Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to the witnesses for being here.
If you'll bear with me a moment, I think you'll see where I'm heading. On April 14, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its fifth assessment report and talked very strongly about the impacts of climate change on food security. Even at its lowest levels, their lowest-increase scenarios show global warming of about 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. The other scenarios, at the other end, show four degrees. What they concluded was that at a minimum we're going to see crop yields declining by 2% per decade and a more likely scenario of about 1% a year at the same time as the demand for food is increasing by 2%.
What I think I heard both of you saying is that the tendency is for research to be microfocused on small projects. My concern is the role that your organizations could play in addressing this much larger challenge we have coming from the impacts of climate change on food security and food production. I'd like to ask both organizations whether you see the possibility of any kind of coordination of work in responding to the threat to food security from climate change and about what role you see for your organizations in addressing that challenge.
Maybe we'll start in Saskatchewan.