Select Page

SOURCE: Alaska Highway News

DATE: February 15, 2018

SNIP: B.C. will not meet its 2020 greenhouse gas emission targets and is not adequately prepared to mitigate the impact of fire, flooding, and drought precipitated by climate change, B.C. Auditor General Carol Bellringer says.

In an audit of B.C. climate change policies and the province’s ability to address both risk and adaptation, Bellinger confirmed what the B.C. government already has admitted: it is not on track to meet its interim 2020 targets of reducing greenhouse gases by 33% below 2007 levels by 2020.

But it’s also unlikely to meet its longer-range targets either, Bellringer concludes, with its current climate change policies, and says carbon taxes alone are insufficient tools for reducing GHGs.

“The trajectory to 2050 is indicating it will not be met with what’s currently in the plans, and that’s even before you take into account the LNG,” Bellringer said at a press conference Thursday, February 15.

Then again, few jurisdictions in the world are on track to meet their respective climate change targets.

Even Germany, often held up as the climate change poster child, has considered scrapping its 2020 interim targets – an acknowledgement that it won’t meet them.

A paper in Nature last year says that all major industrialized countries are failing to meet their climate change commitments and suggested that too many countries are focused on “numerical targets” and should focus more concrete actions.