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As federal government representatives, we are able to encompass the ideas and concerns of everyone within Canada (this includes the provinces, territories, youth, Indigenous peoples, corporations, etc.), taking on a pluralist approach to climate change. This is through the implementation of strategies and policies that are aimed towards involving the cooperation of different groups, taking on an intersectional lens.

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Living Law on a Living Earth: Aboriginal Religion, Law and the Constitution by John Burrows (2006) via Quercus

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Climate change adaptation plans and actions - Canada.ca

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We are working with the provinces and territories to implement the Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change. This is our plan to meet our emissions reduction targets, grow the economy, and build resilience to a changing climate.

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The authoritative information on the status of approval, acceptance, accession and ratification of the Agreement is provided by the Secretary-General of the United Nations, on the respective internet page of the United Nations Treaty Depositary under: Paris Agreement.

The Paris Agreement is a legally binding international treaty on climate change. It was adopted by 195 Parties at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris, France, on 12 December 2015. It entered into force on 4 November 2016. Currently, as of 27 January 2026, there are 194 Parties to the Paris Agreement.

Its overarching goal is to hold "the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels" and pursue efforts "to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels."

However, in recent years, world leaders have stressed the need to limit global warming to 1.5°C by the end of this century.

That's because the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change indicates that crossing the 1.5°C threshold risks unleashing far more severe climate change impacts, including more frequent and severe droughts, heatwaves and rainfall.

To limit global warming to 1.5°C, greenhouse gas emissions must peak before 2025 at the latest and decline 43% by 2030.

The Paris Agreement is a landmark in the multilateral climate change process because, for the first time, a binding agreement brings all nations together to combat climate change and adapt to its effects.

How does the Paris Agreement work?

Implementation of the Paris Agreement requires economic and social transformation, based on the best available science. The Paris Agreement works on a five-year cycle of increasingly ambitious climate action -- or, ratcheting up -- carried out by countries. Since 2020, countries have been submitting their national climate action plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs). Each successive NDC is meant to reflect an increasingly higher degree of ambition compared to the previous version.

Recognizing that accelerated action is required to limit global warming to 1.5°C, the COP27 cover decision requests Parties to revisit and strengthen the 2030 targets in their NDCs to align with the Paris Agreement temperature goal by the end of 2023, taking into account different national circumstances.

Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs)

In their NDCs, countries communicate actions they will take to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in order to reach the goals of the Paris Agreement. Countries also communicate in their NDCs actions they will take to build resilience to adapt to the impacts of climate change.

Long-Term Strategies

To better frame the efforts towards the long-term goal, the Paris Agreement invites countries to formulate and submit long-term low greenhouse gas emission development strategies (LT-LEDS).

LT-LEDS provide the long-term horizon to the NDCs. Unlike NDCs, they are not mandatory. Nevertheless, they place the NDCs into the context of countries' long-term planning and development priorities, providing a vision and direction for future development.

How are countries supporting one another?

The Paris Agreement provides a framework for financial, technical and capacity building support to those countries who need it.

Finance

The Paris Agreement reaffirms that developed countries should take the lead in providing financial assistance to countries that are less endowed and more vulnerable, while for the first time also encouraging voluntary contributions by other Parties. Climate finance is needed for mitigation, because large-scale investments are required to significantly reduce emissions. Climate finance is equally important for adaptation, as significant financial resources are needed to adapt to the adverse effects and reduce the impacts of a changing climate.

Technology

The Paris Agreement speaks of the vision of fully realizing technology development and transfer for both improving resilience to climate change and reducing GHG emissions. It establishes a technology framework to provide overarching guidance to the well-functioning Technology Mechanism. The mechanism is accelerating technology development and transfer through its policy and implementation arms.

Capacity-Building

Not all developing countries have sufficient capacities to deal with many of the challenges brought by climate change. As a result, the Paris Agreement places great emphasis on climate-related capacity-building for developing countries and requests all developed countries to enhance support for capacity-building actions in developing countries.

How are we tracking progress?

With the Paris Agreement, countries established an enhanced transparency framework (ETF). Under ETF, starting in 2024, countries will report transparently on actions taken and progress in climate change mitigation, adaptation measures and support provided or received. It also provides for international procedures for the review of the submitted reports.

The information gathered through the ETF will feed into the Global stocktake which will assess the collective progress towards the long-term climate goals.

This will lead to recommendations for countries to set more ambitious plans in the next round.

What have we achieved so far?

