Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Agriculture and Forestry
Issue 6 - Evidence, February 4, 2003
OTTAWA, Tuesday, February 4, 2003
The Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry met this day at 5:38 p.m. to examine the impact of climate change on Canada's agriculture, forests and rural communities and the potential adaptation options focusing on primary production, practices, technologies, ecosystems and other related areas.
Senator Donald H. Oliver (Chairman) in the Chair.
[English]
The Chairman: Honourable senators, I am pleased to welcome you to our first hearing in 2003. I would also like to welcome everyone watching us on CPAC and listening to our deliberations over the Internet.
[Translation]
We are pursuing today the examination of the impact of climate change on agriculture, forests and rural communities, with a special focus on the adaptation needed to support our primary industries and our communities.
As demonstrated by public opinion surveys and by media reports, climate change has become a concern for many Canadians. As environmental changes affect all citizens, throughout the country, our examination becomes more important. Over the last few months, many Canadians have become aware of the work of Senate committees. They recognized the rigour of our studies and the quality of our reports.
On the basis of the work already done on this subject, our committee will reach a high standard, and I am sure it will be able to suggest answers which will help our farmers, our foresters and our rural communities. Last December, we examined the impact of climate change in some areas of Canada and the issue of local adaptation. Today, we are concluding our regional examination concerning the Prairies and British Columbia.
[English]
Honourable senators, I welcome here today two distinguished scientists from the Canadian Climate Impacts and Adaptation Research Network. Dr. David Sauchyn is from the Prairies, and Dr. Stewart Cohen is from British Columbia. They will provide information on the impact of climate change on their specific regions and explain to us how industries are adapting to the new realities.
Mr. Sauchyn, please proceed.
Mr. Dave Sauchyn, Coordinator, Prairies Region, Canadian Climate Impacts and Adaptation Research Network: Mr. Chairman, I am pleased to address your committee on the issue of climate change impacts and adaptation in the Prairie provinces. In doing so, I will use this PowerPoint presentation, of which I understand the senators have a paper copy. I also understand that you have a copy of the paper brief that was submitted by our office.
The impacts of climate change in Canada are felt first in the North and then in the Prairies. According to the Canadian global climate model, the largest amount of global warming will occur in the Prairies. The impacts are occurring first in the North but the cost of climate change will be greatest in the Prairie provinces, simply because there are many more people in the Prairies than in the North.
In fact, global warming has already begun to occur. Using any set of climate data from the Prairie provinces, we can show that winter and spring temperatures already have increased dramatically. The slide that I am using is for a location in southwestern Saskatchewan, showing the quite dramatic increase in February temperature. This trend shows up in any set of climate data from the Prairie provinces.
The forecast for this century for the Prairie provinces includes, of course, an increase in temperature. This is the most certain part of the forecast. That increase in temperature will be mostly in the lower temperatures, that is, winter, spring and at night. As that previous diagram indicated, quite a bit of the warming in winter has already occurred such that today the growing season is almost three weeks longer than it was in the 1960s. You can speak to any Prairie farmer for confirmation of that.
The forecast of precipitation is less certain. Anything from a small decrease in precipitation to quite a large increase. Most of the scientific information points to actually increased rainfall and snowfall in the Prairie provinces. However, as a result of the higher temperatures, there will be a much greater loss of water by evaporation, and also plants will transpire more water. As a result of the increased water loss, the major impacts of climate change on the Prairie provinces are loss of soil moisture and surface water. Even though the good news is a longer growing season, the major limitation, as a result of climate change, will be the loss of water. The loss by evaporation, in particular, will much exceed the increased precipitation that is forecast.
The other major impact of climate change is the increase in the variability of the climate such that we expect extreme weather events. We expect storms to occur with increasing frequency so that a rainstorm or a windstorm of a certain size will occur more often. Also, the water cycle will be more variable, so there will be wet years. In fact, we expect there will be years that are wetter than normal but, at the same time, there will be years that are much drier than normal. I will refer to drought later in my talk because that, of course, is the weather event of greatest concern on the Prairies.
The slide that I am presently using is essentially a weather forecast, or more correctly a climate forecast, for this century for the Prairie provinces. In addition to the forecasted change in climate, the other factor is the sensitivity of the Prairies to climate change, climate variability and these extreme events. The natural systems, such as the badlands in southwestern Saskatchewan, and the socio-economic systems, such as the croplands in central Alberta, are both sensitive to climate. We have a scenario that includes increased climatic variability, climate change and more extreme events impinging on these sensitive systems.
An image of Canada from space shows that the Prairie eco-zone is a unique region of Canada. The soil, the land cover and climate are such that the Prairies constitute the region of Canada that contains most of the farmland. However, the other natural characteristic is that the Prairies are the region of Canada that is defined by its aridity. The dryness of the climate — the sub-humid climate — is such that there is a lack of vegetation cover, and this is the main natural characteristic of the Prairies. We can show this climatically by using the idea of a moisture deficit because, throughout the three Prairie provinces, there is less water gained each year than is potentially lost. I could use the analogy of a bank balance where there are deposits and withdrawals. For the water balance, there are deposits of snowfall and rainfall, and the withdrawals are the evapo-transpiration — a loss of water by evaporation and by leaf transpiration. The difference, then, is either a surplus or a deficit of water.
The only area in the Prairie provinces that has a surplus is in the higher elevations of the Rocky Mountains. That is why there are glaciers and permanent snowfields. Throughout the rest of the Prairie provinces, there is a deficit that can be as great as 425 centimetres of water. That area is southwestern Saskatchewan and southeastern Alberta — the area commonly referred to as the Palliser Triangle. In this region, the deficit is made up by irrigation for the purpose of irrigated agriculture. This map shows the current climate of the Prairie provinces, using climate data from 1961 to 1990.
We can take the Canadian climate model and produce a map for the period 2040-69 — essentially, the middle part of this century. It shows that, as a result of global warming, we have a brand new category of moisture deficit which would now be as great as 490 centimetres: almost one-half metre of water lacking that has to be made up in order to produce crops. The map also shows that the area of dry lands becomes quite large by the middle of this century, such that it occupies essentially the southern half of the Prairie provinces. In the north, the area that supports trees is quite a bit smaller.
This map captures what we consider to be the dominant impact of climate change on the Prairie provinces — the expansion of the land that is currently dry and supports grasses, and a shrinking of the land that is currently relatively wet and supports trees. You can easily appreciate the implications of this for both agriculture and forestry.
It will require adaptation. It will require adjustments in practices, infrastructure, policy and programs to minimize the impact of this drying out of the Prairie landscape, and to take the advantages offered by a warmer climate. The advantages would be primarily the opportunity to produce crops over a longer growing season, although that opportunity is offset by a limitation on water supplies. On this diagram of adaptation options, I have highlighted in red the on-site operations because that is where farmers, ranchers and foresters will adjust their practices, their management of the forest and the land, to accommodate the impacts of climate change.
The other boxes on the slide before you represent structural, engineering, technological, political, financial, legislative and institutional approaches to adaptation where the bureaucrats, politicians and decision makers in government and industry will have to adjust public policies, institutions and programs to sustain farming, ranching and forestry under these drier conditions.
In terms of forestry, the major impact of climate change will be a change in forest productivity. Productivity will be initially enhanced by more carbon dioxide, because plants require carbon dioxide for respiration and productivity. Ultimately, however, forest productivity will decline as a result of lack of soil moisture, and with the drying out of the forest we expect there to be an increase in the frequency of fires and insects. Third, there will be a change in the occurrence of commercially important tree species. As a result of these impacts, forest management will be sustained with stronger science and the integration of climate change impacts with other land use activities. The map before you now from the Saskatchewan Research Council shows how we expect the severity of forest fires to increase as a result of global warming.
The next diagram shows that we expect that, initially, forest productivity will increase with increasing carbon dioxide, but then there will be a significant decline in that productivity as the soil dries out.
In terms of agriculture, using that scenario of increasing aridity, we can compare a map of land suitability for agriculture from 1961 to 1990, versus the period 2040 to 2069. This first map is the current situation in the Prairie provinces. It shows that a large part of the southern Prairies has been suitable for producing spring grains, essentially cereal crops. Those shades are the intermediate shades from the browns through the greens. The area that we call the grain belt, a large part of southern Saskatchewan, south-eastern Manitoba and southern Alberta, has been suitable for producing cereal crops. To the north, the limitation has been a lack of heat. The growing season has been too short to produce these crops.
If we apply the Canadian climate change model to this map, we find quite a different scenario for the middle part of this century. Now a much larger part of the Prairie provinces are suitable for producing cereal crops. Those intermediate shades now extend through central Saskatchewan and up through northern Alberta. The opportunity exists, therefore, for crop production over a much larger part of the Prairies, assuming that water is available.
The same map shows that now a large part of southern Saskatchewan and southeastern Alberta become unsuitable for crop production. That is indicated by the red shade that you see on this map. The red shades represent landscapes that are too dry to produce crops. Those areas have not existed until now, and we expect a significant part of Saskatchewan and southern Alberta to be too dry to produce crops.
The other challenge we are facing is the increased climate variability, so superimposed on the drying out of the Prairies is an increase in the frequency of climate extremes. The two extremes I am talking about are too much water and too little water. Therefore, flooding on the one hand and drought on the other become quite significant challenges because, whereas we have decades to adjust to a warmer climate, we may have much less time to adjust to the increased climate variability.
Of course, the climate anomaly of greatest concern is drought. The map before you now is of the Prairie provinces for the previous growing season showing the extent of land that has experienced record dry conditions. On this map, the red shade indicates conditions that have never been this dry since climate observations began in the 1880s. You can see that virtually all of central and northern Alberta and western Saskatchewan have never been drier. There never has been a worse drought than that which has occurred over the last three years.
