This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: More than two dozen University of Victoria researchers contributed to "Canada's Changing Climate Report 2026," the country's most comprehensive assessment of how climate change is affecting communities, ecosystems and coastlines across Canada. The report concludes that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions are driving widespread and interconnected changes across the country, including extreme heat, longer wildfire seasons, shrinking snow and ice, warming oceans and rising sea levels.
Among the UVic contributors are Xuebin Zhang, director of the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium (PCIC), who served on the report's steering committee and science advisory committee. Roberta Hamme, director of UVic's School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, and Francis Zwiers, scientist emeritus and former director of PCIC, are coordinating lead authors on the chapters on oceans and climate changes over time, respectively. "PCIC's scientific capacity and our world-caliber services have added both data and analysis to this report.
Our rigorous physical science has provided detailed assessments of past and future changes in Canadian climate, including temperature, flood, drought and fire," says Zhang, director of the UVic-based PCIC. "This report is the most up-to-date assessment of how Canada's climate is changing and why and how it is expected to change in the future. The regional data and analysis provided by our researchers offer information that is relevant to regional and local decision-makers, helping them understand the risks they face and prepare for future changes." Hamme contributed expertise on changing ocean conditions.
The report finds that Canada's oceans have warmed and become more acidic because of excess carbon dioxide from human activities. Marine heat waves are becoming more frequent and intense, with impacts on marine ecosystems and coastal communities. "The oceans perform a great service to humanity by absorbing about 90% of the excess heat and 25% of the excess carbon dioxide, which slows the rate of climate change," Hamme says.
"But higher temperatures and more acidic waters affect which plants and animals can thrive there, rising sea levels affect our coastal communities and more frequent and intense events are harder to recover from. This report lays out in plain language how Canada is changing and what we can expect for the future depending on the choices we make." Zwiers is a coordinating lead author of the chapter that provides an overall synthesis of observed changes in Canada's climate, detailed assessments of temperature and precipitation changes and the role that human influence on the climate has played in those changes. The analysis found that BC, which is PCIC's primary focus, has changes similar to those in most of Canada.
Like other Arctic regions of the world, Canada's North is warming much more quickly than elsewhere, and it is also receiving more precipitation, consistent with theoretical expectations of change in a warming world. "In this report, we have been able to estimate how much Canada has warmed, not just since broad national coverage of observations became available in 1948 but since the 1850–1900 preindustrial period," says Zwiers. "This was achieved, despite Canada having only a smattering of meteorological observing stations prior to 1900, thanks to PCIC postdoctoral fellow Tong Li, who developed sophisticated ways of combining available observations with results from climate models." The national assessment is an update to the 2019 report that has served as the authoritative resource for information about Canada's changing climate.
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