Although climate change action needs to be massively increased to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement, the years since its entry into force have already sparked low-carbon solutions and new markets. More and more countries, regions, cities and companies are establishing carbon neutrality targets. Zero-carbon solutions are becoming competitive across economic sectors representing 25% of emissions. This trend is most noticeable in the power and transport sectors and has created many new business opportunities for early movers.

By 2030, zero-carbon solutions could be competitive in sectors representing over 70% of global emissions.

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The authoritative information on the status of approval, acceptance, accession and ratification of the Agreement is provided by the Secretary-General of the United Nations, on the respective internet page of the United Nations Treaty Depositary under: Paris Agreement. The Paris Agreement is a legally binding international treaty on climate change.

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The recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report underscored the dire state of the climate crisis, concluding that "immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions" are needed to limit global warming even to 1.5°C or 2°C.

The report renewed calls for urgent action and an end to "dithering" by politicians. These echo longstanding arguments which bemoan the lack of " political will " to tackle climate change.

The world absolutely needs to reduce or eliminate emissions, and fast. But while many of the problems inhibiting effective climate action are political, they aren't really about politicians failing to do anything. There has actually been plenty of climate action over the last couple of decades. So far, however, it's largely failed.

Climate action for whom?

Different kinds of climate action have different costs and benefits for different people. Because of this, choices about what courses of action to pursue are profoundly shaped by relations of power.

We live in a world marked by severe disparities of wealth and power within and between countries, many of which are rooted in longer histories of colonialism and exploitation. These disparities have often allowed powerful companies in sectors like finance and energy to dictate the course of climate action. This has made it very difficult to pursue measures that might threaten their interests, but which would dramatically reduce emissions - like banning fossil fuel exploration.

Instead, we've had a slew of measures to address climate change which rely on making emissions reductions profitable. But the quickest ways to reduce emissions aren't always the most profitable. And what is profitable for some can be harmful for less powerful people and communities.

Read more: IPCC report: how to make global emissions peak and fall - and what's stopping us

One example is carbon credits - permits that allow firms and governments to meet emissions targets and offset their pollution by funding projects that reduce emissions elsewhere, mainly in developing countries. The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) organised by the UN was meant to help reduce emissions this way. As agreed in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the CDM was supposed to mobilise investment to install renewable energy, retrofit factories and restore habitats.

While a large market developed for carbon offsets, it failed to substantially reduce emissions. A major reason for this was its reliance on profit-seeking private investors. Many of the projects funded through the CDM were probably profitable on their own - the distribution of CDM credits very closely mirrors patterns of private foreign investment in developing countries, with the vast majority funding projects in China and India.

Only a narrow range of possible emissions reduction projects, which either delivered their own revenue or provided cost savings for existing businesses, were financed as a result. But even these efforts were hampered by the push to create secondary markets for carbon credits, in which banks and financial institutions speculated on the price of credits. This was supposed to create more accurate prices, but instead, it made them more volatile, inhibiting new projects, as it became hard to predict how much the carbon credits they generated were worth.

Carbon trading also privileged the interests of private investors over those of communities near CDM-funded projects. Windfarms built in southern Mexico and financed through the CDM, for instance, privatised communal land, displacing indigenous communities.

Not-so-sustainable energy

Another major plank of climate action so far has been incentivising the adoption of new technologies with lower emissions. Governments in developed countries have offered subsidies for people to buy electric cars, or increased funding for research and development of clean energy technology.

It is tempting to think public and private investment in renewable energy might allow governments, businesses and civil society to pull together and fight climate change. But there remain significant obstacles. For one, many of the major energy firms investing in wind and solar power, like Shell and British Petroleum, also supply oil and gas. As long as producing fossil fuels remains profitable, these firms will resist efforts to stop selling them.

More importantly, shifting to fully renewable energy sources would require mineral extraction on a truly massive scale to supply the materials for batteries, wiring and other components of solar panels and wind turbines. Recent estimates suggest that meeting current global energy demand with 100% renewable energy would take more cobalt, lithium, and nickel than is known to exist on earth.

A scramble for these minerals is already underway. Demand for batteries in phones, laptops, and electric cars has triggered a rush to establish industrial mines in the southeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the majority of the world's known reserves of cobalt are found.

Foreign-owned industrial mines employ very few Congolese workers and the profits largely accumulate abroad. Some communities have been removed to make way for mining operations. Small-scale mining by local people, often operating without permits or formal mineral rights and using their own tools, has become the main means by which cobalt has benefited local livelihoods.

But according to media and activist reports, child labour is rife in these smaller mines. Meanwhile, the cobalt boom has been linked to landslides, river pollution, and deforestation, and locals have suffered widespread exposure to toxic mining dust in the air and in food and drinking water.

