Brockville Climate Action Group

Ottawa Citizen / Jake Rupert / 02 July 2008

With scientific models predicting a hotter and wetter Ottawa due to climate change, city bureaucrats say the time to prepare is now.

Council's planning and environment committee is being asked to endorse a climate change adaptation plan for the city next Tuesday.

The plan was created by officials in the economic and environmental sustainability group, and it's the next step in series of events after council's 2005 decision to acknowledge climate change and that greenhouse gases are contributing to it.

The idea behind the creation of the climate change adaptation plan is simple: "It's always better to be prepared," said the group's leader, Carol Christensen.

If the plan goes forward, Ottawa will join a growing list of Canadian cities making contingency plans to deal with climate change, including Vancouver, Halifax and Toronto.

The group bases its assessment of climate change as it relates to the city on an internationally accepted prediction formula from the United Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change, which can be applied to specific locations.

According to the formula, if greenhouse-gas emissions aren't significantly lowered, summers in Ottawa will be 4.5 to five degrees warmer in 70 to 100 years with a 10-per-cent increase in precipitation. Winters will be six to seven degrees warmer, with 24 to 35 per cent more precipitation.

If gas emissions are seriously cut, the temperature increases would be two to three degrees in summer and three to four degrees in winter.

Precipitation would increase between five and 20 per cent, depending on the season.

This is on top of the one-degree increase in average temperature Ottawa has experienced in the last 30 years, which is twice the rate of the world in general - and this is the optimistic picture.

According to the report, Canadian climate change scientists say if current greenhouse gas policy continues, increases in temperature and precipitation will come 30 years sooner than predicted, or as early as 2050.

To Ms. Christensen, the message is clear: climate changes are coming, and the only questions are how bad will it be and what can be done to lessen the economic, environmental, and health impacts on the city.

"The idea is that if we can anticipate the impacts, we can mitigate them," she said.

In the report going to the committee, her group outlines the predicted consequences and the city departments that should be concerned, which is just about all of them.

The group predicts damage to roads, buildings, bridges and electrical transmission lines built for climate conditions that no longer apply; increasing demand for water, coupled with dropping water levels; increasingly contaminated rivers and loss of wetlands; illnesses due to heat waves and increasing smog; winter sports seasons cut in half; power outages and more flooding, among other things.

"All of the above impacts have economic, social and environmental consequences," the report says. "Some can be mitigated, others adapted to or their impacts lessened."

To do this, the group is proposing a three-stage plan: a detailed look at what city operations will be affected and to what degree, a review of the various departments' abilities to change and adapt, and, finally, policy and operational changes to mitigate economic, social, and environmental damage.

These include possible changes to emergency plans, health programs, conservation measures, engineering and design guidelines, construction standards, tourism and recreation plans, safety guidelines, and city operations in many departments.

The report concludes that it is "hard to predict with certainty" the actual impact of climate change, but that change is coming nonetheless.

Ms. Christensen said for now, the climate-change adaptation program won't cost anything, but when it enters its third phase - implementation - there are sure to be costs.

She also had words for climate-change naysayers who argue that manmade gases aren't responsible for hotter temperatures: "This city council has already found that climate change exists and that greenhouse gases are contributing," she said. "We're at the stage now of planning what to do about it.

[ ORIGINAL ARTICLE HERE ]