Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
It's a great pleasure for me to have the opportunity to speak to this committee. I congratulate the sponsor for introducing a bill that gives us an opportunity to think about climate change and the Kyoto Protocol in a particularly focused way.
I want to direct my comments to the subject of adaptation. Some members may feel this is a bit tangential to the main thrust of the bill. Nevertheless, I think it is an important issue that needs to be considered whenever we begin to think about an appropriate strategy for Canada and for the international community on climate change.
As members will know, the Framework Convention on Climate Change recognizes two approaches to climate change. One is mitigation, the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. The other is adaptation, doing what we can to reduce the impacts of inevitable, necessary, unavoidable climate change, which we are facing now, to reduce our vulnerability and perhaps expand our resilience in the face of a changing climate. This can mean strengthening and redesigning and setting new design standards and codes for infrastructure; dealing with the thawing and melting permafrost and the impact that has on our Arctic communities; and enhancing and improving water conservation in various ways where we might suffer water shortage. It can mean looking at crop varieties and alternatives in places where we're faced with drought, such as the Prairies; thinking about how to manage the invasion of insect pests, such as the mountain pine beetle in British Columbia; or dealing with extreme events, such as the floods and droughts to which many parts of the country are exposed.
In the near to medium term, there is some opportunity for substitution between mitigation and adaptation. That is to say, the more we can adapt in the short term, the more time there will be to mitigate the greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere and to reduce the damage for a given level of concentration. This is only a partial and temporary solution. I do not suggest that adaptation can in any way deal with the major impacts of climate change. But in the short term, it is something to which we should, and must, turn our attention.
One of the fundamental questions to ask is how much can adaptation achieve? How much can we reduce our vulnerability to climate change by taking the sorts of adaptation approaches that I've mentioned in relation to climate risks?
My thought is that this bill and, for that matter, the Clean Air Act are taking a heavily mitigation-focused view of the climate issue. Before we can understand what the costs and benefits are of one strategy or another, we need to know more about what can be achieved by adaptation, both in Canada and globally.
There are important differences between these two approaches. Mitigation is something we have to agree on and pursue globally and internationally. It's something that happens by international agreement that we form, participate in, and then implement. The benefits that come from mitigation are globally spread because they're the reduction of the rate of climate change. They are globally spread benefits. Different countries will get different amounts of those benefits according to their existing level of vulnerability. On the other hand, adaptation is something that we do for ourselves. The benefits from adaptation fall where the adaptation measures take place.
My conclusion from this reasoning is that Canada should consider how much it needs to allocate to adaptation and, in so doing, consider what the degree of urgency is for us with respect to the amount of mitigation we want to pursue. We need to do this in the Canadian context, but we also need to do this in the negotiations that are ongoing with respect to the post-2012 regime that will follow after the termination in 2012 of the first phase of the Kyoto Protocol.
I think both in Canada and internationally, the climate issue has been too narrowly conceived, with too heavy a focus and emphasis on mitigation. There's a lot we can do in adaptation to reduce the near-term impacts, and we need to find ways of giving more attention to doing that.
This really raises a question about Canada's national interests, and I would like to see that in two parts. One is what is best to do for ourselves, in a rather narrow self-interest, in which case I think the case for adaptation is very strong. The other is what we need to do as a good global citizen, to help maintain a stable world society and economy, and there we have a responsibility to play a role and, if possible, a leadership role in the area of mitigation.
But I should make it clear that in mitigation, we can lead by example, we can demonstrate, but what we do does not make an awfully big difference in terms of global climate change. Canada contributes less than 2% of global emissions, so what we do in practical actual terms of reducing climate change does not make an awful lot of difference. We have major players contributing much more to greenhouse gas emissions--for example, the United States and the major emitters in the developing countries such as India, China and Brazil--and what they do is very important. We need to go into the negotiations with full awareness and cognizance of what they are going to do and how we might influence their choices.
So the question is, if you like, by putting our own house in order and reducing our own emissions, does this leading by example help in that direction, and how much might it help?
There is a lot we can do domestically. We could follow the example of the State of California and take some of the steps that have been taken there. We might find ways of joining with California and the northeastern United States in a carbon cap and carbon ceiling trading market. So we might get to some sort of Kyoto arrangement, not in a top-down controlling way, or not only in that way, but also by looking at the bottom-up things we can do on a regional basis with other partners in North America and potentially also Europe.
Let me make one further point about adaptation. Adaptation is not new. While we call a lot of things adaptation because of climate change, we have been doing a lot of these things already. So is it just a case of doing what we have been doing more and better? Well, partly, but we are in fact not dealing with our current weather and climate risks as well as we might be. We currently have what I like to call an adaptation deficit in relation to current climate and current climate variability. Our losses from climate variability and from climate-extreme events are in fact increasing, and if you look at the payouts that are being made by Canadian federal assistance to provinces to deal with natural disasters, you see that they have been going up quite considerably.
In dealing with climate change, we can add the concern that we have in catching up with the way in which we should be dealing with climate variability and the disasters that are associated with extreme climate events.
I'm suggesting that it's time for Canada to think about more of a balanced, two-track approach to climate change in which we address mitigation as vigorously and effectively as we can, but at the same time pay attention to adaptation for our own country and of course, where we can, through organizations like CIDA and IDRC, help the most vulnerable developing countries to deal with their own adaptation problems.
Thank you very much for hearing me. I circulated in advance a short written version of this testimony, which I understand is available in both English and French, and I would be glad to respond to any questions you have about that or my remarks.
Thank you.