In This Together: Do Your BC Tenant Rights Protect You From Climate Change?

It’s too hot outside.  

The world is marching towards three degrees of warming. Heat waves are growing in fervour. The ground is covered in concrete and asphalt that stretch as far as the eye can see and the skyline is dotted with closely packed buildings, stoking the urban heat island effect Urban heat island effectUrban areas experience higher temperatures due to the replacement of natural land cover with surfaces like asphalt and concrete, leading to increased heat absorption and reduced cooling through natural processes. Urban heat islands exacerbate heat-related challenges in cities.Learn more . 

And it’s too hot in our homes.  

Heat pumps and air conditioners are expensive (we already spend half our incomes on rent and utilities), tenants (nearly 30% of the population in British Columbia) often have no control over their heating systems, and heat-vulnerable populations are suffering. 

“Heat reveals and exacerbates existing injustices,” says Dr. Mohammed Rafi Arefin, recalling the 2021 heat dome in BC that killed 619 people. Most deaths happened indoors, he says, and disproportionately affected seniors, disabled people, and lower-income earners. 

Working with the Tenant Resource Advisory Centre, Dr. Arefin (an assistant professor in the Department of Geography and a founding member of the Centre for Climate Justice at the University of the British Columbia) and Rachel Stern (a fellow member and PhD student in the same department) have been conducting research on the “intersecting crises of housing and climate.” 

What they’ve found is this: “In a changing climate, BC's tenants need more protection for their security of tenure.” 

“Home is usually thought of as a refuge, as a place of safety,” Dr. Arefin says, but for some, it’s “a site of extreme insecurity and precarity.” 

Many people don't have a choice about where to live.  

Walking Under City Trees

with Kit Wong-Stevens

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Exit Walking Under City Trees

As the effects of climate change rise in BC, what makes a neighbourhood more heat-vulnerable?

Researcher Kit Wong-Stevens works with heat-vulnerable people to understand how they cope with hot weather.

Exit Walking Under City Trees

Kit Wong-Stevens completed her undergraduate degree in Anthropology and Forestry at the University of Toronto. She is currently a MSc student under Dr. Lorien Nesbitt in the Urban Natures Lab at the University of British Columbia. She uses mixed methods to study the urban forest preferences of diverse, heat-vulnerable residents to cope with heat and is also interested in environmental justice, public health, community engagement, and urban planning.

For seniors, disabled people (both of whom are usually on a fixed income), or lower-income households, who often live in older buildings with lower rent, leaving their homes would mean having to navigate costly rental markets — especially in Vancouver, Canada's most expensive rental city. 

Tenants also lack power over their living conditions, Rachel and Dr. Arefin say. Tenants can rarely apply for retrofit programs or reap the full benefit of climate adaptation strategies. In BC, an air conditioner program was launched to provide free, portable ACs to lower-income, heat-vulnerable populations, but tenants could not participate in the program without their landlord’s consent. 

Some landlords refused to sign the forms that would grant their tenants permission to apply for the ACs, Rachel says. Health authorities stepped in, telling landlords and strata councils that ACs were a necessity. But this, Rachel explains, wasn’t a mandatory request — “It was basically a plea to the people in control of housing to allow people to stay cool in their homes.” 

Without policy changes, tenants remain in untenable situations. And in BC, the eviction capital of Canada, many tenants fear upsetting their landlords and losing their homes. Of the evictions that occur in BC, 85% are “no-fault” evictions, Dr. Arefin says. Moreover, landlords can increase rent (in addition to annual rent increases) to fund repairs or green retrofits. 

Tenants need greater protections to withstand the impacts of climate change, Dr. Arefin and Rachel say. Protections against evictions and rent increases, as well as more manageable increases (“Next year, it’ll be 3.5%, which for many will be unaffordable,”  Dr. Arefin points out). 

It’s also imperative to implement and enforce “a right to cooling in people's homes just as we have the right to heat in the winter,” Rachel adds. 

In short, good climate policy is good housing policy, they both say. As Dr. Arefin puts it, “Housing justice is a central tenet of climate justice.” 

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