I'm Quentin Chiotti, the air program director and senior scientist at Pollution Probe. I always like to point out that I have a PhD in geography, not medicine.
That said, Pollution Probe has actually been actively involved in the whole issue of impacts and adaptation for quite a while. This month in fact is the tenth anniversary of the Pollution Probe, Environment Canada, and York University national conference on climate change and human health that took place in November of 1996.
Speaking for myself, I've been working in the area of climate change impacts and adaptations since 1993, primarily in the areas of energy, health, and agriculture, and more recently in terms of the linkages between air quality and climate change. I was employed with Environment Canada, in their climate change adaptation impacts research group, from 1995 to 2002. During that period I was the science adviser for a multi-stakeholder study on the atmospheric change in the Toronto-Niagara region.
I was also a contributor to the Canada country study, the first national assessment of climate change impact in Canada, in the late nineties. I was a contributing author to the chapter on the costs of inaction. That probably, more than anything, is why I decided to fly to Ottawa early this morning.
I'm currently a member of the advisory committee to the Climate Impacts and Adaptation Research Network of Ontario, as part of the national C-CIARN network. I'm also the co-lead for the Ontario chapter of the 2007 national assessment on climate change impacts and adaptation.
I did circulate earlier a letter that was sent to Prime Minister Harper in April of this year, signed by 90 climate change scientists, emphasizing the significance of climate change, the confidence that there is in science, and the urgency of taking action. That letter was in part initiated because of the urgency to take action that was more or less discussed at COP 11 in Montreal in November. I had circulated as well a diagram that outlines the fact that if we wait five years, ten years, or twenty years before we take significant action to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, we'll be looking at very substantial reductions in the future for every five years or ten years that we wait.
I think the people at this table will agree that there's broad consensus that we need to reduce global emissions of greenhouse gases between 60% to 80% by the year 2050. I want to remind everyone that the European Union is very much talking about a 25% commitment of reducing greenhouse gases by 2020 in order to avoid what the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change has described as “dangerous” interference with the earth's climate.
I'd like to also point out that in terms of the impacts research, and anything you've heard this morning, it's largely based on a two-time CO2 scenario. If in fact we go beyond the dangerous level and look at higher concentrations of CO2, then the impacts are likely going to be much greater.
Jim Bruce mentioned some of the impacts for Canada. I'd just like to reiterate the significance for the far north and its vulnerability to climate change, the vulnerability of our coastal regions, particularly to floods and storm surges, and in the Prairies, as mentioned, in terms of water shortages, especially for agriculture and oil sands development.
I would point out that in Quebec, the concern on water resources is so great, particularly in hydro capacity, that Quebec has actually taken the lead of all provinces in Canada, looking at climate change impacts and adaptation through their Ouranos consortium of industry, government, and academia to tackle the problem.
Similarly, the Province of Ontario has just embarked on a series of round tables to deal with climate change and air quality, of which impacts and adaptation will be a significant component. In terms of Ontario, the impact on the Great Lakes water quality and quantity were mentioned. There are very significant implications, based on historical experience, in terms of critical infrastructure--storm sewers, electricity, as well as communications--and significance for our forestry and agriculture, including, in the case of forestry, the resource communities dependent on it. In particular there's the significance on human health.
Unfortunately, when I got the call last night to attend this morning, I had only one copy at home. It is a primer on climate change and health that we released in 2004, based on a three-year study we had done on human health in the Toronto-Niagara region. I would like to table that for the committee, for your interest.
Just going back to the overall costs of inaction, in the Canada country study we estimated, based on international experience, that the costs of climate change would be somewhere in the neighbourhood of 2% to 4% of GDP, which at the time, in 1988 dollars, was in the neighbourhood of $10 billion to $12 billion a year. A broader range would likely have been a low of $3 billion to a high of $24 billion annually.
I would say that although the 2007 assessment is unlikely to present economic impacts in a dollar value, I think we can be pretty confident that the impacts of climate change, based upon what we know now, will be higher than that amount.
Thank you.