Canada’s carbon emissions drop 6.4% in 2021 from 2019: report

Article content

Canada is making noticeable progress reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but it will have to accelerate its pace in order to meet its promise to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, according to a new estimate.

Article content

The country likely generated 691 megatonnes of emissions in 2021, a small increase from 2020, when authorities restricted economic activity to slow the spread of COVID-19, but 6.4 per cent lower than 2019, according to 440 Megatonnes, a research project overseen by the Canadian Climate Institute think-tank.

Article content

“It’s promising to see Canada starting to make tangible progress in reducing carbon pollution, especially coming out of the pandemic,” Rick Smith, president of the institute, said in a press release.

Emissions were 6.7 per cent lower than 2005, the year Canada and more than 120 other countries agreed to use as a benchmark for their carbon reduction plans under the Paris Agreement. So, the emissions estimate represents a start, but there’s still a long way to go, considering Paris signatories pledged to drop emissions by at least 40 per cent from the 2005 benchmark by 2030.

Article content

The report comes on the heels of a new poll from market research firm Léger Marketing Inc. and Postmedia Network Canada Corp. — the owner of the Financial Post, the Ottawa Citizen and dozens of other publications — that indicates that half of Canadians don’t think the government is doing enough to fight climate change.

Smith said in the Feb. 23 press release that the latest 440 Megatonnes estimates suggest governments are on the right track, but that “long-term success now rests on how quickly the government’s chosen policies are actually implemented.”

Progress appears stagnant in the short term, but is more promising when one zooms out and considers the longer term, the report said. Canada is making progress in separating economic growth from greenhouse gas emissions, a process known as “decoupling,” as emissions per unit of economic output are now 27.5 per cent below 2005 levels, authors Seton Stieber and Dave Sawyer wrote.

Article content

Even though emissions increased from 2020, they would have increased significantly more if the various efforts Canada has taken to fight climate change over the past number of years hadn’t started to kick in. The true extent of the progress is only now becoming apparent years after the 2019 implementation of Canada’s carbon pricing plan, said Tom Green, climate policy analyst at the David Suzuki Foundation, a non-profit.

“After a decade or more of inaction on climate, the new government began to implement a series of climate policies, all of which took time to develop and roll out,” said Green. “So one would only just start to see emissions decoupling from economic growth, but in coming years, the decoupling should be more pronounced if we keep the same policies in place and keep ramping up stringency.”

Article content

The 440 Megatonnes analysis isn’t perfect, as it is based on estimates. The official figures will be released this spring, in Canada’s National Inventory report, which reports data 16 months following the year in question. The estimates are an attempt by the think-tank to address this reporting lag.

Moreover, data from 2020 is difficult to analyze, as it was an “unusual year,” the report said. There was a steep drop in economic activity due to lockdowns. To try to fill in the gaps, the authors used data from 2016 and 2021. To meet Canada’s targets, they reckon emissions reduction will have to outpace economic growth by five percentage points annually; in other words, if gross domestic product averages growth of 1.5 per cent between 2022 and 2030, then emissions will have to drop by about five per cent each year.

“2023 is an especially critical year, as the federal government moves ahead with major policies,” the report said.

Green agrees with the authors that the work is far from done. “We need to redouble our efforts to bring down emissions more quickly, given the extreme weather and climate damages we are already seeing at only 1C of temperature change,” he said.

• Email: mcoulton@postmedia.com | Twitter: marisacoulton