If you are familiar with the Prairies, this kind of image has been familiar. Here is a scene near Outlook, Saskatchewan showing that this Government of Canada stream gauge is no longer functional because the stream has disappeared. Over a large part of this region, the surface water has disappeared.
PFRA, or Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration, a branch of Agriculture Canada, was a government agency created in response to climate concerns. PFRA was created in the 1930s in response to the dust bowl, and has been responsible for the management and rehabilitation of the Prairie landscape since the 1930s. A report produced by PFRA in 2000 indicates that, despite all of the soil conservation that has been practised since the 1930s, the Prairie landscape is still vulnerable to erosion as the result of back-to-back droughts because it is difficult to maintain a residue cover or some kind of stubble cover if there is no water.
The second paragraph in this excerpt from the report indicates that it is difficult for farmers to justify protecting the soil because the probability of severe erosion is once in the lifetime of a farm family. Economically, it is difficult to justify protecting the soil from erosion when it may occur once in your lifetime. However, if we expect more severe drought, we also expect more frequent erosion. As a result of climate change, it may become more cost effective to practise soil conservation.
This scenario is being realized currently. This is a picture I took near Oyen, Alberta, last spring showing the soil drifting across Highway 9 — very close, ironically, to where my grandparents homesteaded. This is a scene that was common in the dust bowl of the 1930s. As a result of the rehabilitation of the Prairie landscape, this scene is less common but it still occurs during droughts. The impact of climate change may be to make this scene more common as a result of more serious drought.
In response to the drought of 1999 to 2002 — and in fact throughout much of Alberta the drought is not yet over — the Alberta government, and in particular the Department of the Environment, developed a drought risk management strategy last year. This is a good example of adaptation to climate change. The politicians in Alberta may not think they are adapting to climate change but, in fact, this represents adaptation to climate change, even though they do not call it climate change. They refer to ``risk management'' and to ``drought.''
The scenario of increased drought as a result of climate change suggests that this kind of risk management will be increasingly necessary as a means of adaptation to climate change. The justification given for this risk management plan was that drought has been addressed historically in an ad hoc way. Governments, provincial and federal, have responded to drought with relief, with aid. However, there is recognition that aid is not a sustainable way of dealing with drought. As a result, the Alberta government, in this case, developed a risk management plan to prepare for the increased frequency of drought as a result of climate change.
Finally, I want to refer to a study that is being conducted at the University of Regina with funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We are looking at the stress that is being imposed on small communities and on farm families in the six rural municipalities shown on this map. A large number of social scientists are involved, and they are examining economic and social stress, but climate change is an element of this study.
Initially, we conducted a survey in the six municipalities, asking the residents for their understanding and perception of climate change. I found the results quite revealing. Only 11 per cent of the respondents did not consider climate change to be a serious issue. In fact, 45 per cent of the respondents thought climate change would be very serious.
Furthermore, we asked the residents of these municipalities what they are doing about climate change. Once again, I thought the results were quite revealing, especially in the farm community. Less than 40 per cent of the farmers said they were not adjusting to climate change. The rest said that they were doing something. In fact, almost 30 per cent of the farmers said that they were doing quite a bit in preparation for climate change.
That is one of the bullets or points in the paper brief that you have. I will complete my presentation by referring to this paper brief and, in particular, the nine points on page one. At point number 8, I suggest that:
Prairie people, and especially prairie farmers, have a relatively large capacity to adapt to climate change because of a history of adaptation to climatic variability.
Very few climates in the world are more variable from season to season and year to year than the Prairie provinces. The history of prairie agriculture has been characterized by adaptation to climate. Even though, in our survey, some 30 per cent of farmers said they were doing nothing about climate change, in fact all farmers who are still on the Prairies have done something about the climate. Of any constituency in Canada, I suggest the Prairie farmers are in the best position to deal with climate change, although they will be seriously challenged and will need a lot of help.
Our first point is that the Prairie provinces are expected to be exposed to the largest increase in temperature of any region, any populated part of Canada. Second, the Prairie provinces are very diverse, all the way from the Rocky Mountains and grasslands of southwestern Alberta, right up to the tundra and bare lands near Churchill, Manitoba. These ecosystems, landscapes communities and economic activities are sensitive to climate and, therefore, sensitive to climate change.
A large part of my presentation dealt with the major impact of global warming in the Prairie provinces being increased aridity — the drying out of the prairies as a result of the loss of water, even though we expect more rain and snow. Higher temperatures provide an opportunity for a longer growing season and, therefore, farming over a larger area, and also a greater diversity of crops. However, this opportunity will be offset by the decreased soil moisture and water supplies. You can argue that water will limit economic activity in the Prairie provinces much more so than any other factor.
Shifts in the variability of the climate, and especially in the frequency of extreme events, will also heavily impact on the people and the economy of the prairies. Already it is the most variable climate in Canada, and it is expected to become more so. It is the only part of Canada where drought is actually a serious hazard. Even though drought occurs in other parts of Canada, it is considered a natural hazard on the prairies.
On the other side of the coin, the most intense rainfalls in the history of Canada have also occurred on the prairies. I have talked to farmers in southern Manitoba, for example, who tell me the reason they buy crop insurance is, number one, for drought and, number two, for flooding. Therefore, if the problem is not drought, it is flooding.
Most of the run-off on the prairies actually comes from the Rocky Mountains. Not much of the water is generated by rainfall on to the prairies. Most of our water, especially in Saskatchewan and Alberta, is derived from glacier and snowmelt in the Rocky Mountains. That is the basis for irrigation in southern Alberta and in western Saskatchewan. All of the cities in Alberta and Saskatchewan derive their water either directly or indirectly from the Rocky Mountains.
The C-CIARN Prairies network, where I am based, has funded research on this problem. We have discovered that, in fact, this source of water from the Rocky Mountains is in serious decline. We expect most of the glaciers to disappear in this century. We have had the luxury in Western Canada of glacial water, and that source is disappearing rapidly. That will require serious adaptation of water management strategies. I know that kind of discussion is occurring presently in southern Alberta.
The impacts of the warmer climate on the boreal forest will be in terms of fire, pests and changes in productivity. These impacts will require significant adaptations of the forest industry and forest management, which is primarily the mandate of provincial government.
I already made the point about the adaptability of Prairie people. Nonetheless, they are vulnerable. Small communities on the Prairies are especially vulnerable because they are already in serious decline and subject to other stresses, particularly economic ones.
The final, but definitely not the least important, issue is research. I want to leave you with the message that planning for adaptation to climate change requires significantly more research because we are just beginning to understand the impacts of climate change. We have an even weaker understanding of the processes by which communities, governments, industry, sectors of the economy, will achieve adaptation to climate change. Therefore, if you remember nothing else from this presentation, please remember that we are in serious need of your support.
I am sure you have heard this argument before: In the bigger picture, only a small proportion of funds are addressed to adaptation to climate change. The focus of the climate change program thus far has been on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and the entire debate over the Kyoto Protocol. If you get a chance to read this brief, you will find that our ninth point includes some recommendations for the funding of research on the adaptation to climate change.
There is an annex to this brief. It contains a description of the Prairie Adaptation Research Collaborative, a research institute based at the University of Regina. We host C-CIARN Prairies. If you have an opportunity to read this description, you will recognize that it is being funded completely by Natural Resources Canada. In fact, it is their initiative. I want to take this opportunity to acknowledge the leadership shown by Natural Resources Canada in the realm of climate change.
The Chairman: Thank you for a most excellent report. One of the last things you said was that there has not been a great deal of work and research done on the concept of adaptation, but a lot has been done on greenhouse gases and Kyoto, and so on. This committee was formed precisely to do this study. We felt there had not been very much done, and we wanted to find out the extent to which there had been research. Some of our recommendations, when we get to that, will be based on what we find. That is why we are here.
I would now turn to Mr. Cohen. I must say I hope his presentation is a bit more positive, because Dr. Sauchyn's remarks have left us with the feeling that he is not holding out a great deal of hope for people in agriculture in Western Canada, particularly in 50 years' time. My ears are open for something positive.
Mr. Stewart Cohen, Scientific Advisor, British Columbia Region, Canadian Climate Change Impact and Adaptation Research Network: Mr. Chairman and senators, my message will talk about challenges; I will avoid the topic of hope. However, we can certainly discuss that afterwards.
I am pleased to be here on behalf of C-CIARN British Columbia. C-CIARN British Columbia is hosted by the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia. The other partners are the Adaptation and Impacts Research Group of Environment Canada and the British Columbia Ministry of Water, Land and Air Protection. There is also an advisory committee that includes representation from universities in British Columbia, other government departments, First Nations and community organizations. There is a listing of the members of the advisory committee at the back of the slide deck which has been provided to you.
I will begin by giving a summary of the main points from the paper briefing. The first point is that, similar to what Mr. Sauchyn described in the Prairies, there has been an observed increase in temperature and precipitation in British Columbia. This observed warming has affected growing season length, and also appears to be implicated in the recent epidemic of the mountain pine beetle. I will talk some more about that in a moment.
Projected impacts of future climate change include continued lengthening of the growing season, increased crop water demand and increased risk of fire and pest infestations. There are a number of regional concerns in different parts of the province. Certainly, in northeastern British Columbia, there are concerns about forest productivity and risks to forest growth. The Okanagan region is dependent on irrigation for agriculture. Within the Georgia basin region, there are concerns about flood risks. On the coastal zone, there are concerns about coastal erosion and fisheries.
Similar to what Mr. Sauchyn has mentioned, there is a need for additional research efforts to better understand adaptation to climate change and how this could affect resource management and regional development.
