Canada needs more coordinated approach to climate change, ship source oil spills: auditor report

Canada’s commissioner of the environment and sustainable development has criticized the federal government for not showing sustained leadership or responding in a coordinated way to the risks associated with climate change.
Also in his 2010 Fall Report, commissioner Scott Vaughan calls on the Canadian government to update its emergency planning and documentation of responses related to ship-source oil and chemical spills.
The report, posted on the Auditor General of Canada’s Web site, recognizes five federal departments have each conducted environmental risk assessments related to the potential effects of climate change. These include Environment Canada, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Health Canada, Indian and Northern Affairs Canada and Natural Resources Canada.
But these studies have been undertaken in a piecemeal and uncoordinated fashion, the commissioner found, and not much has been done after they were completed. “We found limited examples where policies and plans were adjusted or created to address risks arising from climate change.”
The report recommends Environment Canada take the lead in a coordinating a government-wide response to climate change. This would include the sharing of tools and best practices “to improve how the government integrates climate-risk identification, assessment and adaptation into its decision making and planning.”
The report also takes aim at the government’s lack of preparedness for oil spills from ships. In addition to calling for emergency response plans to oil spills to be updated, the commissioner noted the Coast Guard’s responses to ship-source spills are poorly documented.
“Between 2007 and 2009, a total of about 4,160 pollution incidents involving spills of oil, chemicals, or other pollutants into Canadian waters were reported to the Canadian Coast Guard,” the commissioner’s report notes. “About 2,000 were ship-source spills.
“These spills involved a variety of vessels, ranging from pleasure craft and fishing boats to barges, cargo vessels and tankers. The remaining spills came from land-based sources (about 245), oil-handling facilities (about 30), mystery sources (spills where the source could not be confirmed-about 1,630), and other sources (about 255).
The commissioner calls on the Coast Guard to establish a common system for reporting oil spills and documenting responses to them. “The level of documentation on responses should be proportionate to the significance of the incident and, where applicable, contain information on contributions from other entities,” the commissioner says.