A Made-in-Canada approach to climate change

By Gordon McBean

National polls show a high level of public interest in climate change. In political circles, the debate goes back and forth on "Kyoto – yes or no?", banning incandescent light bulbs and injecting ethanol into our gasoline supplies. Reducing emissions of greenhouse gases through a comprehensive policy strategy is long overdue. But there is another aspect that never seems to get on the political radar screen — that is adapting to climate change — making informed choices and modifying the way we do things to reduce the impacts and gain the benefits. It should not be one or the other but an integrated approach.

The more we reduce emissions, the less to adapt to Greenhouse gas emission reductions, if done smartly, have many co-benefits such as energy efficiency, reduced air pollution. And, many natural ecosystems and communities of people, particularly the poor and poorer countries, cannot adapt.

Since it has been extreme weather events that have focussed public attention on climate changing, it is appropriate to also discuss natural hazard mitigation. In the natural hazards field, the four pillars of action are response, recovery, preparedness and mitigation. While climate change mitigation means reducing emissions, natural hazard mitigation is almost the same as climate change adaptation.

Although all objective studies demonstrate that costs of investments in prevention (mitigation and preparedness) are less than the costs of responding and then recovering after the tragic event has happened, very few governments are willing to spend much on prevention. They choose instead to hope the events will not happen to them. Katrina and New Orleans is only the most recent example of this. Here, the federal government has been consulting a national natural hazard mitigation (prevention) strategy for at least a decade and it has never gotten beyond that stage, due to the politics of election cycles and who pays when a disaster hits –— as usual invoking the complexities of Canadian municipal-provincial-federal politics.

Does this explain the lack of political interest in climate change adaptation compared to the focus on emission reductions? Due to the long-time scale of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (about a century), emission reductions now are for the benefit of our grandchildren — something I strongly advocate. But we note that proposed emission reductions are always set in the future, such as 2020 — well after the next election.

The assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are important in this policy debate. The recent rate of warming of 0.13°C per decade will increase to 0.2°C per decade for the next few decades, regardless of emission reduction strategies. By the end of the century, the warming rate could be as much as 0.8°C per decade or as low as 0.15°C per decade, depending on global emission reduction actions. For the rest of this century, the warming climate will bring rising sea levels and increasing frequency of weather-climate-related hazards. We need to change the way we do things.

ipcc highlights

In its assessment of impacts, adaptation and vulnerability, the IPCC highlighted:

* Moderate climate change in the next few decades is projected to increase aggregate yields of rain-fed agriculture by 5-20%. Major challenges are projected for crops that are near the warm end of their suitable range or depend on highly utilized water resources.

* Where extreme weather events become more intense and/or more frequent, their economic and social costs will increase. These increases will be substantial in the areas most directly affected.

* Cities that currently experience heat waves are expected to be further challenged. Elderly populations are most at risk.

* Coastal communities and habitats will be increasingly stressed by climate change impacts interacting with development and pollution. Current adaptation is uneven and readiness for increased exposure is low.

* Arctic human communities are already adapting to climate change, but both external and internal stressors challenge their adaptive capacities. Substantial investments are needed to adapt or re-locate physical structures and communities."

We need an integrated natural hazard prevention-preparedness and climate change adaptation strategy. Public surveys have shown that about 90% of Canadians check the weather forecast every day because today's and tomorrow's weather matters to them. An adaptation information system should provide relevant information on a season-to-decades basis. Government's role is to protect citizens and provide public good information of common benefit to all And where appropriate, it should provide regulations and fiscal frameworks so that Canadians can make informed decisions on investments, commercial and personal activities on a short- and long-term basis.

There is also a private sector role in providing specialized information services and in interpreting and using the information. Municipal governments would use the information for land-use planning; provincial governments would use it for the management of natural resources such as water and forests; and the private sector would factor it into all relevant investment decisions. Our economy would be more efficient and globally competitive and the costs of weather-related (and other) disasters would decrease.

To implement such an information and regulatory system requires focused research on how the climate will change regionally and locally, and how that change results in the changing risks of floods, frost-free days or whatever. This would generate a better understanding of the socio-economic relations between weather-climate and economic activities, with integrated research across the spectrum of natural-social/economic-health-engineering sciences on climate, weather, air quality and marine systems.

Emission reductions require a global effort and we need to be part of it and contribute to the research. For climate change adaptation and hazard prevention research, the issues are local. Only Canadian research, done in Canada for Canadians, will meet the needs — a real "Made-in-Canada" approach. This research needs to be fed into our national strategy. We can then hope that the effectiveness of the management of horizontal issues in governments is up to the task.

Gordon McBean is a professor at the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, University of Western Ontario and Chair, Board of Trustees, Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences.