Climate Change

Since the industrial revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, human activities have intensified to the point where we are altering the global climate system.

Among the biggest contributors to climate change is our use of fossil fuels to generate energy. Burning fossil fuels like coal, oil, and natural gas to meet our basic needs for electricity, heating, and transportation releases enormous amounts of greenhouses gases into the atmosphere. Once in the atmosphere, those gases trap heat from the sun, warming the planet and putting us on a collision course with climate disaster.

Global understanding of climate change has been growing for decades. In the late twentieth century, international concern about a potential climate crisis led to the establishment of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (“UNFCCC”) in the mid-1990s. In the years that followed, several protocols were established under the UNFCCC, and, in 2015, the Paris Agreement was reached, representing an historic international commitment to limit global warming to no more than 2 degrees celsius above pre-industrial levels while striving ambitiously to meet a lower limit of 1.5 degrees.

Canada is a party to the UNFCCC and Paris Agreement, and the federal government must work collaboratively with provincial and territorial governments and Indigenous governments across the country to lower Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions. Environmental laws of various kinds support these efforts, including laws that establish carbon pricing regimes, laws that control the use of greenhouse gas-emitting fuels, and laws that require governments to monitor changes to carbon-sequestering ecosystems. Laws like these that attempt to lower greenhouse gas emissions and lessen the climate crisis are laws concerning climate change mitigation.

Other laws related to climate change are focused on climate change adaptation. Laws like these recognize that many consequences of climate change are already taking effect, like sea level rise, fiercer weather, and more destructive storm surges and coastal and inland flooding. To face these new realities, Atlantic Canadians need to adapt, which means we need laws addressing where and how we build new infrastructure and support communities at risk.

As part of our work, we advocate for strong and effective laws addressing climate change mitigation and adaptation, including laws supporting the renewable energy transition, laws curbing our carbon emissions, laws protecting carbon-sequestering ecosystems, and laws governing land-use planning.

To learn more about our work in this area, search our Resource Library for research reports, blog posts, and submissions to government.