Canada's Emission Trends 2014: preface

Preface

Canada’s Emissions Trends provides projected greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and supports domestic and international reporting requirements. The projections can be used to analyze the effect of different emissions abatement strategies and enables quantitative assessment of emissions reductions associated with policy measures that will arise in the future.

Environment Canada published the first Canada’s Emissions Trends report in 2011. This is the fourth annual report.

The analysis presented in this report incorporates the most up-to-date statistics on GHG emissions and energy available at the time that the technical modeling was completed in the summer of 2014, and is based on scenarios of emissions projections using the Energy, Emissions and Economy Model for Canada.

Provincial/territorial and federal government departments were consulted during the development of the projections and were invited to provide their input.

The majority of data and assumptions used for the modeled emissions scenarios have been subject to extensive consultations. For example, the National Energy Board has extensive consultation processes in place to ensure their projections of energy demand and supply growth are robust; the data they provided to Environment Canada reflect those consultations.

As with all projections, the estimates in this paper should be seen as representative of possible outcomes that will, in the end, depend on economic, social and other factors, including future government policies.  

Structure of this Report

This report presents projections of GHG emissions to 2020 and is aligned to the historical data on GHG emissions provided in Canada’s National Inventory Report 1990-2012: Greenhouse Gas Sources and Sinks in Canada. The first section, Canada’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions in a Global Context, sets the stage by explaining Canada’s emissions relative to other countries and the work that is under way internationally as part of the global effort to reduce emissions. The second section, Historical Greenhouse Gas Emissions by Sector, explains historical emissions trends by economic sector and provides details about the evolving trends in these sectors from 1990 to 2012. The third section, Projected Emissions Trends, provides projections of GHGs by sector to the year 2020 and explains the underlying reasons behind these sectoral trends. The fourth section, Projected Alternate Emissions Scenarios, provides a sensitivity analysis, which is also explained in further detail in Annex 3. This analysis presents possible trajectories of GHG emissions under various assumptions about the future path of energy prices and the economy. The annexes of this report provide further details on Land Use, Land-use Change and Forestry accounting, information on the key drivers of emissions used within the modeling exercise, and technical explanations of the modeling platform and changes made since last year’s projections.