Today during Question Period I rose to ask both the Minister of Energy, Mines & Petroleum Resources and the Minister of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations & Rural Development what the greatest climate change-related risks and opportunities their ministry faces, and how they are prepared to deal with both.

With the upcoming release of the economic vision embodied in the clean growth strategy, it’s critical that every Minister is up to speed on how it will affect their Ministry.

As you will see from the exchange, I was not very impressed with the response I received from the Minister of Energy, Mines & Petroleum Resources. I felt that the response from the Minister of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations & Rural Development was quite good.

Below I reproduce the text and video of the exchange with the Ministers.

Video of Exchange

Question

A. Weaver: In the span of just a few centuries, earth has transitioned from a past when climate affected the evolution of human societies to the present, in which humans are affecting the evolution of the climate system.

Today we are at a pivotal moment in human history. Our generation will be responsible for deciding the path we take and the future climate will take along with us. As elected officials, we’ll either be complicit in allowing climate change to despoil our world or we can lead the way and choose a different path.

Our provincial emissions have risen in four out of the last five years. Every minister has a responsibility to ensure that tackling this issue is within their mandate, as mitigating the impacts of climate change requires an all-of-government approach.

Accounting for 7.2 million tonnes annually, mining and upstream oil and gas production are the biggest contributors. My question to Minister of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources is this. What are the greatest climate change–related risks and opportunities facing your ministry and how are you prepared to deal with them?

Answer

I appreciate that for the member this is a very, very important issue that he’s very passionate about and the work that he’s done with this government to address climate change and our climate action plan.

For this ministry, in particular, we have been looking at what we can be doing as a new government to reduce our impact on climate change. The list is quite long. But I know that question period is the opposition’s time, so I won’t try to list everything. I’ll give the member a few examples of some of the things that we’re doing.

A couple of weeks ago I was at UBC talking with architect students about our new program called the better buildings B.C. program, where we’re looking for innovative ideas in terms of how we can reduce our emissions in our buildings throughout the province.

But the member brought up, specifically, mining and oil and gas. One of the things that this government did was we eliminated PST on electricity for businesses. That includes the mining sector. That includes the oil and gas sector. If they can electrify and move away from oil and gas — diesel, for example — to generate the power that they need to do their operations, we’re reducing our greenhouse gas emissions quite significantly. Those are the types of opportunities that we’re looking at.

As the member will note, I also just introduced legislation to reduce our methane emissions as well. There’s lots that we are doing, and I look forward to being able to brief the member fully at another time

Supplementary Question

A. Weaver: I must say, given the scale of the challenge as well as the scale of the opportunity, going and meeting a few people to discuss some ideas is hardly taking advantage of this opportunity and meeting the challenge. I remain quite disappointed in that response, so let me try again.

The B.C. fires of the past two summers were no surprise to the climate science community. Back in 2004, my colleagues and I published a paper in Geophysical Research Letters, pointing out that we could already detect and attribute increasing areas burnt in Canadian forest fires to human activity and, in particular, global warming.

According to the B.C. Wildfire Service, this year was the worst on record. Over 1.35 million hectares were consumed by forest fires. The fires burned homes, endangered lives and released hundreds of megatonnes of CO₂. What’s happening in California is no surprise to the climate science community, yet it appears to be a surprise to politicians du jour.

We know that global warming will lead to an increased likelihood of summer drought. This, in turn, will lead to more extensive wildfires. We know that precipitation extremes will increase and that flooding events will be on the rise. This threatens human health, ecosystems and the economy.

While the members opposite are concerned about their survival as a political entity, I’m sitting here asking the minister about the political survival of all of our collective species. To the Minister of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development, what are the greatest climate change-related risks and opportunities facing your ministry, and how are you prepared to deal with both?

Answer

Hon. D. Donaldson: As my colleague mentioned, climate change is a considerable risk for our province and planet, and we are committed to tackling it. The member and the Leader of the Third Party asks — and I appreciate — the question about opportunities and risks.

The risks are in forest systems and ecosystem resilience. Ensuring that into the future, we have forest ecosystems that are resilient to and can adapt to the climate change that we are seeing.

We are seeing it, certainly, in the forest fire situation. It’s had an impact there. Large forest fires that we saw in the past two seasons have had enormous impact on ecosystems. We’ve seen it even more recently in the level 4 drought conditions in the areas that I represent up in the northwest and unprecedented drought that has led to impacts on fisheries resources. You’ve seen the pictures of the riverbeds, extremely dry riverbeds — unprecedented.

We are working on mitigative measures. In June, we hosted the first wildfire and climate change conference. A couple of topics it focused on were creating resilient ecosystems to better adapt to climate change and mitigate wildfires and ensuring effective carbon management. Part of that is our forest carbon initiative. That’s a $290 million federal-provincial initiative that’s focusing on incremental reforestation and improving utilization of waste and reducing slash burning.

Finally, in regards to the question as far as opportunities, we also have long-term research trials, assisted migration and adaptation trials to identify seed sources most likely to best adapt to future climates. We’ve made important progress in 16 months, and we need to do more.