A number of provinces have either adopted or are considering climate policy options involving`carbon pricing.'
This is the third annual update of the Bonds and Climate Change report and its Canadian supplement. Since the first report in 2012, the climate bonds landscape in both Canada and the world has changed dramatically.
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.
