.C. would normally expect. In August of that year, for instance, Canada’s Air Quality Health Index listed the air quality in Kamloops as an “18” on a scale that formerly only went as high as 10.

Daniels said lower-income individuals would be best advised to get to a public place like a library, community centre or shopping mall to get out of the extreme heat and smoke. Canada’s federal government likewise recommends Canadians “limit outdoor activity,” “stay indoors,” or “leave the area” altogether when wildfire smoke begins to accumulate in a region. But Daniels acknowledged that many individuals — especially in B.C.’s smaller communities — might not have these resources readily available to them.

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“The problems are complex, the answers are complex,” she said, but when the summers are longer and the droughts are deeper as we’ve been seeing, there will be more fire.

“We need to be acting now,” she said, “and it goes from individuals through to government.”

Hunka reiterated that it’s not just smaller communities which can isolate low-income individuals from the public resources and mobility they need to stay alive. Many cities, he said, have hot-spots in areas where concrete abounds and trees are less abundant. And these less-desirable neighbourhoods also tend to be places where people living in poverty are concentrated — neighbourhoods like Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

Hunka also noted that lower-income residents have more health problems than their wealthier peers, and are less likely to have ready access to health care — an observation borne out by a 2006 study published in Health Policy, which looked in depth at the impact poverty has on health and access to medical care.

In Montreal this year, for instance, of the 54 residents killed by a summer heat wave, the majority were over 50, lived alone and had pre-existing medical conditions, according to the regional department of public health.

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And while B.C. has yet to experience temperatures as high as those in Quebec, a 2017 study from the Department of Geography at the University of Hawai’i projected that nearly half the world’s population will be exposed to climatic conditions exceeding what it calls a “deadly threshold” for at least 20 days a year by 2100 — so long as greenhouse gas emissions undergo a “drastic reductions.” If greenhouse gas emissions increase, the study says, nearly three-quarters of the world’s population will be faced with deadly climate conditions at least 20 days out of the year by 2100.

And aside from what the data shows, said Hunka, the fact that climate exacerbates the most troubling health concerns associated with poverty is a reality he and his colleagues witness every day.

“We’ve got to do a lot better as a region of taking care of our most vulnerable,” he said. “Especially as the risks will only become more potent.”

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