Canada’s Changing Climate Report 2026 highlights that the country has warmed nearly twice as fast as the global average, and provides guidance on avoiding climate data overload and decision-paralysis
The Government of Canada has published its second report into the country’s changing climate to inform decisions around planning, resilience-building and emergency preparedness.
Canada’s Changing Climate Report 2026 was released on 3 September and is part of the country’s National Adaptation Strategy. An update on the first such report published in 2019, it provides a synthesis and assessment of the latest knowledge and data on how Canada’s climate is changing.
Key findings include Canada having warmed by 2.0°C – and by 2.6°C in Canada’s North – over the past 75 years due to greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activities. This means that since 1970, Canada has warmed nearly twice as fast as the global average, while the Canadian Arctic has warmed three times as fast as the global average.
“Warming temperatures have driven wide-ranging, interconnected, and sustained changes across Canada,” the report states, including more extreme heat, less extreme cold, longer growing seasons, longer fire seasons, thinning glaciers, thawing permafrost, warming oceans, and rising sea levels.
In the near term, the report predicts that the annual average temperature in Canada will rise by about 1°C from 2021 to 2040.
“Planning for and building resilience to a changing climate depends in part on having a clear-eyed view of what future climates might lie ahead,” the report says. “This report can help Canadians and people living in Canada understand what those future climates might look like as this century unfolds.”
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‘Scientific underpinning’ for national adaptation policy
While the report notes that global and regional assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are widely recognised as authoritative, it says there is a need for national-level assessments to provide policy- and decision-makers with more “targeted” information and to provide the “scientific underpinning for national adaptation policy development and action”.
The report is designed to support at least one element of the climate adaptation planning cycle, which comprises engagement and early planning; understanding how the climate will change; identifying climate change impacts; assessing risks, vulnerabilities, and opportunities; identifying adaptation actions; and implementing, monitoring and reviewing actions.
It draws on science published in peer-reviewed scientific literature, with climate experts across Canada assisting in reviewing and assessing it and, unlike the first edition of the report, the 2026 version also includes sections that document indigenous science, observations, and perspectives on the implications of climate change.
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As well as chapters on the report’s findings, there is also a detailed chapter on how to use the information contained in the report. This includes guidance on avoiding data overload and decision-paralysis, common considerations for using climate projections, and enhancing climate data usability through the development of tailored data visualisations.
“Our objective in this chapter is to help readers move from knowledge to application, to help them use this report in their own context, to describe where to find more specific information, and to know what to expect when using tailored climate information,” it says.
In the press release accompanying the report, Environment and Climate Change Canada noted that the federal government “is committed to fighting climate change and reaching net-zero by 2050 by taking a pragmatic and durable approach”, including by building major clean energy projects across the country, driving mass electrification, and making “significant investment” in the low-carbon economy.
It highlighted that “to protect Canadians from the impacts of climate change and severe weather”, the federal government has committed more than CAN$2.1bn (USD$1.5bn) to implement the National Adaptation Strategy and support a wide range of adaptation-related activities; that it committed last month to supporting 141 climate resilience projects across 128 communities in Canada; and that the government’s Spring Economic Update in April set a goal to deliver CAN$13bn (US$9.4bn) in international climate finance over the next five years.
“The Government of Canada is moving with urgency to fight climate change while working together to build the energy security, industrial capacity, and strategic autonomy that will define this century for Canada,” Environment and Climate Change Canada said.
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