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Degrees of Change – 3.0 People, Places, and Prosperity: What Degrees of Change Means for Canada

3.0 People, Places, and Prosperity: What Degrees of Change Means for Canada

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3.1 People, Places, and Prosperity

The NRTEE’s Degrees of Change diagram plainly shows that Canadians, the places where we live and that surround us, and how we make our living — people, places, and prosperity — all stand to be affected to varying degrees by a changing climate.

People

Whether rural or urban, southern or northern, a changing climate has implications for people. Climate change can affect physical and mental health, comfort and safety, and the very livelihoods of communities. Canadians have experience coping with weather hazards and risks from environmental phenomena, and climate change falls within this scope. Some evidence points to adaptation initiatives already undertaken by Canadians in reaction to recent environmental changes. For example, to deal with the rise in insect levels, northerners are installing window screens and using bug nets and insect repellent more frequently. Residents in remote coastal communities are better prepared to cope with temporary shortages in food and other goods and services resulting from inclement weather. Hunters in the Arctic are using global positioning systems to help find their way in unpredictable or adverse weather conditions.[206]

But as the impacts of climate change intensify and possibly accelerate, will Canadians be as well equipped to deal with these changing conditions? Is there a gap between how Canadians perceive risks of changing climate and what scientific assessments say about those risks? Are some groups of Canadians better positioned to deal with the changes ahead than others? Beyond information, what incentives might Canadians need to keep the climate in mind when making major investment decisions, such as the location of their house or expensive home retrofits? If climate change increases the price of goods (such as food and electricity) and services (such as insurance) who will be affected and how?

Governments in Canada and research organizations have started looking into these questions. Much of the effort is going into investigating human health impacts of climate change and public awareness and understanding of possible risks.[207] This research is informing changes to existing public health programs and helping to create new ones.

Others take a more hands-on approach. For example, the Canadian Public Health Association, in partnership with the College of Family Physicians of Canada, the Canadian Nurses Association, the Canadian School Boards’ Association, Friends of the Earth, and TransAlta Corporation, has embarked on a two-part project to increase Canadians’ knowledge of the health effects of climate change and air pollution issues. Their aim with this initiative is to change attitudes and encourage responsible individual and group action on climate change.[208]

A close look at the Human health and Communities and infrastructure categories of the Degrees of Change diagram leads to a basic conclusion: we need to also consider the social face of climate change adaptation and begin to take stock of the questions we pose here.

Places

Canadians will experience and perceive the impacts of climate change very differently across the country. For example, communities in coastal zones will likely see more and faster erosion, effects of more severe and frequent storm surges, and sea-level rise. Living on the Prairies could mean greater exposure to heat, drought, and precipitation patterns that are much more variable than in the past. The needs of urban life will lead to different approaches than in rural Canada, and the same is true of large cities compared to small towns. Place and the experiences of people within it will determine the degree of support for climate adaptation responses as a result.

Understanding the possible impacts of climate change on communities and economic sectors and adapting to them is a growing priority of provincial, territorial, and municipal governments. Many have either released or are working on climate strategies, frameworks, or policies that outline sectors vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, broad adaptation needs, and priorities in response. Naturally, the economic and environmental makeup of each jurisdiction is a good guide to the issues they profile. Building community and municipal capacity is a common theme for many jurisdictions. Supporting research and providing information, communicating the risks, helping internalize risks in planning, and funding community projects or case studies are approaches provinces and territories are taking to strengthen local capacity. Several jurisdictions are also partners in the federal Regional Adaptation Collaboratives program, a multi-million dollar “cost-shared initiative to support coordinated action towards advancing regional climate change adaptation decision-making.”[209]

In compiling the Degrees of Change diagram, our lens was national. However, it does highlight impacts specific to coastal Canada, the North, mountain regions, the B.C. interior, the Prairies, the Great Lakes region, and Québec, lending support to the conclusion that climate change presents different but real risks and some opportunities to all regions across Canada.

Prosperity

A changing climate will be a fundamental driver of economic change this century. Understanding how Canada can prosper through climate change — by transitioning to a low-carbon economy and by adapting to the risks and opportunities that a changing climate could bring — will help shape our economic future. The ongoing sustainability of Canada’s resource industries and of some service industries depends, in part, on strategies taken now to address the risks and opportunities of a changing climate. Adaptation thinking is also critical to ensure the soundness of many public investment and policy choices, whether for upgrading community infrastructure, augmenting networks of protected habitat, reducing human pressures on our ecosystems, realigning trade promotion strategies in light of a shifting comparative trade advantage, or adjusting development assistance envelopes.