I should like to provide more details on climate trends in British Columbia and to focus on two cases that I hope will be of interest. The first one is water issues in the Okanagan and Columbia region and how they will affect agricultural and other water users, and the second is the forestry issue, focusing not only on pests and fire but also on the implications of increased temperature on forest management choices. Finally, I will discuss the opportunities that are available to expand the dialogue between researchers and decision-makers at the local level, which we hope C-CIARN B.C. will be able to do.
I will begin with a series of slides from a document, produced by the British Columbia Ministry of Water, Land and Air Protection, showing some of the recent climate trends in B.C. The first slide shows increases in average temperatures throughout the last century. You can see that the entire province has warmed, particularly the inland and northern regions. The coastal region has warmed by about half a degree. This warming has not been equal in all seasons nor at all times of day. The map on this slide illustrates how the night-time minimum temperatures have increased considerably more than the daytime maximum temperatures have, and in some regions no trends have been detected for daytime maximum temperatures.
Mr. Sauchyn talked about glacier retreat. We are certainly seeing that in British Columbia. This photograph shows the Wedgemont Glacier near Whistler, taken in 1979, and the other photograph is taken from approximately the same location, but 20 years later. You can see there has been a retreat both at the terminus and also halfway up the slope. This is part of a worldwide trend in glacier retreats.
The diagram, which was taken from the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change report, the IPCC, lists trends in glacier retreat in many Arctic countries but also areas such as Kenya, Peru and Chile. The scale is in kilometres, so each horizontal line represents a kilometre. You will notice that, for most of these glaciers, the line is sloping downward as we head towards the present, indicating a retreat. You will see this particular glacier, the Wedgemont, listed about halfway down the page. There is a red line sloping downward, and that decline appears to be a kilometre and a half.
While temperature has increased in British Columbia, precipitation has also increased. This map shows an increase of between 2 and 4 per cent per decade over the 20th century, at least in southern regions of British Columbia. We have not been able to detect a significant statistical trend in the north.
There have been some trends detected in the melt of ice. Clearly, this is a result of warming temperatures. This figure shows the change in first melt over a period of approximately 50 years, and the numbers are in days per decade. Therefore, in the southern interior and in the north, melt is occurring earlier by approximately one week per decade over this 50-year period, so basically a little over a month in most of these locations.
I will turn now to the first case I wanted to illustrate, which is on water management and climate change in the Okanagan and Columbia regions of southern and southeastern B.C. I would like to begin with some information provided by the University of Washington in Seattle. They have been looking at implications for the management of water resources on the entire Columbia Basin system, which is a transboundary system. The headwaters of the river are in British Columbia, but the water flows through the states of Washington, Montana and Idaho, and the terminus of that watershed is in Oregon. There has been considerable development in this watershed, many large reservoirs and smaller ones, and because of that there are many objectives that this watershed is trying to achieve. In the winter, the key objective is hydro-power production. In the summer, there are many objectives to be achieved, including flood control, hydro-power production — much of it for export to California — irrigation to support agriculture largely in the Snake River region in Idaho, in-stream flow to support fisheries, and recreation.
The University of Washington has been working on this project for a number of years, and they have come to the conclusion through their hydrological work that, in a climate change, it would be expected that flows would begin to increase earlier in the spring than they do now because of earlier snowmelt. On the graph, the dash line shows the average present stream flow, with the peak occurring in June. The various scenarios that they have tested are shown in the broader black curve, and they show an earlier peak of approximately one month, with greater flows taking place in the winter and early spring, and consequently less flow through the stream channels in the summer and early fall months. This means that less water in summer will be available to support irrigation, urban use, fisheries protection and energy production. More water in the winter will be available to produce energy in the winter, but it may also create additional flood risks.
In addition to the hydrological work that the University of Washington have been doing, they have also developed a water management system model. With that model, they wanted to test how well these various objectives would be achieved under different scenarios of climate change. They would compute reliability scores up to 100. In this figure, there are eight different objectives. For example, the one on the left is for firm energy production. That is for customers who are paying a premium to have guaranteed production of hydro-electricity. The black bar shows the estimate from the model under current climate conditions, which is approximately 98 per cent reliability of the system to produce electricity. The red bar is based on a climate scenario from a German climate model, the ECHAM4. This scenario is warmer than current climate and a bit drier. The blue one is from an American model, the PCM, and is also warmer but is relatively wet. The warm, dry case shows a decline in reliability of 10 per cent for firm energy, and the warm wet case shows little change.
As you look through the rest of the objectives, you can see that the warm, dry case results in declines in reliability in many objectives, such as fish flows and Snake River irrigation. There would be an improvement in reliability for navigation and for flood control. This creates a challenge for water managers who are trying to manage a system to meet many different objectives at the same time. How will they do this when faced with a change in the resource that they are trying to manage?
In Canada, we wanted to organize a case study that could look specifically at Canadian conditions, in the hope that it would contribute to a transboundary dialogue with our colleagues at the University of Washington. We have begun with a study of the Okanagan region in B.C., which, as you know, is highly dependent on irrigation for agriculture — primarily for fruit growing. There is also a growing population in Kelowna and Vernon, and these combined stresses are beginning to create difficulties for the management of water in this region.
It is expected that, under future climate conditions, there will be an increase in the length of the growing season. In this graph, there are calculations of a unit known as the ``growing degree day,'' which is the accumulation of degrees above a certain base threshold for crops. In this case, it is 5 degrees Celsius.
The black curve on the bottom represents the estimate for current climate: The red curve on the top is for the 2080s. If you compare April's current climate, which has about 100-degree days, towards the end of this century you will be able to get that amount of heat in March. The growing season will advance by about one month. In the middle of the growing season, there would be an increase in growing degree days of about 20 per cent. The result would be a longer growing season and a warmer season. The question is: Will the water be there?
A group at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada located in Summerland, British Columbia, worked on developing a crop water demand model, and their results are shown in this table. First, there are four irrigation districts represented, all in the southern part of the Okanagan. Licensed allocations are shown in the first column in millions of acre-feet per year. The reported use is shown in the next column from the late 1990s. As you can see, in some cases, reported use is well below allocation but, in the case of Penticton, it is close to the allocation limit.
The next two columns show the estimates from the crop water demand model, which is dependent on evapo- transpiration, which is a temperature-dependent indicator. In the case of Penticton, the 1961 to 1990 estimate is 6.6 million acre-feet, but for the future climate it goes up to 9.1 million acre-feet, exceeding the licensed allocation that Penticton currently has.
In the case of Summerland, the projected crop water demand almost reaches the licensed allocation. This creates a significant challenge for those who believe that irrigation will be an important adaptation strategy for agriculture to respond to a longer and warmer growing season.
At the same time that Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada did their work, a group that I was part of was looking at stream-flow hydrology for a number of creeks in the Okanagan region. I will show two examples: One is for Dave's Creek near Kelowna and the other is for Whiteman Creek near Vernon. For Dave's Creek, the blue area represents the estimates for the current period of record and the other curves, green, red and black, show projections for future time. You can see, as we progress through the century, the peak flow from snowmelt occurs earlier and earlier and, in this case, also occurs lower. There will be more water in the stream channel in the winter and early spring than there is currently and, consequently, there will be less water during the growing season of May, June, July, and August.
In the case of Whiteman Creek, there will also be an earlier start to the snowmelt period but the peak will still be at the same height as we currently observe. This is probably because this creek has a higher elevation, and so the snow has not been depleted more rapidly but, rather, it has just been depleted earlier. Again, there will be more water flowing through the system in the spring and less water flowing in the growing season.
We wanted to bring these scenarios to water managers in the region and to begin a dialogue on adaptation. Basically, the question that we asked them was: What if this were the new hydrograph for your irrigation system, for your municipal system and for your fisheries habitat? How would you feel about prospects for adaptation? What options would you prefer? Would this make a difference to the way in which you would propose to manage this resource? We held a series of focus group meetings in 2001. This study was supported by the Climate Change Action Fund. These various local water managers raised a number of options. There was no attempt to achieve a consensus; we just wanted to hear their views. There was a preference for some structural measures, especially to increase storage, such as building dams at higher elevations. There was also some interest in social measures, such as purchasing water licences. These seemed to be preferred over institutional measures, such as reorganizing water management institutions to bring them to a regional or basin-wide level.
Stakeholders did identify the implications of some of these choices. Some of them would involve high costs, some might have side effects on fisheries, and some might involve restricting individual development choices. We felt, at the end of the exercise, that we were beginning to see some ideas develop on how we might connect global science to global decision-making.
With our colleagues at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, we have initiated a joint study that merges the hydrologic work and the work on crop water use. This diagram provides a picture of the plan that we have. The study is still in progress. We are hoping that we will be able to link the climate scenarios and the hydrologic scenarios; scenarios of water demand and supply, for irrigation; and scenarios of land-use change. Will cropland or urban lands expand during the scenario period through this century?
In addition, we are looking at the role of local institutions in being proactive about water management. We are doing interviews with, for example, stakeholders in the southeast Kelowna irrigation district who have already instituted a program of metering for irrigation. We are asking the question: Why did you make this decision? How did this come about? How have you measured success in reducing demand for water? We are doing interviews with several of these cases to understand their decision-making processes today.
We are also investigating the costs of certain adaptation options. Some of them are demand side, such as more widespread use of metering, and some are supply side, such as building expanded reservoir storage or pumping water from Okanagan Lake to higher elevations. What are the costs? What are the potential water savings for additional storage? Will any of these options be enough to reduce the region's vulnerability, or will there be a need to use more than one?
We hope all this information can then inform a dialogue process on regional water management with water managers and water users throughout the region. We hope that, by this time next year, we will have some results to report.
