Canada is still not on track to meet its commitments under the Paris climate agreement, federal Environment Commissioner Jerry DeMarco said in a new report on Thursday.
The news landed on the same day that two other reports forecast a continuing increase in the country’s oil sands emissions, while a coalition of institutional investors called for faster emissions reductions from big industrial emitters.
Ottawa has promised to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to be 40 to 45% below 2005 levels by 2030, but so far they have only fallen 7%. In a news conference after the reports were tabled in Parliament, DeMarco said it is still possible to meet those targets, The Canadian Press reports.
The “task is much harder because there’s only six years left to do essentially 20 or 30 years’ worth of reductions,” he said. But “it’s not time to give up.”
While progress is “painfully slow” on some of the government’s policies, “that’s not a reason to just throw up our hands and say we won’t make it,” DeMarco added. “We owe it to our children and our grandchildren to make as great an effort as possible to meet these global challenges.”
Pretty much concurrently with DeMarco’s report, an analysis by S&P Global Commodity Insights found that greenhouse gas emissions from the Albert oil sands increased about 1% per year since 2019, a considerably slower rate since the preceding decade, but could spike again this year as the industry increases production, CBC reports.
“The industry is becoming more efficient and creating less pollution for every barrel of oil that is produced,” CBC writes, citing S&P chief analyst Kevin Birn, but emissions will still rise in step with increasing extraction. “In 2024, overall Canadian oil production growth is among the highest of any country in the world. As a result, S&P is forecasting total oil sands emissions in Alberta to increase by about 5%.”
The Environment Commissioner’s report looked at 20 of the 149 measures from the government’s 2030 Emission Reductions Plan progress report, and found they were being implemented too slowly to fulfill their intended goal, CP writes.
Only nine of the 20 were on track and another nine were facing challenges.
The other two had significant barriers like delays in meeting milestones, including the initiative to get Indigenous communities off diesel fuel, and the oil and gas emissions cap. The government only published the cap’s draft regulations on Monday, after promising the measure in the 2021 election, and enforcement won’t begin until 2030 or 2032.
“Overall, the federal government had advanced a variety of mitigation measures to support progress towards a net-zero transition but had still not made sufficient progress to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to meet its 2030 target,” the report reads.
The report also zeroed in on whether Environment and Climate Change Canada has reported on its progress with enough transparency. In 2021, Parliament passed a law requiring the department to set emission targets and to publish emissions reduction plans and progress reports.
That law requires the department to include in its progress report what additional measures could be taken if Canada is not on track to meet its 2030 targets. DeMarco said he expected more measures to be included in last year’s progress report, since Canada clearly knew it wasn’t doing enough to meet the target.
Of the 32 additional measures the department published—in addition to the 149 existing ones—DeMarco found only seven were new. Three of them enhanced existing measures, and the other 22 were ones the department had already reported.
That included continuing to develop the Canada Green Buildings Strategy, which was already in the original plan. When that plan was finally released, after the government had cancelled its popular Canada Greener Homes Grant, it emphasized funding for low-income building retrofits but no firm targets to reach net-zero emissions.
DeMarco found the government has made strides in consulting with the provinces, territories, and Indigenous Peoples, and that the department met its legislative reporting requirements. However he was critical of the government’s transparency with regards to its modelling data—concerns which he also raised in his report last year.
“Although the department made marginal transparency improvements on modelling assumptions for federal measures in the emissions projection report, it still provided insufficient details,” DeMarco’s latest report read, noting the department only provided details for one-third of the measures it included in its modelling.
“This issue of the lack of transparency in the modelling continues to be an ongoing concern, which can undermine the trust and credibility in the reported progress,” the report read.
Meanwhile, a coalition of institutional investors with nearly C$7 trillion in assets is calling in big emitters across all sectors of the economy to more aggressively align their climate performance with international targets.
Climate Engagement Canada (CEC) says some companies “have made gains over the past year setting and improving emission reduction plans, analyzing their targets, and bolstering transparency in climate-related lobbying,” the Globe and Mail reports. All but two of the 41 companies in CEC’s tracking have progressed over the last two years, with nine of them disclosing detailed climate transition plans for the first time.
But the companies’ decarbonization plans “fail to consider social impact, risk, and opportunities” of driving down emissions, “and there was little improvement in disclosure of climate risks using the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) framework, which is the global standard for reporting,” the Globe writes.
Responding to the Environment Commissioner’s report outside the House of Commons Thursday, Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault told media the government could do better on transparency, and reiterated the work already done to bring emissions down.
“I agree with (DeMarco). We need to continue moving forward to implement measures to reach our 2030 target,” Guilbeault said.
“I should point out it’s the first time in Canada’s history emissions are going down because of measures that the government is taking.”
Guilbeault said final regulations for clean electricity standards will be released in the coming weeks.
The main body of this report was first published by The Canadian Press on Nov. 7, 2024.
