Cities need consistent funding to adapt to climate disasters

Summerland Fire 2026 screenshot

Programs 'yanked' away

Kristy Dyer - Aug 11, 2026

There’s a difference between a lottery ticket win and a pension.

A lottery ticket win is a one-off. It’s out of the blue (well, you did buy a ticket). You could use that money to invest in the future—a downpayment on a car or pay off a credit card—but it is a one time deal.

On the other hand a pension is something you can count on. You can make long term plans, look down the road 10 or 20 years, maybe even further.

Frankly, we’ve “borked” the climate.

Every place on earth is facing rising temperatures, water scarcity, fires and flooding. You don’t have to be a liberal to believe there’s an increase in extreme weather.

Property insurance payouts due to extreme weather and fire have steadily increased. Insurance companies, hard-nosed and profit-oriented, increased home insurance premiums 45 percent between December 2019 and December 2025, mostly due to extreme weather events.

The climate change burden is local—your city is replacing infrastructure, fighting wildfires, working to prevent heat deaths.

This is not your typical “natural disaster,” where a localized event hits a small region and federal funding can swoop in and fix it.

This is a series of hits of increasing frequency, across the country and around the world.

A short-sighted take is to be surprised by each event and a responsible long view realizes actions have to be taken to soften the impact or reduce the severity of those crises.

Unfortunately cities in B.C. lost their only source of steady funding when the provincial NDP government canceled the Local Government Climate Action Program in April 2026.

It’s hard to overstate the loss. From 2022 to 2026, Penticton received $900,000 from LGCAP to invest in the future. Summerland received $600,000 and Kelowna $2 million. The amounts are substantial but what is critical is the stability, knowing funding will be there, allowing planning for the long-term.

More than 50 cities in B.C. used the LGCAP to fund, in whole or part, sustainability positions. Funding a person has a multiplier effect. Often you have a young smart person thinking 40-plus hours a week, writing additional grants applications, starting incremental programs, planning for the future. It’s unfortunate these people will lose their jobs. What is tragic is B.C. is going to lose their services. Sustainability professionals are in demand. They will leave, probably even leave the province.

This is the second time the provincial government has yanked the rug out from under local governments. In May 2021, it abruptly cancelled the Climate Action Revenue Incentive Program and there was a two-year gap between the end of that program and the start of the LGCAP, during which many climate programs suffered.

This years sudden “yank” was worse.

When CARIP was suddenly suspended, B.C. promised, and eventually delivered, a replacement program. The current cancellation has left us hanging without plans for any replacement program.

The province canceled the consumer carbon tax (industrial emitters are still paying via the Output-Based Pricing System) because people felt they were paying too much for gasoline at the pumps.

Prior to 2024, drivers paid 17 cents per litre to fund sustainability. Today they pay 90 cents per litre as a direct result of U.S. President Donald Trump’s war with Iran. The bump in gas prices will depress carbon emissions, much like the carbon tax, but there are two sets of losers.

First, lawmakers anticipated the carbon tax was regressive—it was a larger portion of poor people’s budgets. Therefore, the carbon tax was refunded four times a year in B.C. to low- and moderate-income families. Those checks no longer go out.

Second, the carbon tax funded the CARIP and then the LGCAP. Canceling the tax meant that there’s no dedicated stream of funding. The LGCAP was paid out of general revenues and the government has now cut the LGCAP.

Global warming is going to move “100 year” floods to every 10 years or so. Federal emergency money is going to be hard to come by.

The impacts and ultimate responsibility are local—passed down to your city and maybe even your neighbourhood. At the same time, the investments needed are consistent and long-term, such as improving tree canopy to decrease urban heat islands, increasing the percentage of low income housing with adequate (and affordable and efficient) air conditioning and hardening infrastructure for more extreme conditions.

Going forward there may still be federal and provincial money on one-time, competitive grant bases. But that is lottery money, not pension money, and as such, unsuitable for the challenges ahead.

About the Author

Kristy Dyer has worked in the sustainability field for more than 10 years, including work with solar energy in New Mexico and cleantech in Silicon Valley. After she moved to the Okanagan, she ran a small business, Teaspoon Energy, doing energy audits of large houses. Most recently, she worked for a B.C. business doing carbon footprints for tourism organizations.

She has written about sustainability since 2012. You can find her columns archived at TeaspoonEnergy.blogspot.com.

Dyer has a background in physics and astronomy, and has occasionally been caught trying to impersonate an engineer.

A long-time member of First Things First, Penticton’s local climate change group, whose goals are to educate and lobby for solutions to the climate crisis, Dyer is honoured to live, work and play in the unceded, ancestral and traditional territory of the Syilx Okanagan Nation.

You can contact her at Kristy.Dyer+C@gmail.com