I would now like to turn to the second case that I wish to present, which is on forest management and climate change in interior and northern British Columbia. I shall begin with a photograph that, perhaps, a number of you have already seen. This photograph was taken in the central interior of British Columbia, showing an example of how widespread the damage has been from the mountain pine beetle. From the surface, it looks like a beautiful picture of red trees, but these are all damaged and diseased trees that are dying because of the beetle.
The Canadian forest service has been doing some research on the mountain pine beetle. This map shows where these outbreaks have been occurring. A couple of interesting climate indicators seem to be at work here. One is that we do not see many outbreaks in areas where the summers are relatively cool. That is the areas shaded in orange, tending to be higher elevation regions. The second is that we do not see many where the winter minimums are below minus 40 degrees Celsius, which is shown as the area within the black line. What has happened in the last couple of years is that there have been warm winters without these cold winter temperatures. Thus the beetles have been surviving the winters, and they have been able to expand their area of damage. The Canadian forest service has documented the recent outbreak as reaching close to 1,500,000 or 1.5 million hectares.
There are two things that are happening here: Not only have the winters been warm enough for the beetle to survive but also the other curve, shown with the blue dots, is showing that susceptible pine trees, lodgepole pine, have been expanding in the area. This has been a management decision. It was obviously taken for reasons of efficiency and productivity, but that, combined with the warming winter, has created a new vulnerability on the ground leading to this outbreak.
What about the future? This work by the Canadian forest service is an estimate of climactic suitability for the mountain pine beetle, estimated for the past and the future. Thus, there are four time slices here of 30 years each. The maps on the top show calculations for 1941 to 1970, and then 1971 to 2000, and the bottom two maps are projections for the future climate. The categories in light yellow and orange, representing high and extreme climactic suitability, are seen to be expanding in the projections to the point that they dominate all of the low elevation regions in the B.C. interior — south, central and north.
Similarly, there has also been some work done, looking at another indicator called the fire weather index. This is from a study done several years ago as part of a larger project called the Mackenzie Basin Impact Study. I understand that Aynslie Ogden, who did a presentation for C-CIARN north for your committee in December, cited this study. There were a number of projections within this study, and one was the projection of changes to fire weather.
Here in this slide, eight time periods are shown. Just for your reference, Great Slave Lake is that elongated blue shape on the top right corner in each map. Just below Great Slave Lake that is northern Alberta, and to the left is northeastern British Columbia. The fire weather index calculations here are split into three categories: green is low, blue is medium and red is high. As this simulation progresses from the 1980s down to the 2050s, you can see the area of red expanding, beginning in northern Alberta and making its way towards the west into British Columbia.
In the case of the mountain pine beetle, climate suitability and the case of the fire weather index, there are no assumptions made here about any change in management, about any proactive adaptation strategy. What these two diagrams represent are changes in climate risk in scenarios of climate change.
The British Columbia Ministry of Forests has undertaken another interesting project related to forestry and climate. This one is considering the question of where does one plant a seedling, given the knowledge of the elevation of the tree of origin. If you had a tree at 500 metres in elevation and it produced some seeds, and you wanted to replant after logging or after a fire or after a pest outbreak, should you plant that seed at the same elevation of the tree of origin, say at 500 metres, or should you plant it at a lower elevation or a higher one? How well would that tree do?
A whole series of test plots are shown here. The horizontal scale, which is labelled ``elevational transfer'' begins at zero, which means that you planted the seed at the same elevation as the tree of origin. The positive numbers toward the right means that you planted the seeds at higher elevations. The negative numbers mean that you planted at a lower elevation. On the vertical axis is a measure of the success of this planting. This is in volumes per hectare, so it is yield, changes in per cent. Again, zero means no change from current yield. Positive numbers mean you have done better, you have improved; negative numbers mean it was a mistake to plant the seed there, and you are getting less yield.
This curve is statistically fitted over this range of points to give some idea of whether there is a relationship between the elevation at which you planted the seed compared to the origin, and the yield. If there had been no change in climate, given that the age of these trees may have been 30, 40, 50 years, then you would see that curve do its best at a zero elevational transfer. In other words, you are planting at no change in elevation. In fact, this curve does not reach its peak at zero; it reaches its peak at around 200 to 300 metres higher up than the tree of origin. That means that if you want to plant a tree, you had better plant it higher up in order to do as well or better in your yield in the future.
As you go up in elevation, temperatures cool; usually under dry conditions, about six degrees per kilometre. Here at 300 metres, you are talking about one and two degrees of warming that that tree has experienced during its lifetime between the time the original tree began to grow and the time that the seed was produced: that same seed that the forest manager now has to decide where to plant.
The Chairman: Or do you need a new species?
Mr. Cohen: That is another question. Should you change species? This creates a number of challenges for forest managers. They have to deal with these changes in risks, but they also have to deal with these changes in potential, given the increase in temperature.
In these two cases, plus in the first examples of the trends that I have shown you, what has research identified? First, that B.C. is already experiencing climate change: temperatures are increasing, and precipitation is increasing. Glaciers are receding. They are affecting summertime water supplies similar to what Mr. Sauchyn just mentioned.
Studies of future climate change are showing that the water supply will be affected, particularly by changes in the timing of snowmelt. Watersheds will likely have more water in the winter and less in the summer. At this time, there would not be any clear statements about whether total water supplies during the year would be higher or lower. There is still uncertainty on that point but there is fairly high confidence on the issue of timing change. Another point is that growing seasons will lengthen and become warmer. Forest pests and fire risks will likely increase in interior British Columbia and expand to higher elevations and latitudes.
At the same time that research is telling us some things, it is also asking new questions. First, how will water supply and demand change, and what will that mean for the management of a water resource that has to achieve many objectives, including supporting irrigation, fisheries, providing electricity and flood control? For instance, in dealing with these objectives, managers will not only need to be concerned about the change in the raw resource, they will also have to recognize that there will be population changes, land use changes, and these could limit our ability to adapt. It is clear that in an adaptation study, all of these elements will need to be considered together.
Indeed, climate change itself may constrain possible adaptation strategies for other users, such as irrigated agriculture. How will climate change alter forest management? The experiments with the lodgepole pine seedlings demonstrate that reforestation plans will need to consider climate changes over the lifetime of newly planted trees. How will this affect future harvest levels? What will the impacts be on the communities supported by them?
That leads to this broad question about climate risks and how they will change for communities. The question that should be asked today is: Are businesses and governments making planning decisions and management decisions based on the assumption that climate will not change?
How can uncertain climate scenarios be incorporated into these assessments of risks and opportunities? Again, scenarios are uncertain because of the nature of the state of the art of climate science. It is particularly difficult to downscale from global climate models to questions of regional climate. It is particularly difficult in British Columbia because of the complex terrain. Therefore, we will never assign probabilities to these scenarios. We can indicate to stakeholders the origin of these scenarios, that they have been produced by the best practices of the atmospheric scientists who have produced them, but we cannot assign probabilities to them.
What we hope that C-CIARN British Columbia will be able to do is expand the dialogue on climate impacts and adaptation. C-CIARN B.C. and its partners have already held workshops with academic researchers at UBC and Okanagan College, and more are planned with other schools. There have also been regional workshops that aimed to attract a broader base, not just in academia but also among stakeholders and local managers of resources. A very successful meeting was held in Cranbrook two weeks ago, and one is planned for Prince George in two weeks.
Through this process, we are hearing concerns from stakeholders and researchers in a number of areas. The first one is the need for expanded monitoring programs. We are not just talking about monitoring of climate, we are talking about monitoring of the state of the resource: water, fish, crop development, forests, et cetera. There are concerns about their vulnerabilities, not just of the resource itself but vulnerabilities of communities, regional economies and questions about adaptation options. This leads to greater concerns about the larger impacts on community health and on lifestyle and, finally, the unknown potential for surprise impacts. It is important for these kinds of studies to maintain a future focus, even though future climate is uncertain because, in this way perhaps, the potential for surprise can be identified.
Finally, C-CIARN British Columbia is trying to promote new research opportunities in the region. By encouraging stakeholder participation in the earliest phases of the research, we want to promote an interdisciplinary collaboration as well as collaboration between researchers and practitioners in various fields of resource management. There is a very important role for local knowledge in learning about how a region might adapt to climate change.
Second, we hope that these new opportunities will lead to the identification of potential new vulnerabilities or adaptation opportunities that could be studied. This effort to study adaptation is about becoming more resilient to future as well as current climate variability and risks.
I mentioned that, at the end of the slide deck, I would provide a list of our advisory affiliates. They have been important in providing advice on how to connect the climate change issue with a wide range of potential researchers and stakeholders in the region. This is the local Web site address for CIARN British Columbia.
The Chairman: Thank you very much for a most excellent presentation.
Mr. Sauchyn, on one of your early slides, you showed that, by the year 2040, the southern part of the Prairies would be dry, and you said about 50 per cent of them would be dry. You then went on to talk about some of the positive effects of that. One of the positive effects is that it will be possible to have a longer growing season for certain crops.
I am hoping that there are many other advantages to this dry land, in terms of both farmers and those in forestry. Can you tell us what are some of the other advantages of this longer growing season and having 50 per cent of the province dry by the year 2040?
Mr. Sauchyn: The advantages of a longer growing season, of course, is that it is possible to produce warm season crops and, therefore, a greater diversity of crop production and the potential for having two crops in one year. You can use the analogy of the kind of agriculture that is practised to the south, in the Midwest or the Central Plains of the United States. We already have farmers on the Prairies who are experimenting with warm season crops such as pulse crops. That new opportunity arises. However, the limitation is the supply of water.
