Canada’s legally binding climate target seems to be out of reach, new data released from Environment and Climate Change Canada suggests.
The department’s greenhouse gas emission projections are a critical signal whether the country is on track to achieve its climate goals.
The report’s projections show Canada will fall well short of its 2030 climate goal — just halfway to its target of a 40 to 45 per cent reduction below 2005 levels.
With the government’s current climate measures, Canada is on track to reduce its emissions by 21 per cent below 2005 levels by the end of this decade. If the government implements additional climate policies, the report projects the country could see a 28 per cent reduction.
The news comes just months after an unprecedented warning from Canada’s leading climate think-tank which found the country won’t meet its 2030 target.
The Canadian Climate Institute’s September forecast estimated that the country was on track to reduce emissions by 20 to 25 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030.
Reacting to Wednesday’s report, the institute said it shows the country is “well off track and needs immediate policy delivery.”
Prime Minister Mark Carney also foreshadowed the news in year-end interviews, including on Wednesday with the CBC’s chief political correspondent Rosemary Barton.
Wednesday’s Environment Canada update is the first since Carney took office.
Since then, Carney has removed key planks from Canada’s climate plan: cutting the consumer carbon tax, pausing the electric vehicle mandate, backing additional LNG exports and potentially supporting the building of another bitumen pipeline to the Pacific coast.
As a result, this report is worse than in recent years. Under Carney’s predecessor, Justin Trudeau, the country was on track to slash its emissions to 34 per cent below 2005 levels.
The report lands a decade after the signing of the landmark Paris Agreement, an international climate pact that committed the world to limit average global temperatures from rising above 2 C and to pursue efforts to hold it to 1.5 C.
While those numbers may sound small, every fraction of a degree of warming according to international climate scientists accelerates deadly heat waves, droughts, forest fires and flooding like the scenes seen in Abbotsford, B.C., over the last week.