Yet it’s unclear to what extent industry sectors, governments, and others are taking action to prevent future costs and take advantage of potential economic gains presented by a changing climate (see Box 16). Our analysis of Canadian survey responses to the Carbon Disclosure Project — an international effort to track corporate progress on managing climate change risks — and input from stakeholders leads us to conclude that corporate Canada’s engagement on climate change adaptation is generally low. Awareness of impacts and adaptation lies in environment, health, and safety officers, not fully at senior management levels. In the CDP analysis, very few Canadian firms indicated that they were specifically engaged in risk management activity or business planning focused on examining the risks or opportunities from the impacts of climate change. A possible exception is the financial and insurance sectors. Responses from these sectors indicate that business planning related to climate change impacts may be more common than in other sectors.

Canada has conducted remarkably little economic analysis to date on climate change impacts, and even less so on the costs and benefits of adaptation. More has been done on the economic costs of reducing Canada’s GHG emissions, by contrast. This conclusion comes from our review of economic studies costing climate change impacts in Canada or containing results for Canada. The federal government has identified quantitative economic analysis of the effects of climate change — and options for reducing those effects — as a key research need and knowledge gap.[210] Indeed, key decision makers in government and industry see the costs of adapting to a changing climate as the most significant barrier to moving forward (see Figure 11).

3.2 Building a National Response

In the Degrees of Change diagram, we use 60 data points to collectively illustrate that the impacts of climate change could be significant for Canada. The NRTEE believes an increased level of national coordination and purpose will be necessary to adapt to climate change for these reasons:

• A changing climate affects many aspects of daily life, as we know it. The scope and scale of risk and opportunity exceeds the ability or responsibility of any one community, industry sector, or government to respond. Using Canada’s North as an example, Figure 12 illustrates the cascade of effects flowing from selected direct impacts of climate change — warmer temperature and shifting patterns of weather extremes and rain and snow fall. These direct impacts of climate change in turn result in physical impacts, including the depth of summer thaw and extent of permafrost and sea ice, and the flows in rivers. Along with particular regional characteristics, such as demographic and economic makeup, direct and physical impacts of climate change combine to threaten human health and safety, the integrity of buildings, the cost of doing business, local job security, ecosystem health, and the overall well-being of communities. We can expect some of these effects to happen concurrently, alongside other pressures. And, although, households, communities, governments, and businesses will independently taken action to protect themselves if they are able, many problems will exceed the capacity or mandate of individual sectors or decision makers.

FIGURE 12: SOME EXAMPLES OF THE CASCADING EFFECTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE

Source: Based on information in Furgal and Prowse (2008)

• The diverse effects of climate change on Canadian regions and sectors preclude a “one-size-fits-all” approach, yet several benefits lie in leveraging experiences and resources. If summarizing what we know about how climate change could affect Canada is difficult, mandating adaptation targets that can apply to the entire country is unreasonable. Context matters greatly. The impacts of climate change are regionally variable as are their implications, and, within regions, pockets of demographic groups (Aboriginal peoples, children and the elderly), systems (networks of critical infrastructure), and particular economic activities are more vulnerable than others. Stimulating the sharing of lessons and resources across regions and internationally, minimizing duplication, preventing negative spill-over effects from one region or sector to another, and protecting the most vulnerable are all important functions to strengthen Canada’s ability to prosper as a nation in a changing climate.
   
• Climate change presents risks but also opportunities. The possible opportunities created by the effects of a changing climate may require nurturing through the dedication of attention and resources. Too often, news coverage portrays climate change as a doom-and-gloom story of impending disaster.[212] Certainly, many of the possible impacts of climate change are likely to negatively affect us, and we must address them, but we should not ignore the possible opportunities that a changing climate could create in part by proactively adapting to them. Some economic sectors and businesses may do better because of the effects of climate change, and they should seek to identify those new economic opportunities and invest in pursuing them. Turning back to the example in Figure 12, reduced reliance on winter roads due to warmer average temperatures disrupts supply chains and increases costs for the mining companies operating in the region. On the flipside, this same impact presents an opportunity for road construction and logistics companies.