The Chairman: It may not be an advantage, given the glacial melt.
Mr. Sauchyn: Water management becomes the critical issue under this new climate.
The Chairman: Where else can the water come from if we stop getting water from the glaciers? Normal precipitation has never been high, you told us, and one cannot go out to the sea and desalinate salt water. Where will the new water come from?
Mr. Sauchyn: One of the two alternate sources would be groundwater. Compared to other states and provinces, the Prairies do not make extensive use of groundwater. Much of the water underground is of poor quality on the Prairies, however.
The Chairman: It is all gas and oil.
Mr. Sauchyn: You can expect there will be much greater pressure to develop the groundwater.
The other source is further north. On the shield in northern Saskatchewan and Manitoba, there is a lot of water, but the problem is moving that water to the southern part of the prairie provinces. I am sure engineers are considering those kinds of technical solutions. However, the social scientists would prefer to move the people north to where the water is. Engineers would prefer to move the water south to where the people currently are.
Senator Wiebe: By both of your presentations, I am led to assume that, with regard to Western Canada, global warming will mean a lack of water. Yet, our world will never lose the water we have now unless we do as some oil companies in Alberta do and pump it into the ground. However, I do not want to discuss that ridiculous practice right now.
In order to have water, you must have heat. Heat evaporates the water; it forms clouds and we then have rain. As our glaciers melt, that water goes into our oceans. Therefore, the land mass will shrink and we will have more water, due not only to the melting of glaciers but also of the ice cap, et cetera.
Why will we in the south and west parts of Canada not have the advantage of that precipitation? Much of our precipitation in the West comes over the mountains as a result of evaporation on the oceans. I disagree a little bit with your presentations. Glaciers have had an effect on the long-term supply of surface water in the West. However, I live along the South Saskatchewan River. There, our biggest concern is the amount of snowfall in the mountains, because that dictates how much water we will have available the following year. It was not the melting of glaciers that provided us with water, but the precipitation that fell.
We are assuming that global warming equates to dry. Could it also mean the opposite? Could it also mean wet? The Palliser Triangle, the area from Winnipeg to Calgary to Saskatoon, is depicted on this map. Many years ago, Palliser said that this was a desert, and would not recommend that anyone try to farm there. Look at how farmers have adapted over the years in that desert.
Are we looking at the worst-case scenario, or could jet streams change as a result of global warning, bringing more water to our area? Could be become a tropic rather than a desert?
Mr. Sauchyn: With regard to the Palliser Triangle, Texas is a geographic analogy of a possible future climate. We think of West Texas as a desert, yet it gets a lot more rainfall than southern Alberta, because they are close to the Gulf of Mexico. However, they lose much more water than southern Alberta. Therefore, the reason that west Texas is as dry as it is is that the rate of evaporation is so high.
You are right: We expect to have more rainfall and snowfall in the Prairies in the future. However, in order to use it we would have to keep it from going back into the air.
You are also right that there will be years in which we benefit from quite a bit more precipitation. Just as there will be serious droughts, there will also be unusually wet years in the future if the climate change forecasts are correct. The challenge is to find a way to capture that increased water to get us through the dry years.
You mentioned John Palliser. In our brief, I referred to some research that was done at PARC, the Prairie Adaptation Research Collaborative, in which we studied drought before the Prairies were settled. We went to the Cypress Hills of southern Saskatchewan, which are forested, and looked at tree rings. Trees in that region grow according to how much rain falls. We found that there was a drought from 1855 to 1867, a drought of 12 years' duration, and John Palliser came through right in the middle of that 12-year drought.
We also found that the twentieth century was unusually wet. What made the climate of the twentieth century unique is that there were some bad droughts, but they each lasted only a single year — 1937, 1961, 1984 and 1988 — until the end of the century and the current drought.
The fact is that our parents, grandparents and great grandparents chose the best possible century in which to settle the Prairies. Before that, it was much drier, and we are expecting much drier conditions in the future.
Mr. Cohen: It is important to make a distinction between hydrological drought and agricultural drought. They both represent shortages of water, but in different parts of the system.
Agricultural drought means that you have a shortage of water where the crop is, so you are thinking about soil moisture conditions, and that is dependent upon the precipitation on a particular piece of land.
Hydrological drought is dependent upon precipitation in the source region of those rivers. As Senator Wiebe said, the South Saskatchewan River is very dependent on snowmelt from the Rockies. There could be tremendous variability in snowmelt from year to year, and so the river will rise and fall. However, how much precipitation a farmer needs is dependent on the soil moisture conditions on his land. In a climate change, it is clear that with an increase in temperature the probability of agricultural drought will increase. There cannot be the same certainty about hydrological drought because of the uncertainty around predicting future snow pack in the Rockies.
I would like to make a point about the distinction between total water supply and changes in its timing and distribution. In the case we have seen in B.C., we cannot make a clear statement about changes in totals. However, we can make one about changes in timing. Since the snow will melt sooner, water will flow through the system sooner. That will mean more water in April and May and less in July and August. This is a consistent result from many watersheds for which snowmelt is an important component. Throughout North America, this consistent change in timing has come through.
It is not clear what that means for the provision of irrigation services because it will depend on how institutions that are responsible for this resource balance that objective with the other objectives it needs to meet.
Senator Wiebe: As you mentioned, the main reason this committee was formed was to listen to people such as yourselves in order that we can make recommendations about how we can adapt to the climate change that is happening.
Mr. Sauchyn, in your brief you include adaptation options. There are two areas on which I would like you to elaborate, those being to modify the events and to prevent the effects. Are ``the events'' the weather or the effects? How do we modify that?
Mr. Sauchyn: In that diagram, the events refer to the weather, and the means by which you modify the weather is to try to reverse the impact we are already experiencing. The box that says ``modify the events'' refers to controlling greenhouse gas emissions, which is the primary cause of the current climate change.
Senator Wiebe: How do we interpret ``prevent the effects''? Does that refer to the same thing, greenhouse gases?
Mr. Sauchyn: You can replace effects with impacts, so preventing the effects is adaptation.
I want to add that Senator Wiebe is correct in that it is snowfall in the Rocky Mountains that is the main source of water for the western Prairies, but the climate change models show that in the Rockies there will be decreasing snowfall but increased rainfall. That has already been realized. If you have been out in the Rockies this winter, you will see that they have marginal snowpack but they have had some rain. As Dr. Cohen was saying, that differences in the type and timing of rainfall is the challenge. Even though the total amount of rainfall and precipitation may stay the same or increase, the type and timing is changing, and that is where the challenge lies.
Senator Fairbairn: I listened to your presentations with a great deal of sadness, because almost everything you have said has described life in southwestern Alberta, not just for one or two years but for a number of years. Sometimes we see stories in the media about the greatest drought of all time, as we have in this past year. It certainly was profound. People sometimes forget that those kinds of conditions have existed not just for one year but for a number of years. The water that, oddly enough, came to my area, southwestern Alberta, this summer certainly helped to a degree with reservoirs, but it came at the wrong time. It swept out seedlings. In the fall, when it was supposed to be hot for that final spurt of growth in much of which we grow, it was very cold and wet, so that crops such as potatoes and sugar beets were left rotting in the fields.
What you are doing is fantastic. The only way we will help these communities at high risk with this kind of weather, the small farming communities, is to develop quickly, as one of you mentioned, greater research in how the heck to deal with the situation. You have the heat and you cannot get the moisture.
Have you any knowledge of the Water Institute that has been developing at the University of Lethbridge? I would not say it was started in desperation, but that is probably close. Much work is being done. If we do not get the moisture in our areas, how do we find a substitute?
Several years ago, when we were in an absolute disaster situation, and people were asking whether we could sink pipes or something and get the groundwater out, many people were sinking a lot of things into the ground and they were just getting dust up. There was not any moisture. I know you cannot answer that question, but give it a try. How can you plan a future in this part of Canada when, even as we listen to some of the things you are saying, you cannot maintain water levels?
Mr. Sauchyn: You are right; I do not have a solution. However, we are exploring the options with the Water Institute for Semi-arid Ecosystems, this new research centre at the University of Lethbridge. We are exploring the options with Alberta Environment, with Environment Canada, and with the irrigation districts in southern Alberta.
Seventy per cent of the consumptive water use in southern Alberta is by the irrigation districts. There are something like 300 water licences in southern Alberta. The first seven were the irrigation districts. The way in which water is licensed and allocated in southern Alberta is first come, first served. This approach was reconsidered in 2001. Alberta Environment was faced with a situation where it was about to cancel hundreds of water licences because it had to recognize the right of the irrigators who were there first. As it turned out, the irrigators realized that this was not feasible. They were not about to retain their water licences when their neighbours and the people in the towns and cities were being cut off. A compromise was struck.
The bottom line is that there must be much more flexibility in our institutions, because we are looking at a future that not only is drier but is much more variable, where water will be much less reliable. There will be years when there is flooding, but there will be many more years when water is lacking.
Government institutions, managers and planners have to ensure that policies and programs do not restrict the flexibility of the farmers and the small communities. They must be able to adapt, and in some cases our existing programs and policies constrain that process of adaptation.
Senator Fairbairn: In response to that, in 2001, in that southwestern corner of Alberta, people saw that what they were going to get would not be greatly significant for them, and they would be able to take off a crop, so for the first time they had permission to lease their water quota to their neighbour if the neighbour showed that they were in a better position to take advantage of it. I think that may have been the first time that that was done in that way, certainly in recent memory if at all. That was very helpful. It was a different way of doing things.
