Ecosystem valuation is still an academic undertaking or one that is limited to raising awareness around the value of protecting or restoring nature.
Environmental trends, particularly declining water availability, soil depletion, and climate change, will impact food production in Canada and globally.
New analysis shows that without new and ambitious policy action Canada will miss its Copenhagen targets by a considerable margin. So while Canada will have to play climate policy catch-up to the rest of the world, it appears that a number of forward-looking provinces have already signed up to lead Canada in this mission.
The numbers are in for Quebec and California’s first joint auction of GHG allowances (for convenience’ sake, I will use “allowance” and “permit” interchangeably in this post). The auction held on November 25th marked the last step in the linking of their cap-and-trade systems. Since January 2014, compliance instruments are fully fungible, meaning allowances or offsets from either jurisdiction can be used by firms in California or Quebec to cover their emissions.
Addressing climate change is going to require a lot of investment. The International Energy Agency estimates that the transition to a global low carbon economy will require upwards of US$53-trillion in cumulative investment in energy supply and energy efficiency by 2035. The National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy estimated in 2012 that an “annual investment on the order of $13 to $17 billion” was required in Canada to achieve our climate change objectives.
How can cities be remade so that they can be enjoyed, and not just endured?
In my previous blog post I explained how water quality trading (WQT) works(external link) and how this market-based instrument enhances the cost effectiveness of pollution control policies. When applied successfully, WQT translates into net environmental benefits to watersheds and lower costs to pollutant dischargers than the ones incurred when just using technological upgrades to meet a regulatory standard. In this second blog post I identify the top 10 lessons learned from Ontario’s small – but significant – experience with WQT.
Learning from past successes to create the broad-based support for deep transformational change can occur through one simple concept: collaboration. Identifying villains and heroes, winners and losers has no place in the collaborative process necessary for such change.
In Canada, both our culture and our economy are linked to biodiversity: our economy is in large part underpinned by the extraction of natural resources while our cultural identity is often linked to our abundant biodiversity and large areas of wilderness.
The use of conservation offsets to achieve environmental goals is becoming more prominent, both in Canada and around the world. In order to build new, effective programs, it is useful to evaluate current programs for the lessons that can be learned.
Ontario has lots of water. It’s a fact that the province holds about a third of the world’s fresh water. Unfortunately, it’s also a fact that elevated nutrient levels – particularly phosphorus – in Ontario’s streams, rivers and lakes pose a huge risk to this vital resource. Excessive phosphorus loads from industrial and agricultural sources can lead to algal blooms, which can threaten aquatic habitat and make water unsafe for swimming and drinking.
These two academic research papers look at how market-based instruments could have a significant impact in creating long term sustainable change in transportation, including detailed case studies from London, Paris and New York City.
Transportation - the movement of goods and people from one location to another - is responsible for about one quarter of Canada’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
Growing up in Venezuela, I always was very aware of environmental issues - telling my parents not to use the car so much in a country where gasoline is cheaper than water(external link) and working at a community centre in the design and implementation of water conservation campaigns. However, it wasn’t until I enrolled in my graduate microeconomics and environmental economics and policy courses at the University of Ottawa that I became interested in how economic instruments can be used to advance environmental goals.
the New Climate Economy (NCE, a major international initiative aimed at studying and communicating the benefits and costs of acting on climate change, which is part of the Global Framework on the Economy and Climate, launched its flagship report, Better Growth, Better Climate, on September 16th. It has already been garnering major media attention both abroadand here in Canada, and will feature prominently at the upcoming United Nations Climate Summit, scheduled to kick off in New York on September 23rd.
