GNWT names climate change top priority for coming years
NWT delegate to COP21 says government on the right track but more can be done
John McFadden
Northern News Services
Monday, January 11, 2016
NORTHWEST TERRITORIES
Although its greenhouse gas strategy has now technically expired, the territorial government is still well positioned to address issues surrounding climate change as the new year begins, says senior adviser on climate change programs.
Jim Sparling was one of the GNWT's representatives at the COP21 climate change summit held last month in Paris. Sparling said the delegates he met with were impressed with what's being done in the territory to combat global warming.
"The work that we are doing on energy efficiency and developing renewable energy such as biomass, solar and hydro - we're very well advanced in doing that kind of stuff," Sparling said. "Some of the things we are doing to monitor and track and report our emissions - a lot of countries in the world don't even have that capability."
Sparling said that the bulk of carbon emissions in the NWT are split between transportation, heating and electricity production and despite a good track record, there is plenty of room for improvement.
"Especially on the power generation side and how we can consume electricity and the heating side - that's something we have a lot of control over," he said.
"When we look at how we travel in the NWT - we fly in a lot of airplanes just because we are so spread out. That's a harder piece to tackle."
He described a list of challenges unique to the North. For example, equipment guaranteed to last 10 years in Europe doesn't last as long in the NWT.
"Because we operate them for such a long heating season - we tend to burn them out a lot faster than the manufacturer ever anticipated ... We cannot have our heating devices fail in the middle of winter," he said.
It is oft-quoted that the North is the canary in the coal mine when it comes to climate change, which is something Sparling said he made sure other delegates at the conference understood.
"We're melting," he said.
"As we were talking to people we realized that they don't know the impacts that we are experiencing up here - the changes we're seeing in permafrost, the problems we're having operating winter roads and those sorts of things just were not on people's radar.
We've been working on that for 10 years now and quietly developing some very good expertise on how to address those kinds of problems."
The GNWT's Greenhouse Gas Strategy expired at the end of 2015 but Sparling said the 18th Legislative Assembly has made climate change one of its top priorities.
NWT climate change initiatives will be spearheaded by the new Environment and Natural Resources Minister Wally Schumann.
He was not able to provide an interview with News/North as of press time.
