OTTAWA—As wildfires ravage wide swathes of Australia, climate activists in Canada say the situation should stand as a warning of the political perils of weak climate policy in an age when the consequences of global warming are increasingly clear.

On Monday, the premier of New South Wales — the state in southeastern Australia that has been hit hardest — said the severity of the wildfires is unprecedented as the national death toll from the blazes hit 24. Thousands were ordered to evacuate their homes in recent days as acrid smoke blankets major cities and more than 20,000 square kilometres of land — an area almost four times the size of Prince Edward Island — has burned in New South Wales alone. According to one “highly conservative” estimate from a University of Sydney ecology professor, 480 million animals have died because of the fires.

The devastation has inspired criticism of Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who was slammed for taking a pre-Christmas vacation to Hawaii as the fires got worse. After months of pressure to step in, the Australian government deployed 3,000 army reservists to fight the fires and announced $1.8 billion for recovery efforts.

But the fires haven’t just sparked concerns about the government’s practical response. They have also drawn attention to Australia’s climate policies, as the country recorded its driest and hottest year ever in 2019 while greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming continue to rise.

Catherine Abreu, executive director of Climate Action Network Canada, said these figures and the ongoing fires put Australia’s climate policies in stark relief. The country repealed its short-lived carbon pricing system in 2014 — a mechanism used in Canada and around the world to deter greenhouse gas emissions — and, under Morrison’s leadership, has defended the continued mining and export of coal, a heavily polluting fossil fuel.

Last month, at the annual United Nations climate conference in Madrid, Australia also lobbied for credits from a previous agreement to fight global warming to be carried over to the current Paris Agreement — a proposition that Abreu and other climate activists say would weaken the deal by allowing countries to claim emissions reductions that haven’t really happened.

“Australia, I think, is really lifting up the political tensions around climate right now,” Abreu said, referring to the wildfires and the country’s climate policies that she sees as inadequate.

“They’re experiencing some of the worst climate impacts in the world and they have a climate-denying government that is failing to protect people against those impacts,” she said.

Isabelle Turcotte, federal policy director with Canada’s Pembina Institute, said it was “really disheartening” to witness Australia push for measures at the recent climate conference that she believes would weaken global efforts to reduce emissions. Like Abreu, Turcotte pointed to the irony that Australia is seeing some of the most severe impacts of a changing climate while its federal government has rolled back policies to address the problem.

She added that Canada isn’t immune from the same situation, with Conservatives campaigning in the last federal election on a rollback of key federal climate policies like the federal minimum price on carbon and the incoming clean fuel standards.

Abreu and Turcotte argue this would represent a major weakening of climate action in Canada, even if the Conservatives claimed — against estimates from policy experts — that their policies would be better.

“Australia is a country where strong (anti-)carbon pricing rhetoric won the day,” Turcotte said. “It gives us a really salient opportunity to have that discussion around honest conversations. What is the discourse that we expect form our leaders on climate? We can’t put our head in the sand, we can’t exploit climate as wedge issues … for political gain.”

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For Abreu, the wildfires also illustrate the need for fossil fuel-exporting countries like Canada to plan a transition to a cleaner economy, as countries around the world — including much of Europe and Canada — push to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.

“I can’t imagine a more stark lesson in the dangers of caving to that political argument and not heeding the warning signs that it’s time for us to address climate change and diversify our economy,” Abreu said.

“We should be first movers when it comes to this type of diversification.”

With files from Star wire services

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