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Climate change has become one of the most widely discussed and debated policy issues in modern times. The potential implications of human-induced climate change on the global environment and the natural resource base on which humanity depends are bigger, and potentially more catastrophic, than for any other environmental issue. As reflected in the precautionary principle, agreed to by Canada (and 178 other nations during the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development) and endorsed by Alberta, the lack of scientific certainty about how climate and ecosystems will respond to various levels of greenhouse gas emissions should not be a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.
Yet the combustion of fossil fuels is at the heart of many industrial societies and their modern economies. Fossil fuel combustion is the main source of greenhouse gas emissions from human activities. Policies to substantially reduce the combustion of fossil fuels, change the types of fuels used, or capture and store emissions all require real changes to how individuals and companies produce and consume energy. Some of these changes could affect consumer prices, corporate profits, and the trading competitiveness of certain industrial sectors or countries. And internationally, climate change is seen from dramatically different perspectives – depending on whether one is a major oil exporter or consumer; an industrialized or less developed country; or a sector or nation that is well buffered from the effects of climate change, or one that is highly vulnerable to predicted droughts, flooding, or other changes.
Therefore action to address climate change has become a major topic in the worlds of economics, politics, trade, corporate business strategy, and in Canadian federal-provincial relations.
Welcome to the fascinating world of climate change policy!
First and foremost, because of its direct impact on the entire climate system, climate change is a global issue and the policy solutions must be grounded in a strong international context. Addressing climate change requires global cooperation because greenhouse gas emissions have global impacts. regardless of where they are emitted.
Although climate change has been on the international agenda for a quarter century, a critical turning point came at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, when the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was opened for signature. It recognizes that human activities around the world have changed, and continue to change, the concentrations of gases that form the Earth's atmosphere. The UNFCCC lays out a basic foundation, or framework, for global cooperation on climate change. The ultimate objective of the UNFCCC, as noted in Article 2, is "stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system." It provided a mechanism for future international discussions, which subsequently resulted in the Kyoto Protocol to the UNFCCC in 1997.
Industrialized countries that ratified the UNFCCC committed to reducing and holding their greenhouse gas emissions at 1990 levels, although this commitment was not legally binding. The Kyoto Protocol was the first international legally-binding agreement that actually requires countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. When Canada ratified the Protocol late in 2002, it committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 6 per cent below the country's 1990 levels, to be achieved between 2008 and 2012. The Canadian policy context is complex, due in large part to the relationship between the provincial, territorial and federal governments and the differences in amounts and sources of greenhouse gas emissions across the country. Nevertheless, Canada has made significant progress and there is reason to be optimistic about the direction of Canadian climate change policy.
Alberta has been engaged in formal policy discussions on climate change since the formation of the Clean Air Strategic Alliance in 1994. The province was actively involved in federal and provincial discussions leading up to the 1992 UNFCCC and following it, as various efforts were made to develop national action plans to control and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Alberta published its own climate change plan in October 2002 but Alberta policy direction remains opposed to the Kyoto Protocol.
The effects of climate change will not be distributed evenly around the world, and one of the biggest challenges in developing policy has been to understand and evaluate the costs and benefits of action – from reducing emissions to developing strategies to adapt to climate change.
