Hello. My name is Colette Downie, and I work at Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada.
Thank you to the committee for the opportunity to appear today to address findings of the Adapting to the Impacts of Climate Change report. I would also like to thank the commissioner, Julie Gelfand, and her team for preparing an in-depth examination of the federal government's progress in adapting to the risks associated with climate change.
ISED recognizes the importance of being adaptable to climate change impacts and ensuring the department can continue to carry out its activities and support Canadians despite adverse affects of climate change.
We agree with the commissioner's findings. We've already taken action to improve our internal processes so that the department is better positioned to make informed, forward-looking decisions to manage risks related to climate change.
After considering the commissioner's advice, ISED views that the best way to swiftly implement her recommendations is to improve the department's existing processes to identify, assess, prioritize, and address climate change risks. In particular, we're making changes to our integrated risk management processes. These include a renewed focus on identifying key risks at the sector level to ensure that the risk profile for the department presents a comprehensive picture of our risks.
Any new processes that we introduce as part of these changes will include references explicitly to climate change impacts to ensure that they're one of the factors considered when risks are identified. We are also committed to collaborating with Treasury Board and Environment and Climate Change Canada on guidance for assessing climate change risk.
As I mentioned, we've already started to make progress on our risk management processes. Starting in January 2017, during risk discussions at senior-level management committees, organizations within the department were explicitly asked whether climate change effects were having negative impacts on their business and whether any specific climate change risks could be identified. I'd like to underline that since January, there have been discussions on this topic at senior governance committees, including with deputy ministers and associate deputy ministers in October.
We also noted that other departments, such as Fisheries and Oceans, Natural Resources Canada, and Transport Canada, in addition to looking at risk, also considered how climate change impacts could affect policy development and program delivery. With this in mind, we're going to do the same thing. We're going to analyze climate change impacts to see how they'll affect our delivery, our policy development, our infrastructure assets, our program beneficiaries, and other stakeholders.
We understand that sound and reliable science will be key as we move forward to implement the commissioner's recommendations, and that the current and planned climate change research being undertaken and supported across the government will be invaluable to our work.
Thank you again for the invitation to appear.