In several weeks we will be going out on the road to visit points in Western Canada. Everybody in this committee is struck with the question of the ability, whether through management or whatever, of these communities to stay alive, to be able to retain their populations, not only with the pressures that we are already seeing to a degree, but also with the ones we are seeing down the road. Often, all of this is seen as an agricultural issue, which of course it is, but it also has an impact as a humanity and social issue and, indeed, an economic issue, if small communities start to disappear.
Finally, a question that came to my mind this summer, with all of this going on, was how we as a nation will persuade our young people that it is worth the effort to stay on land where they have seen their parents have such a disastrous experience. What do we have to offer? I hope it is through excitement generated by research. We have diversified about as much as we can, and further, perhaps, into alpacas and lamas and so forth that we are raising in southern Alberta. How do you tell a young person to hang in, in the face of the details and the prognostications that we are talking about tonight?
Mr. Sauchyn: I am a scientist, and I cannot answer that question. You raised a number of very good points, and it illustrated that climate change is just one factor. We need to consider climate change in the context of all the other economic and social factors that are influencing these communities. Many of these communities are in such a tenuous situation that a bad year, or a series of bad years, will just push them over the edge.
Mr. Cohen: Senator Fairbairn, you are raising a very big topic here, and it has to do with how we define the capacity of a place to adapt to some kind of stress or risk. Adaptive capacity has many elements: some are technical, institutional, economic and social. There are many examples from the past of how regions and communities have adapted to droughts and floods and the like. The question is this: How will climate change challenge a region's adaptive capacities? Part of the adaptive capacity, not just for the Prairies but also for Canada as a whole, has to do with our knowledge base — universities, governments, communities, engineers and everyone else — to devote some of their time, talent and resources to dealing with this futures kind of question. As Mr. Sauchyn has said, many things will change in the future besides climate.
This kind of research is interdisciplinary. It crosses the scales between global, national and local, but it does not have a natural home in a university setting. An investment is needed in the capacity to do this kind of research over the long term, to bring together people who have the different sources of data, knowledge bases, experiences, tools, so we can address this question of what difference climate change will make to future development. I said I would not talk about hope. What do scientists know about hope? Scientists know something about studying different pathways, and are appreciating what social scientists are doing when they try to create dialogue, stories, and narratives that futures are not preordained. Some people talk about back-casting in that respect.
If we can create a community around this issue to learn how climate change matters to adaptive capacity in all of its forms, therein lies the first step in creating hope because you empower regions to use their own experience, knowledge and tools as partners with those who do research for a living, and thus develop what I call the scientist-stakeholders collaborative. It can operate at different levels. Certainly, we have the capability to bring these tools and experiences together, but it has to be someone's job to do that. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of this issue, it often falls between the cracks of sustained support for developing as a kind of professional ethic or professional community.
The Chairman: Is there a real role for government in coordinating and administering this as well?
Mr. Cohen: We are also talking about research leadership, which can come from a number of places such as government, universities or even non-government organizations. However, they need to have sustained resources to do that.
In December, Mr. Duinker, who was a witness here, talked about research chairs at universities, which I believe is an important part of a solution to gain Canada's capacity to do research in our backyard on this issue. Similar kinds of incentives need to be created in other communities so that people will have an opportunity to devote considerable professional time in dealing with this issue. If you have that, then you provide an opportunity for shared learning experiences and hope.
Senator Fairbairn: I have a final comment. In the very presentation that you have both given tonight, at a time when we have gone through quite a period of thinking of climate change as being something that has had to do with other forms of natural resources, you are telling us, and anyone who is watching, how much broader climate change is than just one issue. However, it is being seen more dramatically at the level we are talking about, the growth of food, than perhaps anywhere else. I thank you for that.
Senator Gustafson: You made mention of public policy. I drove from Estevan, Saskatchewan to Vulcan, Alberta and back two days ago, and I was not impressed with what I saw. That takes in the Prairies along the border. One thing I see, for instance, is that many farmers are going back to summer fallows. For many years, we preached continuous cropping so that the soil does not blow away when we get these drought periods. Today there is a lot of summer fallow between Vulcan, Alberta and Regina, Saskatchewan, or 50 miles west of there. I was very surprised.
Why are they doing that? I talked to a neighbour the other day — I farmed for 50 years and still do — and he said that he thought he would go back to summer fallow because he cannot afford the input costs any more. Public policy, as you mentioned, is so important in this whole issue of dealing with drought.
This committee did what I considered to be a very excellent study, and we came up with a report entitled: ``Canadian Farmers at Risk.'' Many who are here today travelled to Europe and to the United States and looked at farmers' situations therer. Some of the things these other countries are doing struck me as being positive. We hear much talk about subsidies and how they are going to get off the subsidies, but in my opinion that will not happen. In Europe, the U.S. and some of the smaller countries, they are combining rural development, environment and agriculture under one caption. They are basically saying that the farmers alone cannot afford to look after the land. It will take all of society to become conscious of what is happening to the environmental situation of our land. Without using quite those words, you pointed out very well the problems that we are facing.
There are other examples. Let us use the example of fertilizer: perhaps we are using too much. We have pest controls and sprays, and that all comes under the caption of concern for the environment and what we are doing to deal with some very serious problems. Public policy, in my thinking, is so important. How do we make the Canadian public, our provincial and federal governments and the people who have influence, aware of what we are facing?
Mr. Sauchyn: Climate change is ultimately a social issue, not a scientific one, and it is a major public policy issue. We have created the problem, or at least we have increased the rate of climate change, and we must deal with the impacts. It is ultimately a social issue.
I agree entirely that farmers, especially on the Prairies are amazingly resilient, and they do what they have to do to stick around.
I was on CBC Newsworld in the spring, and I said something like ``Farmers have to adapt,'' and my uncle who farms in Alberta saw that on TV. The next time I saw my uncle, he asked what I expected him to do.
There is only so much the farmers can do. Ultimately, the management of the resource, which is the soil, water and vegetation, is the responsibility of the people of Canada.
The Chairman: Earlier, in response to Senator Fairbairn, you said that you felt one of the things that has to happen in relation to adaptation is that farmers must have the freedom to be able to adjust and adapt. You went on to say that you felt there were certain rules and procedures in place that were preventing them from doing so, and that that had to change. What rules, regulations, bylaws or whatever is in place now are inhibiting farmers from being able to adapt to climate change?
Mr. Sauchyn: I cannot talk specifics off the top of my head. I am sure there are people here much better qualified than I to speak to that. It is not just in relation to climate change. Historically, there were situations where government policy has produced undesirable effects — summer fallow being a case in point, or expansion of agriculture into marginal land — that has been a response to public policy. There is a long history in agriculture of the undesirable effects of public policy.
In general, however, we must enable the farmers and ranchers to deal with climate change. As an example, this past winter I was sitting in a pub in Medicine Hat with a bunch of local ranchers. They had seriously culled their herds, which is a serious action because they have lost their breeding stock. I assumed they were doing this for economic reasons. They said they were trying to preserve the grass. People accuse the farmers of raping the land, but they realize if they are to sustain agriculture in the area, they have to sustain the landscape, the grass and resources. As individual farmers and ranchers, there is only so much they can do.
Senator LaPierre: I hardly know what you are talking about. Therefore, I am a good person to listen to you. I am a typical Canadian. I know that there are farmers. I know that there are droughts. I know that there are many other issues affecting farmers. I am not too sure what can be done about it. I have one question and one scenario.
My question has to do with the Aboriginal peoples who live in the provinces you are talking about: Do the same conditions prevail on the reserves of the Aboriginal people? If we talk about that ability, there is probably no one on the planet who is better able to adapt than the Aboriginal peoples. As a consequence, I would like to know whether climatic conditions, or whatever you are talking about, affects their lives and what will happen to them in the process?
Mr. Cohen: There was an earlier presentation by Aynslie Ogden from C-CIARN North who talked about the Aboriginal peoples in the Arctic. Relating some of their stories from their recent observations of how the land has been changing, there was one quote that was something about the earth seems to be speeding up. There is recognition of changes in seasons, changes in characters of the ice. At one time, they were assuming that the cause of this was something that was local. However, as a result of extensive dialogue with those communities and with researchers, there is now a shared understanding that there is something more than just local effects that are taking place here.
When it comes to talking about adaptation to this kind of a scenario, this becomes different for several reasons. One reason is that it is superimposed on the conflict they already have about their lifestyle: should they stay traditional, should they become part of a wage-based economy, or should they try to balance the two economies? Does climate change make a difference to their vision of this dualism?
The second part has to do with their changing status on the land. Their role in management of resources gets wrapped up in the state of their land claims. In the North where you have settled land claims, they have positions of responsibility. In Nunavut and the Northwest Territories, for example, where they can make decisions about managements of caribou herds, fishery harvests, they can establish and maintain co-management boards for resources that are studying this problem in partnership with other researchers and looking for solutions to this situation. The state of their land claims and the state of their dualism will influence how they see the future.
I have heard comments, at least from people in the North who have talked about climate change scenarios creating a new picture for them with which they still must come to terms. Should someone who is a traditional caribou hunter become a wheat farmer because the growing season has become long enough in the southern Mackenzie Valley to grow wheat? This is a question that never would have been contemplated without climate change. However, it is one that is contemplated now. Does that fit into that vision of lifestyle? This confuses the whole question of dualism.
I think you are seeing an awakening of Aboriginal interests of being involved directly in studying this issue. I have seen this in British Columbia with fisheries. They are directly engaged in fisheries management, in working groups around creating new analysis tools for fisheries. It is a very strong dialogue and a strong partnership, and one which in my current experience in the Okanagan is one I am hoping to cultivate. I see them as knowledge partners. The challenge is to generate trust that we are sharing knowledge, and that their perspectives and knowledge will be respected in this analysis.
