Canada’s major-projects agenda has a carbon blind spot |
Canada is pursuing two major federal initiatives that are moving in opposite directions.
Canada’s federal government pledged $3.8 billion on April 29 to protect 30 per cent of its lands and waters by 2030 through its new nature strategy, A Force of Nature. The strategy promises a major push to map and safeguard the country’s most biodiverse and carbon-rich areas before development is allowed to proceed.
Less than two weeks later, it released a second proposal — Getting Major Projects Built in Canada — that would fast-track approvals for the very pipelines, LNG facilities and offshore energy projects that the proposed mapping is meant to guide. The process would be on a timeline too short for the mapping to be finished, let alone used.
Many scientists, legal experts and Indigenous leaders have already raised serious concerns about the potential impacts of these reforms to species at risk, habitat destruction and Indigenous sovereignty.
What’s missing from the conversation is the climate cost of fast-tracking decisions that could disturb the very ecosystems that are actively protecting us from the worst of climate change.
Nature as a climate buffer
Nature acts as a buffer to climate change by drawing carbon dioxide into long-term sinks, removing that carbon from the atmosphere on a timeline that slows the pace of climate change.
Globally, vegetation and soils are estimated to store roughly 2,000 to 3,000 billion tons of carbon, a figure that does not consider our planet’s largest carbon sinks in the ocean.
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Decisions on major projects often ignore cultural and social losses
Canada’s industrial ambitions require robust environmental governance
Canada must improve environmental reviews to speed major projects
Why peatlands must be central to Canada’s climate and economic agendas
As global-change scientists and ocean-policy experts with the........