At the same time, we need to be realistic about what can be accomplished via adaptation. In previous sections of the report, we raised the speed of climate change as a limiting factor to adaptation of plants, animals, and the ecosystems they form. The potential also exists for Canada and the world to experience major effects of climate change abruptly and without warning, which would make adaptation a challenging prospect. The global climate is enormously complex, and scientists do not expect that the climate will change in a straightforward or “linear” way, with each year being warmer (or wetter, or drier, or windier) than the last. Although some kinds of change will be gradual, others may happen as tipping points — a phenomenon that is difficult to predict yet common in nature. At a regional level, the case of the mountain pine beetle in British Columbia is a good example of this kind of phenomenon. This beetle has always been a pest in the pine forests of British Columbia. However, several years ago warm winters and dry summers, combined with other factors, allowed the beetle population to cross a tipping point, resulting in an unprecedented outbreak. The implications of the 16.3 million hectares of forest affected by the beetle outbreak since 1999 are both short and long term, with a temporary economic boost from logging and processing the glut of affected trees, and a long-term decline in economic activity, and effects on regional hydrology, tourism, and recreation.[213]

These tipping points can also happen at the global scale, with sudden and large changes in the global climate and other components of the Earth system resulting in widespread effects that exceed the capacity of humans and ecosystems to adapt. Disappearance of Arctic sea ice, rapid melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, large-scale thawing of permafrost, and massive diebacks of major forests such as the boreal are examples of such catastrophic events causing self-reinforcing cycles that further contribute to climate change. Massive melting of ice and snow reduces the Earth’s ability to reflect the sun’s radiation back to the atmosphere, thus an ice-free Arctic, for example, traps more heat and amplifies warming. Widespread thawing of permafrost in certain types of terrain could potentially release large amounts of methane — a GHG — to the atmosphere, also amplifying warming.[214]

3.3 Navigating Uncertain Climate Futures

Confronting the physical, social, and economic effects of climate change is not about adapting from the present climate to a new one, it is a matter of navigating through ongoing change, at least for the next several decades and likely through this century.

We need to adjust our decision-making frameworks to account for the basic reality that we will never have complete information about the precise magnitude and timing of future impacts of climate change at a given location. There are several reasons for this:

• There’s uncertainty in the scale and speed of future changes in temperature, rain or snowfall, or any other weather or climate indicator.[215] Marked shifts in the chemical makeup of the atmosphere, principally the amount of heat-trapping gases, affect the global climate system. Our failure to predict with confidence the future composition of the atmosphere inhibits our ability to make predictions about the global climate system overall.
   
• We still lack a full understanding of the global climate and how it interacts with other components of the Earth system, like ice sheets and oceans, as the distribution of heat and energy and carbon changes. Our understanding of these relationships has advanced significantly over the past decades, and scientists continue to refine and update global models that forecast future climate conditions based on a combination of theory, climate records, and experiments.
   
• We have incomplete knowledge and understanding of how physical and biological systems at a regional or local level, such as river systems and forests, may respond to changes in climate conditions. With slight adjustments in their inner workings — such as the natural migration of tree species northward — biological systems may prove resilient to a certain level of change. In other cases, sources of stress that are unrelated to the climate, such as pollution or over-harvesting, can exacerbate the effects of climate change.
   
• Predicting human behaviour — the interaction of future economic development, technological progress, evolution in politics and governance, and demographic trends — is itself challenging. We have some idea of how decision makers at the national, regional, local, and household levels could act to limit climate change and manage its effects, but our estimations could turn out to be overly pessimistic or optimistic.

The reality is that we will have to get comfortable with making adaptation decisions under conditions of uncertainty. Uncertainty applies to any future event or phenomenon; it is not unique to climate change. We routinely make decisions under uncertainty, and have developed several approaches to managing and coping with uncertainty, including ignoring it. Engineers make decisions on structural tolerance levels for bridges and overpasses based on good enough, imperfect information. Government decision makers dedicate substantial public resources to addressing national security issues based on incomplete and uncertain information about the future of international terrorism and geopolitical alliances. With climate change, however, we face the prospect of several “unknown unknowns” looming on the horizon.

