On September 2, 2026, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) did something it had spent a decade avoiding.
In a report called Limiting Overshoot, it admitted that the world will exceed 1.5°C of warming above pre-industrial levels within the next few years. UNEP calls exceeding the threshold “unavoidable.” Even in the best-case scenario, where every country delivers on its climate plans, temperatures will still peak around 1.8°C. Without changes to current policy, the world is currently on track for roughly 2.6°C.
This is not a technicality.
For over a decade, 1.5°C functioned as the threshold that nearly 200 nations committed to keeping global warming below through the Paris Agreement. Now they are conceding that threshold will not hold. In fact, current trajectories put the 1.5°C exceedance before 2030. We are no longer talking about preventing overshoot; instead, we must manage its consequences.
Why the 1.5°C Threshold Is Important
A tenth or two-tenths of a degree doesn’t sound dramatic. It is.
UNEP specifically flags the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, the Amazon rainforest, and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation as systems that could undergo larger and potentially irreversible shifts as warming climbs. These are tipping points, not smooth curves. When we push past a threshold, the system doesn’t ease into a new state; it lurches.
Ocean warming is central to this picture.
The oceans absorb most of the heat the climate system accumulates. That heat does not dissipate once emissions decline. The UNEP describes the climate system as behaving like a boiler: cutting emissions turns down the flame, but the heat already stored in the oceans takes decades to work through.
As a result, sea-level rise will continue even after peak atmospheric warming, and elevated ocean temperatures will increase the risk of coral reef collapse, even under lower-emissions pathways. For coastal communities, this is not abstract. Forage fish, juvenile salmon, and near-shore habitats and food webs depend on temperature ranges that are shifting faster than many species can adapt to.
This is not just a global signal.
Environment and Climate Change Canada’s Changing Climate Report 2026, released one day after the UNEP assessment, finds that Canada has warmed nearly twice as fast as the global average since 1970.
More than 55 percent of glacier ice in western Canada is projected to disappear by 2100 even if warming is held to 2°C, and the report calls the resulting decline in glacier-fed summer streamflow an irreversible loss of a critical freshwater source for several western Canada watersheds.
It also documents that glacier-related hazards, including floods and landslides, are expected to increase specifically in western Canada. The Homathko Icefield, source of the Homathko River’s headwaters, sits in exactly this kind of terrain.
The oceans around Canada have warmed and acidified, and marine heatwaves in the Pacific have roughly doubled in frequency since the 1980s. The 2013–2016 heatwave known as the Blob shifted the geographic range of more than 200 marine species. Fraser River sockeye were hit hard: one post-Blob season, fisheries managers had forecast 4.4 million returning sockeye and got 1.5 million.
These are not distant findings.
The Sunshine Coast Regional District’s (SCRD) Coastal Flood Mapping Project, completed in October 2025 with the Town of Gibsons, District of Sechelt, and Islands Trust, mapped flood risk along more than 500 kilometres of coastline against sea-level-rise scenarios of 0.5, 1, and 2 metres.
The project’s finding is blunt: today’s king tides are expected to become the ordinary daily tide by 2050, ~23 years from now.
For biodiversity, overshooting 1.5°C of warming compounds existing stressors on many species.
- Stream temperatures are getting too high for salmon to tolerate.
- Snowpack that sustains summer baseflow is increasingly falling as rain.
- Drought stress is reducing resilience in forests already fragmented by logging.
Sensitive ecosystems absorb the worst of it. Old-growth stands, wetlands, and riparian corridors buffer temperature and moisture swings that logged or developed land can’t, which is exactly why species with nowhere else to go depend on them.
Forest cover does the same job for people that it does for wildlife: it cools.
Tree canopy lowers local temperatures through shade and evapotranspiration. Losing it increases heat risk for communities as extreme heat events become more common.
Most of the coast depends on surface water for its drinking water. Chapman Lake, backed by Edwards Lake, serves about 85% of homes and businesses on the lower Coast. The SCRD’s 2023 demand analysis found the projected 2025 shortfall more than doubled, from 1.64 million to 3.51 million cubic metres, driven by climate change and provincial flow rules for salmon.
