STOCKHOLM | Forest fires, floods, storms, landslides… Our soldiers are increasingly called upon to respond to climate catastrophes. This is also the case in Sweden, except that instead of the army, the National Guard, made up of civilians, is on the front line.
It was also the fierce fires that devastated the country in 2018 that prompted Loukas Christodoulou, a teacher in Stockholm, to apply for the National Guard.
“Across the media, we saw members of the National Guard putting out the fires, just as they had recently helped when we received a wave of Syrian refugees,” he explains. So I understood that they were the backbone of our society and I wanted to be a part of that.
Anne Caroline Desplanques / JdeM
Loukas Christodoulou, teacher and member of the National Guard in Stockholm, Sweden.
Cure for environmental anxiety
Her involvement has also enabled her to manage her environmental anxiety by providing her with the tools to take action to help her community become more resilient. Now he no longer feels like a helpless victim.
According to a Léger survey conducted in the fall of 2022, environmental anxiety is a growing phenomenon in many countries, including Quebec, where this anxiety is leading to a quarter of Gen Z young people not wanting children.
“If you think we’re facing a climate catastrophe, you can’t pretend nothing happened, you can’t just take to the streets and protest, you have to do something concrete to help,” Mr Christodolou said.
A role model for Canada?
Like Sweden, Germany is training civilians to deal with natural disasters. It employs 80,000 volunteers at 800 different locations across the country.
“This is what the country did to relieve the military,” Josh Bowen of the Disaster and Emergency Management Program at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology told the House of Commons a year ago.
Corporal Braden Trudeau, Canadian Forces
But in Canada, “we’ve become so used to calling in troops that we’re not developing the civilian capacity to intervene,” he lamented.
“To tackle the climate crisis, we need to increase the resilience of our communities. This is about physical infrastructure, but also about social infrastructure. And we all are,” says Mr. Christodoulou.
*This report was produced thanks to a grant from the Fonds Québécois en journalistisme international.