Thank you very much.
Good morning, everyone.
Environment and Climate Change Canada is one of the largest science-based departments in Canada. The Science and Technology Branch has about 1,400 employees in 24 science and technology centres across the country. Those employees carry out laboratory work, field work, research and environmental monitoring.
Science is the foundation of our department's work. It supports the development of our regulations, the enforcement of environmental laws, as well as our weather and climate services. It provides the evidence we need to make sound decisions to protect our environment, provides public interest services, and promotes economic growth and prosperity. The science developed at our department has an excellent reputation both domestically and internationally. Our work responds directly to needs in service delivery and regulation, and to other department policies and programs.
Our employees are passionate about the work they do serving Canadians. Our department publishes over 700 peer-reviewed journals and articles annually, which puts the department among the world's most productive environmental science organizations. Year after year we make a high-impact contribution to science across Canada and the globe.
To support the department's mandate, our environmental science has taken many forms. One of our priority areas is to model and assess how the climate is changing, and to understand the impacts of climate change. However, under the current burden of warming and under future scenarios, the challenge of understanding, predicting and tracking climate change is a team effort across all of our branches and scientific disciplines. It's also an area of high collaboration with other national and international organizations.
Our department relies heavily on research and monitoring of the presence and impacts of environmental pollutants and stressors to inform decisions. In this area, we are world-recognized innovators in new approaches, for example in the oil sands monitoring program, a productive collaboration among the Government of Alberta, local indigenous peoples, the oil industry and other stakeholders to monitor the environmental effects of oil sands resource development.
Another example is the elaboration of a draft scientific assessment on the pollution of plastic that was recently published. We hope to be getting comments and feedback on that report between now and April 1.
Another of our priorities is to support informed responses to threats and emerging priorities. We have many activities in a variety of different media that we collect information on, share information on, and collaborate with many other organizations to deliver.
To close, environmental issues are interconnected globally, and no single country or organization has the expertise or capacity to address them alone. Canadian collaboration in the international science community is key to delivering on our mandate's responsibilities.
I'll pass it now to my colleagues.
Thank you.