Sustainability and policy - Climate Change: Biological and Human Aspects - page 484

that the Government produce an annual report (KPIA Plans) detailing Canada's
progress in meeting its Kyoto obligations. This it did through Environment Canada. 2
Canada's emission reduction target was that of 6% below its 1990 levels over the
2008-12 period. The first KPIA report, A Climate Change Plan for the Purposes of
the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act 2007 (Environment Canada, 2007), despite
allowing greenhouse emissions to rise until 2009, presented the goal of reductions
thereafter. However, it was already clear that it would be unable to meets its 6%
reduction on the 1990 Kyoto target. So in 2007 the Canadian Government announced
a new target to cut its then current (2006) emissions by 20% by 2020. As such
Canada was the first nation to publicly abandon its Kyoto target without leaving the
Protocol.
In 2008 the Canadian Government produced the report From Impacts to Adapt-
ation: Canada in a Changing Environment 2007 edited by Donald S. Lemmen and
colleagues (Lemmen et al., 2008). It was a scientific assessment published by Nat-
ural Resources Canada and Environment Canada. It concluded that climate change
impacts could be discerned in every region of Canada, that there would be new
risks and opportunities for Canadian infrastructure, that Canadian communities were
vulnerable to extreme weather events, that Canada's potential adaptive capacity was
high and that barriers to adaptation need to be addressed. As such, science and policy
in Canada were largely chiming.
In the 2008 Speech from the Throne, the Government announced its commitment
to work with provincial and territorial governments, and other partners, to develop
and implement a North America-wide cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases.
The Canadian Government also re-committed itself to a national objective of a 20%
absolute reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 2006 levels by 2020. Its third
KPIA plan (Environment Canada, 2009) noted that while 73% of Canada's electricity
is generated by non-emitting sources such as HEP, nuclear and wind; the Government
had set an objective of raising this to 90% by 2020. The Government was to also
take action to reduce emissions from the transportation sector by regulating carbon
dioxide emissions from cars and light trucks, and that energy conservation is critical
and reducing Canada's emissions must also involve changes in how Canada consumes
and conserves energy in the country's homes and offices. However, buried in an
annex at the report's end was a table showing which of Canada's sectors (residential,
commercial, transportation, etc.) would see emission reductions each year through
to 2012. From this it is clear that Environment Canada expected the large industrial
emitters sector to suddenly make major reductions in 2010 with a jump in reduction
of just 0.6 Gt CO 2 -equivalent in 2009 to 40.9 Gt CO 2 -equivalent the following
year. (Remember, CO 2 -equivalent relates to the standardisation of all greenhouse
gases - such as methane and nitrous oxide - to carbon dioxide based on global
warming potentials as described in Chapter 1.) Such a jump in reductions here (let
alone elsewhere in the plan) was at best optimistic. The sector sources of Canada's
greenhouse gas emissions are given in Figure 8.4a.

2

Environment Canada is the Canadian Government's Department of Environment. (In UK terms it is
the equivalent of Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs [DEFRA] combined with the
Environment Agency.)