ACT News, Climate Change, Economy, Featured
ACT Submission to BC Climate Leadership Plan- Phase 2
April 12, 2016
ACT News, Climate Change, Economy, Featured
April 12, 2016
Below is ACT’s Submission to Phase 2 of BC’s Climate Leadership Plan consultation process. A PDF version of this submission is also available here.
Consultation Opportunity on the Draft BC Climate Leadership Plan
ACT, SFU Recommendations: Delivered April 4th, 2016
Preamble
Given planned provincial investments in LNG, and reluctance across the country to implement a carbon tax, and other factors, it seems clear that neither the Province of BC nor Canada will meet prescribed carbon reduction targets by 2020, and both will be challenged to meet targets set for 2030. Moreover, global projections suggest that, even if every country that signed onto the Paris Agreement implements the voluntary, non-binding emissions reduction targets they submitted, the global climate will still exceed two degrees of warming by mid-century. In fact, climate projections indicate that, no matter what action we take to reduce our emissions, warming will occur at about the same rate and amount by 2030-2050, due to the inertia of the system and the longevity of CO2 in the atmosphere. This is known as the “commitment to climate change,” and is already evident in troubling impacts such as the pine beetle epidemic, record-setting temperatures, and changing hydrological patterns, to name but a few issues of concern for BC residents. Sea level rise is likely locked in for millennia.
The World Economic Forum’s 2016 Global Risks report identifies failure of mitigation and adaptation to climate change as the top risk over the next ten years, and the other top risks are all related to climate change impacts, including water, food, and social displacement and unrest. On both global and local scales, failure leads first to greater vulnerability to extreme weather events, resulting in food and water crises, large-scale migration and other man-made environmental catastrophes, such as infrastructure failure, which in turn lead to loss of ecosystem services and high economic costs.
We therefore must plan for and adapt to some level of climate change impacts, while we work hard to reduce our emissions. This adaptation work will require increasingly transformative policies to counter the continuing impacts of a changing climate globally and regionally on the economy, the environment and the climate nexus of water, food, energy and biodiversity, and we urge the team that is charged with planning and implementing BC’s Climate Leadership Plan to take these challenges into account.
Water is at the heart of most climate change impacts, and we acknowledge the Province’s achievement of progress with the new Water Sustainability Act, which outlines a direction consistent with the new UN Sustainable Development Goals. BC has a similar opportunity to show significant leadership with the proposed Climate Leadership Plan; however, the current draft requires the addition of actionable adaptation measures that complement emissions management and reduction approaches if it is to reflect the goals of the three major international climate-related agreements agreed upon in 2015: the UN SDGs, the Sendai Disaster Agreement and the Paris Agreement.
The new federal mandate letters and funding actions refer to “low carbon resilience” and “green infrastructure” as priorities. It is time we brought together the until-now largely separate discourses on climate change adaptation and mitigation to achieve win-wins. We feel that this is possible and set out some of the ways we can achieve this goal at the provincial level in BC below. We have presented our suggestions within the structure identified by the Province in its response to the recommendations provided by the Climate Leadership Team:
What We Value
– Carbon pricing and general financial mechanisms
– Climate risk management and adaptation
» Amend the Environmental Assessment Act to include the social cost of carbon (#11)
» Update forest and agriculture policy, regulation and protected areas strategies to account for climate change impacts (#16)
» Update by 2020 hazard maps for all climate related hazards (#24a)
» Invest in sufficient monitoring systems to ensure the change in climate can be managed effectively (#24b)
» Develop a policy framework to guide government’s management of the risks associated with a changing climate (#24c)
» Increase communications to public (#24d)
» Use First Nations traditional knowledge when appropriate as part of hazard mapping information (#25a)
» Resource the research of climate change impacts on the inherent and treaty rights of indigenous people (#25b)
The Way We Live
– Community and built environment
» Revisions to the building code that require new buildings to (i) increase use of materials that sequester carbon and (ii) have the capacity of meeting most of their annual energy needs by on-site renewable energy within 10 years (#20b)
The Way We Work
– Industry, business and natural resources
» Create a task force with appropriate expertise (e.g. economics, global markets, clean innovation, environment-economy policy) to research B.C.’s competitive advantages and potential growth areas in a low-carbon economy, both within and across sectors, and to develop recommendations on stimulating these areas (#10)
» Create a task force to review and update carbon management best practices for the agriculture sector (#18)