Guided by the precautionary principle and using approaches that treat risk explicitly provides a useful and manageable means of addressing both risk and uncertainty. The precautionary principle emphasizes that the absence of scientific certainty should not be used as an excuse to delay taking action,  especially when faced with the possibility of irreversible damage.[216] Risk management and adaptive management approaches provide structured and consistent means of treating uncertainty and comparing actions against objectives.

That means moving away from trying to find “perfect” solutions and looking to strategies that minimize the costs, financial or otherwise, of being wrong.[217] These strategies include the following:

• Promoting long-term planning processes that include monitoring and review functions, and allow for the inclusion of new information as it becomes available. Long-term planning applies to areas such as coastal zone and watershed management, energy planning, and urban design and redevelopment. British Columbia’s Living Water Smart initiative, for example, is a comprehensive plan to keep the province’s water healthy and secure for the future. It comprises innovations to modernize the Water Act, including provisions for an efficient and flexible water-allocation scheme that can adapt to changing conditions.
   
• Prioritizing options with the potential to bring benefits even in the absence of climate change. “Win-win” options enhance the capacity of ecosystems, businesses, communities, and households to adapt to the effects of climate change and contribute to the achievement of environment, economic, or social outcomes, such as increased biodiversity, economic competitiveness, and poverty reduction. “No-regret” options reduce risks from current climate conditions, and include strategies to minimize damage from natural hazards. “Low-regret” options have relatively low or negligible costs, so even if it turned out that they were not required to address the future effects of climate change, there is low regret from incurring the (unnecessary) costs.
   
• Prioritizing strategies that are reversible and avoid “lock-in.” Because of uncertain climate futures, decisions with long-term implications made today, such as zoning, siting major industrial operations, and building connecting and critical infrastructure, could constrain our options tomorrow and could prove costly over time. For example, building coastal protection structures as an adaptation option to safeguard homes and commercial operations from storms and sea-level change can perform well, provided they are designed to withstand changing climate conditions and are adequately maintained over their service life. If built, little incentive would exist for governments to discourage development along the seafront. However, the combined effects of sea-level rise and storminess could turn out to be more intense than expected, periodically overtopping the coastal protection structures, flooding homes and businesses, and incurring reconstruction costs. The political benefits of continuing to invest in repairing and reinforcing the coastal protection structure would be high, yet the costs to constituents — including those who do not live on the coast — would accumulate over time.

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Footnotes

²⁰⁶ These three examples are documented in Lemmen et al. (2008a).

²⁰⁷ A recent example is Akerlof et al. (2010).

²⁰⁸ Canadian Public Health Association (2010).

²⁰⁹ http://adaptation.nrcan.gc.ca/collab/colcol_e.php

²¹⁰ Lemmen et al. (2008a), p. 18.

²¹¹ Environics Research Group. National Climate Change Adaptation Benchmark Survey. April 2010, prepared for Natural Resources Canada. Accessed on May 20, 2010 at http://epe.lac-bac.gc.ca/100/200/301/pwgsc-tpsgc/por-ef/natural_resources/2010/075-08/index.html

²¹² In an analysis for the UK, Boykoff (2008) concludes, “Across all the years of study, apart from the stories with a neutral tone, fear, misery and doom headlines dominated the coverage.”

²¹³ Williamson et al. (2009); Walton (2009) estimates that seventy percent of merchantable pine volume could be lost to mountain pine beetle infestations by 2015.

²¹⁴ See the news article by the American Association of rhe Advancement of Science at http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2010/0304sp_methane.shtml for further explanation.

²¹⁵ Lemmen & Warren (2004).

²¹⁶ As stated in the new Federal Sustainable Development Strategy “Canada’s environmental policy is guided by the precautionary principle.”  The precautionary principle asserts that: “Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation” (United Nations, 1992). http://www.ec.gc.ca/dd-sd/default.asp?lang=En&n=06E31414-1#s2 United Nations (1992). Report of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development - (Rio de Janeiro, 3-14 June 1992). Retrieved from http://www.un.org/documents/ga/conf151/aconf15126-1annex1.htm on November 2, 2010.  Broadly, the approach guides decision-making under uncertainty, emphasizing that a lack of scientific evidence should not preclude action if the potential exists for serious and irreversible damage.

²¹⁷ Hallegatte (2009).