Thank you. My name is Brian Gray, and I am the Assistant Deputy Minister of the Science and Technology Branch at the Department of Agriculture and Agri-Food.
On page 2 of the document you were given, you will find an outline of today's presentation. I am going to discuss the role and priorities of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, and then I will present an overview of climate change and its impacts on agriculture. Finally, I will provide examples of scientific activities conducted by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada to achieve greater resiliency of the agricultural sector to the effects of climate change.
Our vision for our department is to drive innovation and ingenuity to build a world-leading agriculture and food economy for the benefit of all Canadians. Our mission is to provide leadership in the growth and development of a competitive, innovative, and sustainable agriculture and agrifood sector.
The science and technology branch, which I am responsible for, conducts agricultural research development and knowledge and technology transfer activities to support a competitive, innovative, and sustainable Canadian agriculture and agrifood sector.
I have pulled out what I feel are the most important points in our minister's mandate letter related to the topic that you are studying right now, as it relates to my branch, the science and technology branch. First, I point out that the key point is to invest in agricultural research to support discovery science and innovation in the sector. Second is to work with provinces, territories, and other willing partners to help the sector adjust to climate change and better address water and soil conservation and development issues. Finally, we need to support the ministers of Natural Resources and of Environment and Climate Change in making investments that will make our resource sectors world leaders in the use and development of clean and sustainable technology and processes.
Let's move on to slide 5. Our branch has 20 research and development centres located across Canada. We have 35 experimental farms that are connected to the research centres. We have three regions: the coastal region, the Prairie region and the Ontario and Quebec region.
I will provide a quick overview of climate change impacts on agriculture. Climate change will bring, quite simply, longer growing seasons, due to temperature, but also more variable precipitation, resulting in more drought and also in more flooding. We'll see more extreme events. Warmer temperatures will produce more pests and disease outbreaks, and make Canada more vulnerable to invasive alien species. These are invasive species that might not have the suitable conditions to live in Canada yet, but that, with the changing climate, will. Finally, land suitability for spring-seeded small grain crops will increase, particularly in western Alberta and northeastern British Columbia. In summary, I would say that with the changing climate, we have challenges as well as opportunities in agriculture.
Globally, agriculture represents between 10% and 15% of the total anthropogenic—that is, caused by human activity—greenhouse gas emissions. In Canada, it's approximately 10% of our total greenhouse gas emissions.
In addition to our own research, which I'll be talking about briefly today, we also have our department's agricultural greenhouse gases program, which provides $27 million over five years to Canadian universities and non-profit organizations for the research, development, and technology transfer of ways to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions from Canada's agricultural sector.
Let's move on to slide 9, which outlines agricultural drivers and challenges related to climate change.
There are two key points. The first involves adapting agricultural production to climate change while being involved in its mitigation. This implies adaptation to abiotic and biotic stresses; reducing greenhouse gas emissions; and supporting the development and use of clean technologies contributing to long-term, low carbon economic growth.
The second key point consists in conserving environmental resources and services while increasing agricultural production. The increasing world population stimulates demand for more food. Here we are talking about soil conservation, water and biodiversity in agricultural landscapes, and sustainable intensification.
I will now provide a few examples of AAFC scientific activities. This is slide 10.
Moving on to page 11, here is one example of a collection of science. When we talk about beneficial management practices, one of the stellar examples is moving to no-till. I understand the Soil Conservation Council was here Tuesday. They would have given you quite an update on that. With that, in the west came the reduction of summer fallow. Over the period from 1951 to 2013, the net carbon sink or storage that we were able to achieve because of that change in practice, that beneficial management practice, was about 11 megatonnes of CO2 equivalent. This offsets about 15% of the agricultural GHG emissions.
The point I'd like to make is that it wasn't one or two studies. It was a series of hundreds of studies conducted over decades, not only by our department but by our partners, academia, the provinces, and our colleagues in other countries, most notably the U.S. and the USDA. Research very rarely leads from one study to a beneficial management practice. It takes a fair bit of time.
With the next couple of slides, I'd like to talk about extreme weather events.
In our branch we develop new varieties of crops. We develop new varieties of crops in areas where there is the public good space. That is, there's not an industry that's developing that variety, so it is something we do for the public good and for the benefit of our producers. An example is potatoes. At our Fredericton Research and Development Centre, we are developing varieties of drought tolerant potatoes. This is just a very quick illustration of how that's done. We're doing several crosses in the hope of eventually developing a variety that is more drought tolerant.
Next is an example of where we have too much water. In a changing climate, you'll see that we will have drought, but we'll also have periods of more intense rain. We've already seen that across Canada in the past growing season. Barley is a particular cereal that doesn't do well in inundation. Normal varieties that we have now can't last more than a couple of days being inundated with water. At the Brandon Research and Development Centre, we are developing inundation tolerant barley. On the right you can see the two varieties: the sensitive one, which is the more normal one, and the one that we're developing. It's kind of a neat project. We have mini rice fields at the research centre. We flood them and that variety on the left is now tolerant up to 10 days.
The final example I'll give you is from the agro-climate, geomatics and earth observations division within our branch. They develop tools that are available to farmers and the public. They look at current climate conditions and future projected conditions given to us by Environment and Climate Change Canada or other members of the IPCC.
If you look at the illustration of the maps, the current weather temperature conditions are on the left. If you look at the right, there's a change of 3°C. You can see that this change of heat will make it a lot more attractive for these three examples of pests. What do we do with that? This informs our scientists to develop new varieties of crops that would be resistant to these types of pests, to develop beneficial management practices that would help the system be more resilient to the pests, and finally to search out natural predators to these sorts of pests.
The next slide, I apologize, is a bit busy. It's a work in progress, as are the living laboratories. I will try to explain it very quickly.
It's an adaptive management approach with the goal of improved agro-environmental performance and sustainable intensification. It's the use of multidisciplinary teams of scientists working together with producers, designing and experimenting with new, potential beneficial management practices on real working farms. These beneficial management practices would be different than the suite we have now because we'd be looking for multiple benefits. Beneficial management practices not only help in climate change adaptation but also mitigation, biodiversity, and water and soil conservation and protection.
We've been working with the USDA in the United States, with their science division, which is comparable to ours. We had several workshops leading up to one in January. They're quite supportive on this approach and we're going to look at collaborating over the coming years.
At slide 16, entitled “Looking Ahead”, you can see that the Canadian government is investing in agricultural science inside and outside of AAFC. Improving partnerships is integral to our approach, be it with the provinces, the sector or academia, through the Canadian Agricultural Partnership, with other federal departments and agencies and with international organizations to leverage benefits for Canada.
AAFC is well positioned to collaborate across the agricultural science and innovation ecosystem to support the sector's resiliency to adapt to climate change and mitigate its effects.
Thanks. That's it for me. I'll turn it over to Tom.