The Fraser Valley's top environment stories of 2023

On Tuesday, we looked at the biggest political stories of the year.

Today, we’re going to consider the year’s biggest stories about our physical world and how humans interact with it.

1. The McKee Plan

This year, the City of Abbotsford finally adopted its McKee Peak Neighbourhood Plan, a guide to how thousands of homes may be built on the lower slopes of Sumas Mountain over the coming years. The plan drew significant criticism from recreation groups worried about its impacts on the area’s beloved trails. It also flew in the face of the city’s general plan to get more homes built in central areas, not sprawling outlying areas.

As The Current wrote, the plan is an attempted compromise that attempts to reconcile the illegal nature of trails and satisfy decades-old promises that the city believes might prompt lawsuits if not followed through upon

But on top of the opposition from recreation users and environmentalists, the plan was opposed by Semá:th First Nation, whose traditional territory is centred on the mountain and the prairie below. Abbotsford said it consulted enough with Semá:th. Semá:th disagreed.

Now, the focus will turn to what comes next: where home construction will begin, whether trails will actually be preserved (already there are concerns about some that have been blocked off to the public), and whether the owners of land slated for a “village” centre make a deal with the city. One new thing to watch for is whether the new provincial housing legislation will change how development occurs on the mountain. With the City of Abbotsford having just opened the mountain up to new single-family home development, new provincial rules may supersize that building potential—with possible implications for road, sewer, and other plans.

Catch up

Our in-depth look on the compromises at the route of the McKee plan

Our story on the opposition from Sema:th First Nation

2. The Kookipi Creek fire

On a warm August afternoon, many Fraser Valley residents looked toward Harrison Lake and saw a massive thundercloud on the horizon. Except it wasn’t a thundercloud—it was a gigantic pyrocumulonimbus cloud created as a month-old fire rushed out of a narrow alpine valley and into the Fraser Canyon.

That fire sent local residents fleeing, triggered nightmares in Lytton to the north, destroyed about two dozen structures (mostly, but not all, outbuildings), closed Highway 1, and demonstrated again the increasing fire threat in southern British Columbia.

The fire also again tested the ability of the Fraser Valley Regional District to respond to a massive and fast-moving fire threatening small rural communities. Less than a year before, it had seen the Flood Falls Trail fire outside of Hope threaten the Laidlaw area and one of Canada’s key transportation corridors for several weeks. The Kookipi fire—alongside others that lingered or briefly flared up in other parts of the region—was another indication of how droughts and increasing temperatures are making fires more common and increasing the need to be prepared.

Catch up

The video that shows the fire rapidly destroying the Nahatlach Watch Tower

And video of a four-wheeler group’s return to the tower site

3. The 2021 recovery continues

If 2022 was the year that the Fraser Valley reckoned with the immediate consequences of the landslides and floods triggered by the previous November’s atmospheric river, 2023 was the year it became clear that the region won’t be able to significantly reduce its vulnerability to future disasters anytime soon.

By this fall, significant work had been done on the most obvious and quickest-to-fix gaps in the region’s flood and landslide protections. But that work has helped to demonstrate that the challenges can’t simply be mitigated by dredging rivers, building larger dikes, or reinforcing retaining walls.

The Nooksack River will remain a threat as long as the American decisionmakers feel that letting the river flood into Canada is better than letting it harm their own constituents. Reinforcing flood protections along the Fraser River will cost billions of dollars and require a strategy to prioritize what work will be done first. Finally, provincial and local authorities will have to figure out how to reform a system that is under increasing stress from repeat events and which currently relies on overworked and often under-trained volunteers and municipal staff.

Catch up

This fall we looked at the recovery progress on Sumas Praire, in the region’s small communities, and on the region’s key transportation corridors.

We broke our Sumas Prairie story into three parts:

Part one | Part two | Part three

Our story on the region’s small communities:

Our story on the ongoing vulnerabilities of the highways that connect the valley’s communities—and the BC coast with the rest of Canada:

4. Drought

The prolonged drought that gripped southwestern British Columbia threatened the livelihoods of farmers while aggravating damage to trees and natural systems that require more water. It also was a reminder that our climate is changing and that the Fraser Valley’s summers are becoming not only hotter, but markedly drier and longer.

Our communities, our homes, and our farms aren’t really built for the climate in which they exist now. The question is what comes next and how do we adapt to a reality that is already here.

Catch up

Our story on how the region’s summers are much drier than just a couple decades ago:

Our story on how many Fraser Valley cities promote “ugly” lawns while their own rules prohibit butterfly gardens that are less water-intensive and often better for the environment: