Thank you very much for the opportunity to appear before this committee.
In terms of Health Canada's work and contribution towards the climate change agenda, clearly we recognize the health impacts associated with climate change, and I would say particularly in relation to developing countries. There's a disparity, obviously, between the impacts that we will see in terms of health and climate change in Canada versus the global impacts, which will likely exacerbate existing situations.
In 2008, Health Canada released a very comprehensive report on the health impacts of climate change in Canada, approximately 484 pages, and they involved academics and experts from around the country in pulling this together. They identified a number of key health impacts, ranging from food security and drinking water security to extreme weather events to the spread of infectious diseases and, certainly in terms of the north, the health impacts that will exacerbate existing social and economic conditions.
In terms of Health Canada's work, as you understand, greenhouse gases don't have a direct health impact in their being there, so our concern is very much focused on the need to adapt and prepare for climate change that's occurring in some areas of Canada and certainly around the world.
We have invested in a number of programs that are trying to address and come up with adaptation strategies to deal with, for example, heat waves. We know that in Europe, in 2003, approximately 70,000 people died as a result of three heat waves during that summer.
We have established, over the past year and a half, a pilot project in four communities across Canada to develop heat alert and response systems that bring together all the community social services, the emergency preparedness people, and the municipal people so that we can actually deal with those kinds of health threats when and if they arise.