Majority of Canadian businesses bracing for climate impacts: Study

The numbers, from a recent national survey of business and government leaders by Environics Research Group, reflect what is going on in many companies and industries, according to the chairman of a federal advisory panel on economic and environmental issues.

"Here in the West, we're already seeing the difficulties in southern Alberta with regard to water and water licences and availability for business expansion or urban expansion," said Robert Page, chairman of the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy and a professor at the University of Calgary's Energy and Environmental Systems Group. "This is all a part of climate change and this is something that people are already factoring into doing business in this part of the country."

The survey, sponsored by Natural Resources Canada, found 81 per cent of business leaders, 89 per cent of senior provincial officials and 90 per cent of senior municipal officials believe climate change is already underway with an additional four to 10 per cent in each group believing that it would happen in the "foreseeable future."

Among the business leaders who held this view, 72 per cent said they expected the changing climate would have an impact on their organizations. This percentage increased to 82 per cent for officials from larger businesses with more than 20 employees.

The federal advisory panel warned earlier this month in a report that Canada needs to step up its preparations for impacts and take advantage of potential opportunities of global warming.

"Canada has conducted remarkably little economic analysis to date on climate change impacts, and even less so on the costs and benefits of adaptation," said the report, Degrees of Change: Climate Warming and the Stakes for Canada. "More has been done on the economic costs of reducing Canada's (greenhouse gas) emissions, by contrast . . . Indeed, key decision makers in government and industry see the costs of adapting to a changing climate as the most significant barrier to moving forward."

Governments around the world agree human activity and consumption of fossil fuels is resulting in a dangerous increase in the concentration of greenhouse gas emissions that trap heat in the atmosphere and cause global warming. But they are still negotiating an international treaty to solve the problem.

Avrim Lazar, president of the Forest Products Association of Canada, noted companies in his industry have been significantly affected by warmer winters that led to mountain pine beetle infestations in western Canadian forests.

"For many places in central British Columbia and Alberta it has been a dramatic impact," Lazar said in an interview. "Because our industry depends on natural functioning ecosystems, changes to natural functioning ecosystems is a threat to our industry."

The survey, submitted to the government last spring, was conducted in two phases, starting in May 2009 with in-depth interviews with 24 senior decision-makers from governments and the business world, followed by a telephone survey with 503 senior officials from the same categories in the fall of 2009. The business sample of 302 provided results considered accurate within 5.6 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, while the sample of municipal governments of 174 respondents was considered accurate within 7.4 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

The report said it could not provide a margin of error for results about the provincial governments because of the type of sample used.

But Lazar, a former senior bureaucrat who served as an assistant deputy minister at Environment Canada in the 1990s when the Chretien government signed the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, said the survey also demonstrates that businesses recognize that other factors related to climate change, such as regulations and the rising cost of fossil fuels or other forms of energy, will force them to adapt and change practices.

He noted forestry companies are already exploring opportunities from these types of changes by converting what used to be waste products, such as saw dust, bark and wood chips, into a new renewable energy stream for their operations.

"If you go back to basics, the industrial infrastructure is driven on fossil fuels," said Lazar. "No matter how inconvenient people may find that truth, eventually it sinks in. If there's going to be impacts on the cost or availability of fossil fuels, it's going to change your business economics."

Lazar said the forest products industry is still on track to meet a 2007 pledge to be carbon neutral and eliminate its carbon dioxide footprint by 2015, without requiring any purchase of carbon offset credits from other businesses that reduce emissions.

Source: www2.canada.com