Thank you, Madam Chair. It's a pleasure to be here this morning on behalf of the department to provide a bit of an overview of who we are and what we do.
I'm going to focus most of my remarks on the climate change area, following from the comments from the commissioner as one of the more important areas that we're dealing with these days, but before I do that, could I just draw your attention to the handout we passed around? It gives a one-page overview that I think is useful for the committee in terms of the overall direction and mandate of the department and what we do for a living.
You'll see on that one page that we're a fairly large department. We're organized around three main directions: clean, safe, and sustainable. You'll note we have over 6,000 full-time equivalents in the department spread out across the country. Over 60% of our workforce is located outside Ottawa in the regions, and we have regional offices throughout the country. Also, more than 50% of our workforce is in the science and technology areas, so we are very much a science-based department, both in research and scientific support for decision-making.
The next block down delves a little more deeply into some of our core business lines in research, monitoring, our conservation and protection function, our regulatory function—we are a massive regulatory department, as some of my colleagues will describe—and obviously, given all that, we have a very strong enforcement function as well. The Meteorological Service of Canada is another important area, providing weather and forecasts and warnings and health quality information that's related to the environment.
Also, just at the bottom, you'll see some of the types of things we are involved with. We administer over 12 acts of Parliament and over 70 regulations. We have water quality monitoring stations across the country. We have many different national protected areas and sites. We look after endangered species, ice forecasts, and more monitoring activities.
This overview gives and idea of the wide variety and range of activities the department is involved in. As we pass down the line, I'll get into details on a number of those aspects, but this is the overview.
I might turn now quickly to pick up on some of the comments and situate for the committee where we are in climate change, because I suspect it's an area of interest coming out of the Paris conference as we work toward our attainment of our commitments under that agreement. Again, there's a short deck on it, just a few pages, that gives an overview of climate change.
Before I go through that, we have very recently, just a couple of weeks ago, published with the United Nations our “Second Biennial Report on Climate Change” for Canada.