Some firms, including manufacturers of cars and electronics, as well as financial institutions involved in trading cobalt, have tried to minimise the negative effects of mining. Most of these programmes focus on tackling child labour, by certifying that cobalt was extracted from industrial mines rather than from the small-scale mines where most of the problem exists. But replacing smaller mines with industrial-scale ones wouldn't necessarily benefit mining communities.

Climate action so far has failed to confront the interests of powerful businesses and governments, while passing costs on to vulnerable people and places which have contributed very little to the climate crisis. If we want results, we may need to go beyond simply demanding action and instead focus on changing the way the global economy is organised and governed.

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Climate change: why government failure to act isn't the problem

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The recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report underscored the dire state of the climate crisis, concluding that "immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions" are needed to limit global warming even to 1.5°C or 2°C. The report renewed calls for urgent action and an end to "dithering" by politicians.

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Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change (developed with the provinces and territories and in consultation with Indigenous peoples)

Includes a pan-Canadian approach to pricing carbon pollution, and measures to achieve reductions across all sectors of the economy

Aims to drive innovation and growth by increasing technology development and adoption to ensure Canadian businesses are competitive in the global low-carbon economy

Also includes actions to advance climate change adaptation and build resilience to climate impacts across the country

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Despite doing all we can to prevent climate change, it’s a slippery slope; therefore, we also have the Greening Government Strategy

Increase the resilience of assets, services and operations by adapting to the changing climate

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Arctic Policy Framework represents combined efforts of the Government of Canada, provinces and territories, Indigenous Peoples and Northerners

Looking ahead to the year 2030, the framework will guide the federal government’s involvement in the North, including supporting adaptation action

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Probably going to be something about how carbon taxes are not effective in negating the usage of fossil fuels. However, this is the gov't's first strategy towards appealing towards corporations and maintaining a capitalist strategy. Perhaps w our new policies and strategies that take in the considerations of the youth, Indigenous peoples, radical environmentalists, etc., we can come up w better solutions for negating the use of fossil fuels.

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- Since climate change is a global issue, international agreements are required to establish consensus

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- Since climate change is a global issue, international agreements are required to establish consensus

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- Governments carry much more sway than youth who cannot vote, radical environmentalists who are viewed as fringe groups and corporations who have the sole goal of profit
- The only major climate success in history was achieved through the 1987 Montreal Protocol which succeeded in reducing CFC emissions that we depleting the ozone layer
- Ozone layer is currently returning to pre-CFC levels
- Canadian government facilitated the agreement that resulted in millions of cases of cancer and other diseases being averted
- Such large-scale accomplishments could not be achieved by the other groups who are solely on the penumbra of the issue

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- Other groups have to remember that they rely on government

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- Other groups have to remember that they rely on government

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- Corporations must remember that renewable energy projects would not have been possible without government subsidies as the projects we initially unprofitable
- Youth are taught about climate change through government funded schools
- Protests are directed towards the government which is tacit recognition that the government is the most influential entity involved in climate change solutions

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Canada’s economy could shrink by 6.9 per cent annually by 2050 without more ambitious climate action, according to the summary of GDP projections and climate pledges of G7 nations.

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Canada’s economy could shrink by 6.9 per cent annually by 2050 without more ambitious climate action, according to the summary of GDP projections and climate pledges of G7 nations.

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Based on National Round Table original economic modelling, the report finds that the economic impact of climate change on Canada is currently approximately $5 billion in losses per year, which might dramatically raise to $21 to $43 billions per year by 2050.

~ For example, in 2050, flooding damages to coastal dwellings, resulting fro climate change-include sea-level rise and storm surges, could cost between 1-8 billion per year with higher than average cost impacts in Atlantic Canada.

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- the Canadian government is doing everything they can to put individual health as well as the health of the community first
- Nature-based solutions make the most of nature’s ability to slow climate change by absorbing and storing greenhouse gases, regulating water levels, protecting shorelines from storm surges and erosion, and even cooling cities
- For example, in Nova Scotia, restoring salt marshes is helping protect tens of thousands of residents and businesses, UNESCO World Heritage Sites, Indigenous communities, and more than 20,000 hectares of farmland, from floods, and this is only achieved by listening and understanding the people of these communities
- we (as the gov. Of canada) have protected important natural sites from large corporations
- we have also incorporate climate change in the Canadian education system

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As governmental representatives, we have the power to take an intersectional and pluralist lens towards climate change action.