Perspectives on Climate Change Action in Canada—A Collaborative Report from Auditors General—March 2018

See the Complete Report at:

 http://www.oag-bvg.gc.ca/internet/English/parl_otp_201803_e_42883.html#mb-pnl

Climate change has been identified as one of the defining challenges of our time. The impacts of a warming climate and extreme weather events are already being felt in Canada and are forecast to become more severe and more frequent. For example, an increase in the frequency and severity of wildfires and floods is expected. Beyond environmental and physical impacts, climate change is also expected to have significant economic and social impacts.

At the same time, Canada has missed two separate emission reduction targets (the 1992 Rio target and the 2005 Kyoto target) and is likely to miss the 2020 Copenhagen target as well. In fact, emissions in 2020 are expected to be nearly 20 percent above the target.

Given the importance of this issue and its relevance to all provinces and territories, Canada’s auditors general agreed to work together to collaboratively examine government responses to climate change. This report is made possible by the substantial work of legislative audit offices across Canada and is the first time that nearly all legislative audit offices in Canada have coordinated their work in this way.

The participating audit offices worked together to develop a set of common questions related to mitigating and adapting to climate change. These questions were included as part of the audit work carried out. From 2016 to 2018, audit offices carried out this work and issued reports to their respective governments. The coordination of this work was done through the Office of the Auditor General of Canada by the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development.

We are pleased to make this summary of climate change action in Canada available to all legislators and Canadians on behalf of Canada’s auditors general. Overall, we found that actions taken by governments to date to address climate change across the country have fallen short of the governments’ commitments. This report identifies a number of key issues that exist in many jurisdictions across the country and provides critical questions that may be useful to consider as governments across Canada move forward on their climate change commitments.

We would like to thank the staff who participated in this project for their very important work.