Aquifers behave differently. The coast increasingly leans on Aquifer 560 (Elphinstone/Gibsons) and Aquifer 552 (Langdale). Groundwater ages in wells range from 8 to 86 years. Aquifers provide a buffer during severe droughts, but this buffer is not permanent; deep groundwater changes take decades to reflect current rainfall conditions.
The water crisis has escalated rapidly over the past decade, demonstrating the dynamic described above. Six weeks of coast-wide restrictions in 2015. Stage 4 again in 2017. Joint states of emergency from SCRD, Sechelt, and shíshálh Nation in 2022. In 2023, the lake was at 15% capacity, drought level 5, and demand ran 1.5 times higher than the year before.
Overshoot doesn’t make every year drier. It makes dry years longer and the gaps between them shorter.
The effects of warming past 1.5°C aren’t necessarily felt only once the global average reaches a certain temperature. In fact, they often manifest locally first, in exactly the kind of small coastal watersheds we work to protect.
Climate change and biodiversity loss aren’t just parallel problems. They feed each other. Stressed, drought-weakened forests store less carbon and burn more easily or succumb to disease and other stressors, releasing carbon instead of sequestering and storing it.
But none of this is inevitable in its severity.
How much worse it gets from here still depends on the choices we make, including who we elect as our decision-makers.
Now what?
Passive concern is no longer defensible.
Governments at all levels face critical choices: allow old-growth logging, weaken environmental reviews, and approve more fossil fuel infrastructure, or prioritize public land and water as vital resources rather than mere extraction sites.
Each year, those choices tilt toward deforestation, deregulation, fossil fuel expansion, and unchecked resource extraction, narrowing what remains to protect. In British Columbia, voters will soon face a municipal election, followed by a snap provincial election (expected to be announced within days). The governments formed after these fall elections will play a crucial role in deciding the future of biodiversity and addressing the climate impacts that will affect our communities, our province and ultimately, our world.
Sustained public pressure on decision-makers at every level is not symbolic. It is the mechanism.
People want action. In the recent shíshálh-B.C. Joint Land Use Plan engagement, watershed protection tied to drinking water and salmon habitat drew the strongest support of any measure tested: 89% of respondents backed it.
This isn’t a fringe position. It’s what the public has told decision makers we want.
This is about our fish and forests, our children and our grandchildren. It is about the lifetime we have left and the lifetimes they are inheriting. Every dam approved, every old-growth stand logged, and every regulation weakened lands, eventually, on a specific creek and community on this coast.
We don’t have the luxury of spending another decade contesting the science. UNEP has answered that question.
What remains is the work already underway: protecting the watersheds, forests, and aquatic systems that will determine how severely overshoot affects this region, and ensuring local, provincial and federal decision-makers stop planning around a target we have already exceeded.
For us that means:
- Pressuring every level of government we have access to — to stop approving the deforestation, deregulation, and fossil fuel proliferation that got us here.
- Convening local Watershed Boards to protect our drinking water source areas before the next dry summer, not after
- Completing salmon habitat restoration work like we’re doing on Ch’ḵw’elhp–Gibson Creek, and carrying that collaborative model to new projects
- Backing conservation through First Nations Land Use Planning
- Fighting Woodfibre LNG, the proposed Homathko dam, and changes to BC’s Clean Energy Act
- Pushing for real, core changes in forestry practices that protect ecological values, natural infrastructure, and communities together, not one at the expense of the others
- Saying no to development that pushes us further past a climate target that no longer applies
- Rejecting the narrative that more resource extraction, development, and consumption dressed up as “abundance” can solve a problem that same pursuit created.
Above all, it means saying yes instead to respecting and protecting nature, biological diversity, resilience, and ecological limits because that is where the hope of a livable future actually lies.
Join the SCCA.
Help us carry this important work forward.
