I'll speak next. I will speak to, but not follow exactly, one of the decks you have, “Science and Technology Branch”, which is my area of responsibility.
One of the things I'll note right off the bat is that Environment and Climate Change Canada is one of the larger science-based departments and agencies within the federal government. As you can see from slide 2, a lot of the legislation that the department administers actually puts on the minister a responsibility for undertaking science. For example, under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, it says that the minister shall monitor environmental quality and conduct research on pollution, toxic substances, and ecosystem disturbances. My colleague, Mike Beale, will talk about how we regulate under them, but science provides the underpinning information to which our colleagues will then build a regulatory or programmatic response.
We've put our science into four priority areas.
One is conservation and protection. That's looking at things under the Species at Risk Act, under the migratory birds act, or habitat kinds of issues.
Another priority is contaminants and stressors. Most of us recognize that mercury and lead in the environment are not things we want to have. These are the kinds of things we refer to as “contaminants and stressors”.
As Dan has already mentioned, climate change is another priority. We have some very senior folks who run very large-scale climate models with our colleagues from the meteorological services. We use the high-performance computers in Dorval to run very large models that give us scenarios going out into the future. That was the basis of the very last map that Dan showed you of regional differences, etc.
We also support the weather services, or the meteorological services, in terms of research.
As slide 3 shows, we monitor, assess, and report on threats to water quality, to air quality, and to aquatic ecosystems. As an example of this, we recently sent a report to the United Nations Environment Programme on our release of air pollutants.
In general, for Canada the story on air pollutants is a good one. I think specifically of emissions of nitrous oxide and sulphur dioxide, which are the two primary causes of acid rain. They've shown very significant reductions since the 1990s. A problem that science identified initially was what's happening to some of the forest ecosystems from acid acid rain, and even the parliamentary buildings have been damaged by acid rain. We've taken great steps through regulations to decrease emissions, and the science shows that such has been the case. Our emissions of problematic contaminants, such as mercury and lead, have also significantly decreased. In general, that's a good-news story.
We have also shown that the air quality over the greater Toronto area has improved since 2005, and that is, we would estimate, in step with vehicle emissions. As the vehicle emission standards came into place, we saw a quite significant improvement in air quality over Toronto.
We can do the same kind of analysis of water quality and fish and organisms' health in the environment. We look at species at risk and migratory birds.
We do risk assessment of chemicals under the Chemicals Management Plan.
Again, from my branch side, we do the very heavy science-based assessment of the risks. What are the hazards these chemicals pose to different parts in the environment, and what exposure is the environment is likely to have from these? Then that information is transmitted to our colleagues in the regulatory branch, in Mike Beale's branch, to explore what we can do to regulate and improve the situation.
As Dan said, we do research on climate change to understand the processes. Again, he showed us some differences in temperature increase in Canada. When we briefed first ministers, that was the first time we publicly stated that the temperature in Canada is estimated to increase at twice the global average. If globally we say that we're heading for a 1.5° or a 2° increase, within Canada we predict that means a 3° to 4° centigrade increase in the temperature across Canada.
I'll just note, as Dan did, that we have a very large contingent of scientists in my branch and as well in the meteorological services branch. You'll see in the deck that we are one of the top-performing science organizations and that we do most of that work in partnership.
I look forward to responding to any questions you have.