Once this analysis is done, the question of adaptation will end up being one they will take in their context, just as irrigated agriculture will take in their own. I cannot predict how that will evolve because it will involve a number of issues that are very important to them but, perhaps, are not being studied directly.
Here is another chance for some interdisciplinary collaboration. There is a research community around First Nations cultures and lifestyles, how they vary between Arctic, the Prairies, and the East. It is not very often that those who study traditional environmental knowledge link up well with those studying from a western science perspective: ecology, hydrology, and the like.
You are beginning to see some of these contacts occur. I hope one of the things that C-CIARN can do is encourage this dialogue among the other interdisciplinary dialogues that need to happen in order to address this problem.
Senator LaPierre: What about the rest of the Prairies, Manitoba and Alberta? What happens to those provinces? In the North, I can see that one, because we looked at it, but what about the reserves on the Prairies?
Mr. Sauchyn: I think we must make a distinction between the southern part of the Prairies where the native people are on reserves and in cities, and the northern part of the Prairies, the Boreal forest, where the natives practise a more or less traditional lifestyle. Much of what Mr. Cohen said would apply to the forest of the Northern Prairies. Where some of the impacts of climate change are already being realized, in particular, is the loss and the viability of the winter roads, because these isolated native communities depend on frozen ground to move their supplies in winter. In the last few years, the winter roads have not been viable. The alternative is to fly the supplies in, which is much more costly.
The scenario that I presented for the Prairie provinces suggesting that we move agriculture north would, of course, impact on these people. If the solution to the increased aridity in the Southern Prairies is to encourage agriculture in the North, then we will be displacing the economic activities of some of these northern people. Also, there is currently no infrastructure in that region for agriculture. We would need to recreate the rails, the roads and the network for moving grain in an area where, currently, the dominant economic activity is traditional native lifestyle.
Senator LaPierre: I do not think there is any hope. I think that what will happen, essentially, is that the situation will become awful. I think the small farmer is finished; that farming will develop into immense American conglomerates that will own the land and water. There is a development around the world to sell water to private companies, as the CBC demonstrated this morning in one of its progress reports, backed by the World Bank, and things of that kind. It seems to me that this will decrease the capacity of Canadians to be self-sufficient. It will create an expansion of the urban base of Canada with disastrous results. The only way out of that situation is not only research and all of that.
[Translation]
There is a fundamental issue of awakening by individuals and communities. Without this awakening, nothing can be done.
[English]
There is absolutely nothing that can be done. We have just gone through the tragedy of Kyoto, whereby the majority of provincial governments and municipal governments argued that the ``prise de conscience'' to limit these emissions in order to protect the environment was really a plot of the federal government to seize more power from the provinces and from everybody.
I do not have much hope. I hope that eventually this committee will be able to demonstrate that there is tremendous ignorance. Here you have, sir, almost 90 per cent of people — farmers and non-farmers make up 89.7 per cent, or the vast majority of the people. Most of us live in urban centres. We know that we will get a geodesic dome and cover ourselves up à la Buckminster Fuller, and we can go anywhere we want and live the way we want to, et cetera. It is out there.
Therefore you have to tell us in your research, not only the scientific things but what interdisciplinary studies we need to have? What are these mechanisms we need to put in place in order to develop awareness and the concentration of resources in order to be able to take ``prise de conscience'' and lead it to action?
I am sorry for the sermon, but I give you my blessing.
The Chairman: It is a good sermon.
Mr. Cohen: I did not intend to talk about hope.
Senator LaPierre: You have to because you are a scientist.
Mr. Cohen: I went to school for a long time to study hope, and how to produce it.
On the question of whether there is an opportunity to control your destiny in the face of climate change, I will say this: If you are at the level of a First Nations community, or a province or a country, the more that we can do to invest in our domestic capacities to understand these issues, the more hope there will be. We talk about investment in research in many different communities. Of course, interdisciplinary research is fundamental to this initiative, and it is something that I personally practice and that is being promoted in the C-CIARN system. Another part has to do with some of the things that Mr. Sauchyn was alluding to but could not provide the details on, and that is control over the instruments of the resource in your jurisdiction and how to assess the capability of those kinds of controls to deal with these uncertain futures. Again, there are institutional things at different levels that we do not completely understand how they work. The origin of a law, the origin of an operating rule, the origin of a marketing board, the origin of a price structure: all of these things had some history. They were put in place for certain reasons at the time and now it is important to test them, the abilities of these instruments, these rules, their rate structures, in dealing with scenarios such as this. That is why we must engage the people who are directly involved in the operations of these tools, in the management of these structures, to test these tools under these scenarios. They are ``what-if'' cases, but there can be a lot of learning from that in the process.
Learning is what will give us hope — and that is what I mentioned before to Senator Fairbairn — because we are learning these things for ourselves, and that learning should cross the disciplines and the jurisdictions, and we need the capacity to do this.
Senator Hubley: I have to gather myself up here a bit after listening both to Senator LaPierre's question and the answer of the witness. I am going back to the communities again. This evening we have taken the discussion to the point where we have gathered all the information you have given to us here and we see our farming community here and what we have to try to do is take our hope, which I certainly have a lot of, and faith in our farming community and provide the answers and the ways and means for them to remain successful.
The feeling I have is that, despite the degree of hardship that this climate change and the drought will produce, there is a direct relationship there to our ability to cope or our ability to adjust to the situation. In other words, coming back to what Senator Gustafson has said, perhaps it is the government's role to be able to assess the situation, given the farm communities' ability to adapt and their willingness to work at the problems. However, when we are faced with a drought of this magnitude, I believe it is incumbent on government to try to bridge that difficulty. Yes, we have the information, but will it be able to sustain our farming community through this next phase we are into?
I am not sure if I have made that clear, but it is my feeling now.
Mr. Sauchyn: In the study of adaptation, we make a distinction between autonomous adaptation and planned adaptation. Adaptation will occur because people have a strong instinct to survive. If we do nothing, there will be some adaptation to climate change. However, it will be costly, especially in social terms. The advantage of planning adaptation is that it can be implemented in some kind of equitable and efficient way so that there are no winners or losers. Of course, in Canada we hold those principles quite high. Our objective is to do research to support planned adaptation, rather than just expecting people to find a way of getting by. As Dr. Cohen pointed out succinctly, it requires a new mode of research because these problems will not be answered by scientists in a particular discipline.
Agricultural scientists, especially at Guelph and Saskatoon, have been effective in providing extension, support and research to farmers, for example on the Prairies. However, I think even some of those scientists will admit that they have almost reached the limit to which they can develop drought tolerant crops. With that kind of crop science and that kind of approach, eventually there is a limit to which a particular type of scientist can contribute to the solution. We need to train other kinds of scientists to work directly with farmers.
Agricultural scientists have a history of working closely with farmers and providing the results of their research. We now need to train a new generation of social scientists, geoscientists and biological scientists who can work more directly, or find some kind of mechanism by which the results of their work can be delivered to farmers, associations and government agencies for sustainable agriculture.
An example of a government program that is lacking in flexibility is the way that we fund university research. There are three research granting agencies. They are the Medical Research Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council. SSHRC and NSERC pay a lot of lip service to interdisciplinary research but are not able to fund it because they have a specific mandate to provide funding for either engineering and physical science or social science. By its very nature, climate change research has to be interdisciplinary.
The Chairman: That is a good point. Thank you for bringing it to our attention.
Senator Hubley: To clarify the survey figures concerning farmers versus non-farmers, are those within those smaller communities? Is that where that survey was done?
Mr. Sauchyn: That is right, within the rural municipalities, yes.
Senator Hubley: It does not mean that 89 or 90 per cent were doing nothing. The graphs are read up and down, are they not?
Mr. Sauchyn: That is right. What it shows is that fewer farmers are doing nothing. Most of the people doing nothing are in the towns. In the cities, nearly everybody is doing nothing.
Senator Hubley: I wish to talk about the character of the drought itself. We talked about a couple of yearly droughts. When a drought is repeated year after year, is there a multiple factor to it? Does it become more serious because there is a repeat every year? If there is a turnaround, will it take longer for that land to become arable and usable again? Is that generally the way it works?
Mr. Sauchyn: Yes. Drought is kind of a complex issue, senator. As Mr. Cohen pointed out, there are agricultural droughts and hydrological droughts. There are more than 40 definitions of what a drought is, depending on whether you manage water or soil or whether you are studying the climate. It is a fairly complex problem.
Certainly, the length of a drought is an important factor. Most farmers would tell you that they can survive a one- year drought. A two-year drought is kind of dicey. When there are three, four and five years of drought, what are you supposed to do? Engineers will tell you that they design water supply structures in southern Alberta and southern Saskatchewan for a two-year drought. We do not have the capacity to deal with it past two years.
Senator Day: Many of us are understanding what you said. I want to compliment and thank you for your presentations because they are helpful to us, especially in terms of the examples you gave. If you think of some more examples of where regulations are an impediment to adaptation, we would like to hear from you at any time. You can write to the clerk or the Chair, because that would be helpful.
It is easier for us to react to a disaster or a ``big bang'' kind of situation, and this is not such a situation. This is a very slow, evolving process. That got me thinking about a continuum in terms of where we are at, and I want you to tell me if I am wrong on this. I was thinking that the first phase is that we start to become aware of global warming. We start doing some modelling, some experimenting, and applying the models to known situations. We then test the model so that we can use it as a predicting type of tool. We are in that phase now. Some people are more comfortable with their models and the modelling that is available. Others are telling us, ``We need more time. It is good to do some modelling to predict certain things but not others. We cannot really talk about how much snow there will be in the Rockies or just what the effect will be on some things, but we can tell you some other things.'' That is sort of the first phase.
