Government’s strategy to protect critical infrastructure from climate change falling short: report

The federal government’s strategy to protect more than $100 billion worth of key infrastructure from the destructive impacts of climate change has significant gaps, with three key departments well behind where they need to be. 

That’s the verdict of an audit by Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development Jerry V. DeMarco of the federal government’s Greening Government Strategy.

“As Canada warms at twice the global average, accelerating efforts to protect federal assets and services will sustain communities and save taxpayers’ money over time,” DeMarco said.

“For example, some small craft harbours, which directly support more than 45,000 jobs, are vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and require immediate repairs and reinforcement.”

The report says the federal government owns 1,623 critical assets such as bridges, buildings, vehicles and harbours, 275 of which have so far been identified to be at significant risk because of the warming climate. 

But DeMarco’s audit found only three percent of the 275 at-risk assets had climate resilience plans in place. 

The Greening Government Strategy was launched in 2017 with the dual goals of reducing government emissions to net-zero by 2050, while also enhancing climate resilience by 2035.

Enhancing climate resilience involves assessing the assets under a department’s control to see if they are vulnerable to climate change. Once an asset has been identified, the department responsible is supposed to implement a strategy to strengthen it to survive the effects of climate change such as a warming climate, extreme weather events, wildfires and natural disasters. 

The Greening Government Strategy’s implementation by government departments is overseen by the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, but the commissioner’s report said there were significant gaps in its oversight effort when it came to ensuring those departments actually implemented climate resilience strategies. 

Government departments audited

The audit looked at not only the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat’s oversight, but also the performance of three key government departments: National Defence, Public Services and Procurement Canada and Fisheries and Oceans Canada. 

The audit said that the combined assets owned by these three departments account for 67 per cent of all assets owned by the federal government. 

The audit said that while National Defence, Public Services and Procurement Canada and Fisheries and Oceans Canada had undertaken risk assessments of their vulnerable assets, action had not been taken to improve their resilience

The audit found that the Treasury Board had “significant gaps” in its oversight of government departments, and the guidence and tools it provided to those departments were outdated or incomplete. 

“This had led departments and agencies to take different approaches and advance work on their own in the absence of clear guidelines,” the audit said. 

No interim targets

The audit also found that since the Greening Government Strategy was announced in 2017, no funding had been provided by the Treasury Board to departments and agencies to fund climate resilience activities.

“The three selected departments told us that having no dedicated funding for enhancing climate resilience created barriers in implementing actions to enhance climate resilience, such as infrastructure upgrades involving significant investments,” the audit found. 

The audit also found that the Treasury Board did not have an adequate way to monitor and track progress toward climate resilience objectives, there were no interim targets on the way to 2035, and the Treasury Board did not collect results from 70 per cent of agencies and departments it was supposed to be monitoring. 

“This means that the federal government and Canadians would not know whether planned progress was on track and would not have the opportunity to adjust,” the audit found. 

The audit said that progress on climate resilience is important because the annual cost of damage to government infrastructure caused by climate change is estimated at between $3 billion and $8 billion by 2030, and as high as $6.2 billion to $13.5 billion by 2050.

“As the costs of climate-related events continue to rise, delays or the lack of proactive actions would increase the costs to Canadian society,” the audit said. 

Article source: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/government-strategy-climate-resilience-report-9.7186876?cmp=rss