Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - When the rain finally started about 5 PM on Sunday, October 23, Cortes Island had received almost no precipitation for 97 days. The “Rain’ chart at Cortes Island School shows that 3.5 mm of rain fell overnight and I can hear the drizzle continuing to fall on my roof early Monday morning. Hopefully light rains will continue to soften up the soil before we receive a downpour.

“The 2022 drought is worse than people think, it's worse than scientists predicted, and its impacts up and down the coast are a lot worse than I had even feared when I started researching it,” said Forrest Berman-Hatch, author of FOCI Report: Climate Change and Drought.

Berman-Hatch prepared this study for the Friends of Cortes Island, but is also a member of the Simon Fraser University group RESET (Research for Equitable Ecosocial Transformation), which studies global health in relation to climate change.

The opening paragraph of his report states, “Cortes Island has been in a level 5 drought which weather forecasters predict will end soon. According to BC’s Drought and Water Scarcity Response Plan, level 5 droughts bring ‘adverse impacts to socio-economic or ecosystem values’ which are ‘almost certain’ (Ministry of LWRS, 2022, p.16). Impacts can include the drying of shallow wells and wetlands, increased risk of wildfires and drying of streams during salmon spawning season. The plan recommends local water restrictions be put in place at stage 5 and warns regulatory action and even emergency response to be possible.”

Berman-Hatch said scientists are fairly certain that climate change causes droughts. The IPCC report states that there will be more droughts as a result of climate change, and they will be more severe.

“We had a student at SFU do climate modelling for Cortes, and what really concerned me was that the 2022 drought is longer, hotter and drier than was predicted for the year 2025 under a climate model that uses the precautionary approach,” said Berman-Hatch.

“Scientists such as Simon Donner at the University of British Columbia talk about how climate modelling is really good for averages, were fairly accurate, but they fail to capture the extreme weather events. For instance, the heat dome last year was also quite a bit worse than scientists had predicted the effects of climate change would be within this decade. So when we talk about climate adaptation planning, we need to remember that the models are good guidelines, but the extreme weather events may actually be worse.”

Q/Is this the worst drought on record?

“It's certainly the longest, worst is hard to say. This is a level 5 drought, which is the highest level in BC's scale. It's only the second time since we have been recording drought data that we hit level 5 and the first time was last year. That is a pretty concerning trend. Last year during the heat dome, we experienced higher temperatures than we experienced in this drought. So it may have done more damage than this drought. Certainly, the human impacts were pretty high — over 600 people died,” he replied.

“This drought is longer and drier, but less hot. It's the longest since we have begun recording weather data. In some places we have over a hundred years of weather data on the West Coast and this is the longest drought in that time period. It's certainly the longest since we've had weather data for Cortes and Quadra Island.”