Moving along on the continuum, when we become somewhat comfortable in predicting, then we can get into developing strategies against what we are predicting. In that regard, you were talking about the collaboration between science and stakeholders. That fits in somewhere along there. Because we are starting to develop strategies, one little sidebar would be Kyoto, which slows things down a little bit. Even with Kyoto, and presuming that we meet all the regulations, it will still happen; it just slows it down a bit. Kyoto may give us more breathing space. Therefore, I do not put it on the continuum but as a sidebar.
Then we get into the adaptation, the strategies and the actual implementation of those strategies. I look upon that as being a huge sociological issue. All of this is not happening at one time. Certain little things are happening. Back home, in the Maritimes, when we were not getting quite as much rain in the summer as we used to, farmers were building holding ponds on their farms to capture some of the water which they could use to irrigate on a small-scale basis. They never did it in the past but they are doing it now. Because the spring is coming sooner, they try to plant their crops sooner when it is wetter. The problem is that some of the fields are so wet they cannot get on to plant their crops. These are very small adaptations.
Am I right in thinking that this will be a whole series of small adaptations, which will include the infrastructures and moving? Some farmers will go out of business and some communities will become ghost towns, but then others will grow up. Government will try to move in with programs to help soften the change and the evolution as much as they can. It will try to change the regulations so that they are not an impediment. We will do all of those things, but there is no one big solution to all of this. It will it be a very slow, evolving situation?
Mr. Cohen: You are right, senator. Climate change, as an issue for us to learn about, is an evolving process. The word ``slow,'' perhaps, is relative. I recall when the first papers that came out suggested that, as a result of these computer climate modelling experiments, if we pump more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the world would warm up. Those papers came out around 25 years ago. In 25 years, we have gone from a few papers from some extremely crude climate models, first attempts, to the situation today where we understand much more about climate science, carbon cycles and a wide range of resources including food, forests and water, to varying levels of certainty. However, we still know more about the situation now than we did 25 years ago.
We are beginning to develop a lexicon to connect that to adaptation issues. On the emissions side, we are learning about global agreements and regional issues within global agreements. Kyoto will obviously not be enough on its own, but it is a natural evolution to the learning process on that side of the issue. We have gone from the framework convention in 1992, which had no targets or specific instruments, to Kyoto in 1997, which took the first baby step of establishing targets and instruments, to what will obviously have to happen in 2012, which is a second round with something that is perhaps even broader. That is all happening in steps. While that is happening in steps, our understanding of adaptation, too, will happen in steps.
As an analogy, drought is perceived as something called the ``creeping environmental problem.'' It is different from a flood because you see the waters rise and there is an immediate sense of how you deal with preparing for the emergency of a flood, and the sandbags come out and everything else. Drought is tougher. Just as drought is tougher because you do not necessarily recognize the signs until they are on you, climate change is tougher because of the dimensions associated with it.
We must take the time to learn about climate change and try things as we learn. We will experiment with adaptation measures to varying degrees; small things, things that may hopefully integrate well with the development plans and the resource management plans of various jurisdictions.
If climate becomes an explicit part of the debate on food, forests and water, then those first tentative steps will at least have incorporated that experience in an explicit way. We will then be able to learn from that experience. If something must change in some policy, measure or engineering structure, then those things will have a logical basis upon which to build.
I do not mind the notion of having incremental learning, as long as we make that an objective of the exercise, and that climate change in its various dimensions is an explicit part of the dialogue behind those measures.
Mr. Sauchyn: There is a small probability that the 5 degrees of warming that is forecast for the first half of this century could occur next year. However, that would require some kind of catastrophic change in the global climate cycle, like the collapse of the Antarctic ice sheet or the shifting of an ocean current. There are scientists out there who are saying that there is a small probability that all the climate change we expect in this century will occur next year. The probability is so slight that we are probably not telling decision makers about that. There is also not much they can do about it.
Senator Day: We are getting close to the ``big bang'' situation.
Mr. Sauchyn: That is right. The more plausible scenario is that the global warming in this century will be realized by seeing a rise in the mean temperature over time. We will swing back and forth from year to year. We will still have cold years; however, the warm years will be that much warmer than the cold years. Even though we will swing back and forth, by the end of this century we will end up being somewhere between 1.5 and 5.8 degrees warmer.
When you tell people to expect, by the end of the century, that average temperatures will be 5 degrees warmer, they say, ``Okay, great.'' That is why we tend to focus on, or at least highlight, the more immediate effects of climate change, like disasters or extreme events, because governments, by their nature, are reactionary. Therefore, we like to link extreme events such as ice storms, floods and droughts to climate change, even though, as scientists, we must admit that we are not sure if the current drought is the result of climate change. By portraying the situation in that way, at least governments react, as did the Government of Alberta, with their risk management plan.
Mr. Cohen: It is possible to complement that discussion with invitations to participate in ``what-if'' exercises that can be fairly broad-based at the community level, or may be dealing with sectors across the country. There is an understanding among people who are charged with managing resources that ``what-if'' scenarios provide a learning opportunity. Even though we have difficulty today in saying that the drought of 2001 happened because of greenhouse gases, we can certainly talk about futures in a learning environment that will take away this attribution or probability aspect of the discussion and investigate the local role in vulnerability reduction, in building adaptive capacity and in thinking the matter through and seeing what difference that will make to the way in which they operate or manage a resource.
A number of things must be done together. We must look at what is happening with current extremes and acknowledge that our climate is no longer 100 per cent natural. This has been a clear statement from scientists in the IPCC, or Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Greenhouse gases are playing a role today. Whether there would have been a drought without that situation is hard to say. Certainly, some of the warming we have experienced in the last 50 years is because of greenhouse gases. They could not model this increase in temperature without including greenhouse gases in their model.
If we are beginning to see some of these changes now, we will need to address how we are responding to these current extremes and complement that with some of this ``what-if'' discussion, and we will learn from both.
Senator Day: You cannot say that we should focus now on strategies, because we are all over the place. If we try to come up with a report that suggests where the government should go, we should be recommending that they be everywhere, and doing everything. Everybody should be focusing on this, all kinds of social and research scientists. Some people are working on new species of trees that should be planted for the next half century. Many forest companies put huge investments into trees that they do not harvest for 60 years. We need some help in the forest industry.
Farmers are being told to switch crops. What do they do? Do they travel to the equator to see what they are growing? Are those things going on at the same time?
Mr. Sauchyn: If you succeed in prying more money out of Treasury Board for adaptation research, we can certainly recommend how that money should be spent.
The stakeholders and social scientists must be engaged from the beginning on this kind of research. Even though I am a climate scientist, I would not leave the situation up to the climate scientists to drive the research agenda.
It is clear that the farmers, the foresters and the people in the fisheries industry must pose the important research questions. They are the people who must deal with climate change on the ground. The rest of us are insulated from the direct impacts of climate change.
Senator Day: The majority of people will not have the long term view unless they are forced into it. They will say, ``I have a bunch of equipment here that I have to pay the monthly fees on, and I want to know what I can do to keep growing and harvesting my crops.'' They will not say, ``I better change crops here.'' Only if they are forced into it will they do that. There is usually an economic reason for that decision, as opposed to saying, ``Oh, I have been working with my climate scientist and we have decided I will switch all my crops next year.'' It will not happen in that way.
Mr. Sauchyn: That is why you need a group of people with different perspectives, not only science versus social science but people who look at things over longer time frames and over different sizes of areas. You need people who are concerned about the local situation and what will happen next growing season. However, they need to work with people who look at things nationally or provincially and over longer time frames because they have the luxury of doing that.
Senator Day: Senators have the luxury of looking over the longer time frame.
Senator Fairbairn: I have an observation that I wanted to make, having listened to you. Our entire discussion has moved along significantly from where we started tonight. It occurred to me, as I listened to recent questions, that we have two policies dealing with the parts of the country that we are talking about: One is agriculture and the other is rural development. We have talked about rural development largely in terms of connecting it outward to what people in urban centres are able to do. There is nothing wrong with that approach. However, it seems to me, in listening to you, that there ought to be a different focus.
When we think of rural development in smaller communities, somehow our research and our social discussions have to bring that closer into what is happening, what you have been talking about tonight. We cannot have two streams of public policy going on, one on the ground and one in the town. We must meld these closer together so that there can be innovative thinking, not just with regard to how to keep crops growing or how to adapt but also how to keep towns surviving. The two seem to me to be completely intermingled. I am not sure our policy process is completely intermingled.
Mr. Cohen: Senator Fairbairn, I think you are right about the need to think of public policy in an integrated way because when climate change affects places, it will not make the distinction between individual things. It will affect the raw resource that makes the place what it is and it will influence what people do, either in an autonomous way or in a planned way. It is a good idea to address place-based concepts of policy in an integrated fashion because, in thinking about water resources and resources, you are always trying to get each of these resources to meet multiple objectives. As long as you are in the business of trying to meet multiple objectives, then only focusing on crops or trees or water will miss out on those interactions.
Climate change will work in indirect ways, affecting the relationship between these various resources. There might be timing issues, frequency issues, and changes in opportunities and risks. This lends itself to dealing with this situation in a more collective fashion.
Therefore, I would support that idea from a research perspective. If we are to do integrated studies, then the implications of that will be different things to different parts of a place, and we ought to consider them altogether.
The Chairman: On behalf of the committee, I would like to thank you both very much. We have run overtime, but we have done so because we all had a number of questions arising from your two brilliant and helpful presentations. On behalf of all of us, thank you very much. We will walk away with many good ideas, one of which is that in the research component we really cannot look to just one sector. It has to be coordinated. There is a role for government. We will keep those things in mind as we proceed with the study.
The committee adjourned.