Canada has warmed by 2.0 C over the past 75 years, and roughly another 1 C of warming between 2021 and 2040 is now unavoidable, according to Canada’s Changing Climate Report 2026, released Sept. 3 by Environment and Climate Change Canada.
The report is the first full update to the federal climate science assessment since 2019. It sets out 15 headline statements, each carrying high confidence or better and each cross-referenced to the chapters where the supporting evidence sits. The statement that drew most of the news coverage was the seventh: “The warming and associated changes in climate in Canada are effectively irreversible.”
That phrase is more specific than the headlines suggest, and the distinction it draws is the part worth reading twice. The report says some warming-driven changes, sea ice loss among them, will stabilize if temperature stabilizes. Others will not. “Sea-level change, glacier melt, and permafrost thaw will continue even after surface temperatures stabilize,” the report says. Halting emissions would arrest some of the change but not all of it, and the changes that keep moving are the ones that reshape coastlines, northern infrastructure and western water supplies.
The near-term number is the one with the shortest fuse. The report’s fifth headline statement projects annual average temperature in Canada rising by about 1 C from 2021 to 2040, describes that warming as unavoidable and says it “will exacerbate climate trends that are already observed.” What follows is not settled. The sixth statement says warming in Canada will intensify as long as global greenhouse gas emissions continue, and that temperature in Canada will stabilize “only if and when global carbon dioxide emissions reach net zero.”
The pace of change in Canada remains faster than the global picture. Since 1970, the report says, Canada has warmed nearly twice as fast as the global average and the Canadian Arctic has warmed three times as fast. Canada’s North has warmed by 2.6 C over the 75-year period, against 2.0 C for the country as a whole. Annual total precipitation has also risen faster in Canada than across the global land area, with the largest percentage increases in northern Canada.
The report ties those temperature figures to a list of changes it calls wide-ranging, interconnected and sustained: more extreme heat, less extreme cold, longer growing seasons, longer fire seasons, earlier peak stream flow, shorter snow and ice cover seasons, thinning glaciers, thawing permafrost, warming oceans and rising sea level. “Human-caused warming is the only explanation for the collective changes observed,” the report says.
Water is where several of those threads meet. The report projects summer droughts in central and southern Canada becoming longer, more intense and more frequent, while heavier extreme rainfall and, under high emissions scenarios, more frequent atmospheric rivers drive more flash flooding. It also warns that summer freshwater availability in southern Canada is threatened as snowmelt, peak stream flow and groundwater recharge all shift earlier into the spring. Declines in the glacier contribution to summer streamflow have already been observed in some western Canada watersheds, and the report projects that glaciers in western Canada will largely disappear by the end of this century.
One finding that has drawn little attention carries a lower confidence rating and a genuinely open answer. The report’s 15th statement says Canada’s land and oceans are currently a carbon sink, with medium confidence, and that the oceans are expected to keep absorbing carbon in future. Whether the land does is uncertain. Gains in carbon uptake from vegetation growth on land “may be offset by carbon emissions from permafrost thaw, wildfires, and other disturbances,” the report says. Canada’s landscape currently helps absorb emissions. The report does not say it will keep doing so.
The assessment stops short of putting a cost on any of it. Environment and Climate Change Canada says assessing the consequences of past and future changes in climate for people and nature was outside the report’s scope, though several case story contributions from Indigenous Peoples are included, and directs readers to other reports in the Canada in a Changing Climate national assessment process for impact analysis.
Primary source: Environment and Climate Change Canada, Canada’s Changing Climate Report 2026: Headline statements. Additional reporting via CTV News.