Sources
United Nations Environment Programme. (2026). Limiting overshoot: Navigating exceedance of 1.5°C and pathways towards return. https://www.unep.org/resources/limiting-overshoot-navigating-exceedance
United Nations Environment Programme. (2026, September 2). World set to cross 1.5°C global warming, but can still limit, adapt to and return from higher temperatures [Press release]. https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/unep-world-set-cross-15degc-global-warming-can-still-limit-adapt-and
United Nations Environment Programme. (2026). Limiting overshoot: Navigating exceedance of 1.5°C and pathways towards return [Full report]. https://wedocs.unep.org/items/156d074c-ab1d-4833-acf8-6343589ede9b
United Nations Environment Programme. (2026). Overshoot explained: 5 things to understand about a world beyond 1.5°C. https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/overshoot-explained-5-things-understand-about-world-beyond-15degc
CBC News. (2017, August 25). Fraser River sockeye returns hit new lows despite Cohen Commission changes. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/sockeye-returns-low-1.4312596
Daily Hive. (2026). BC Hydro to buy natural gas power plant to help prevent province-wide electricity shortfalls. https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/bc-hydro-island-generation-natural-gas-plant-acquisition
Environment and Climate Change Canada. (2026). Canada’s changing climate report 2026: Headline statements. Government of Canada. https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services/science-technology/changing-climate-report-2026/headline-statements.html
Mudryk, L., Gruber, S., Beltaos, S., Brown, L., Burgess, D., Crawford, A., Culpepper, J., Howell, S., Kokelj, S., Roy, A., Sharma, S., Smith, S., & Thomson, L. (2026). Changes in the cryosphere. In Canada’s changing climate report 2026. Government of Canada. https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services/science-technology/changing-climate-report-2026/cccr-chapter-6-en.html
Greenan, B. J. W., Hamme, R. C., Casas-Prat, M., Hannah, C. G., James, T. S., & Zhai, L. (2026). Changes in the oceans. In Canada’s changing climate report 2026. Government of Canada. https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services/science-technology/changing-climate-report-2026/cccr-chapter-7-en.html
Sunshine Coast Regional District, Town of Gibsons, District of Sechelt, & Islands Trust. (2025). Coastal Flood Mapping Project. Sunshine Coast Regional District. https://www.scrd.ca/flood-maps/
Narcity Media. (2026). B.C. eyes two new hydropower dams, including Site E near Alberta border, Dix says. https://www.narcity.com/b-c-considers-another-mega-power-dam
shíshálh Nation & Government of British Columbia. (2026, July). shíshálh-B.C. Joint Land Use Plan: Phase 2 engagement summary. https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:VA6C2:541e4156-ccde-48e0-8d10-7d834acb9d53
Global News. (2022, November 8). Sunshine Coast district seeks emergency extension as winter water supply ‘uncertain’. https://globalnews.ca/news/9261458/water-supply-sunshine-coast-uncertain/
Coast Reporter. (2023). ‘Daunting and dire’: SCRD’s water shortfall poised to double. https://www.coastreporter.net/local-news/daunting-and-dire-scrds-water-shortfall-poised-to-double-7267024
Coast Reporter. (2023). Daily Chapman Lake level reports are now online: SCRD water update. https://www.coastreporter.net/local-news/daily-chapman-lake-level-reports-are-now-online-scrd-water-update-7292548
Sunshine Coast Conservation Association. Chapman Water Expansion. https://thescca.ca/current-campaigns/chapman-creek-watershed/chapman-water-expansion/
Coast Reporter. (2023). SCRD keeps Site B water reservoir considerations in play. https://www.coastreporter.net/local-news/scrd-keeps-site-b-water-reservoir-considerations-in-play-7267836
Doyle, J. (2013). Integrating environmental tracers and groundwater flow modeling to investigate groundwater sustainability, Gibsons, BC (Master’s thesis, UBC). https://open.library.ubc.ca/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/24/items/1.0074249
Sunshine Coast Conservation Association. Stop the Auction of Block TA0159: Protect Community Drinking Water. https://thescca.ca/stop-the-auction-of-block-ta0159-protect-community-drinking-water/
Coast Reporter. (2022, November). Gibsons returns to Stage 1 water restrictions. https://coastreporter.net/local-news/gibsons-returns-to-stage-1-water-restrictions-6044317