Canada’s Net-Zero Advisory Body has a critically important and difficult mandate. It sets out Canada’s path to net zero emissions with advice to the minister of Environment and Climate Change through annual reports. It has made good progress, but its second annual report is concerning.

These annual reports will strongly shape strategy to substantially reduce greenhouse gas by 2030 and 2035 to meet the country’s commitment of net zero by 2050.

But the newest report is missing crucial information and gives too much weight to carbon budgets, equity and fairness. Before the advisory body, the NZAB, files its third report at the end of this year, it must strengthen its analysis so that policymakers get the vital information they will need.

The importance of actual emissions

A discussion of negative-emission technologies must be added. A sectoral approach and analysis are essential, as are explicit details about the computer model the group is using.

But a clear distinction must be made between net emissions and actual emissions of carbon. A country’s net emissions are its actual greenhouse gas emissions reduced by the value of its negative emissions.

For example, if in 2050 Canada’s actual emissions are, say, 150 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (MtCO2e) while at the same time there are technologies absorbing an equal amount of carbon from the atmosphere, the country’s net emissions are effectively zero.

This meets the target set out in the Paris Agreement. But if Canada sets a 2050 target where actual emissions are reduced to 50 MtCO2e, only 50 MtCO2e of negative emissions are needed to get to a condition of net zero.

The three-legged stool is the way to net zero by 2050

Canada’s chemical and fertilizer makers are escaping carbon scrutiny

In both cases, net zero emissions is achieved. But in the former case, the country’s actual emission target for 2050 is three times the latter. More importantly, if actual emissions are 150 MtCO2e in 2050, that means 150 MtCO2e a year of negative emission technologies must be deployed and operational.

Setting a net-zero emission target is largely meaningless unless the level of actual emissions and the corresponding level of negative emissions is specified.

A chart in the report is misleading and should be corrected. It depicts a trajectory for emissions falling to net zero in 2050 (page 14 in volume 2). But what are Canada’s actual emissions in that year? There is no way to determine this from the chart and no information is provided in the text.

A year and a half ago, however, actual GHG emissions in 2050 were estimated to be as high as 165 MtCO2e by a companion government report, Canada’s Energy Future 2023, and it has subsequently been shown that it is extremely unlikely that Canada can reduce its 2050 emissions below this level.

Negative-emission technologies are therefore an integral part of the net-zero condition because actual emissions cannot be reduced to zero. It is a physical impossibility.

Canada’s largest carbon sink is potentially its huge expanse of boreal forests, but recent research suggests that it may now be a source of carbon, not a sink.

If so, Canada will need to rely on engineered carbon sinks such as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, direct air capture, or more imaginative concepts such as enhanced rock weathering and ocean fertilization, all of which are technically problematic.

A discussion of the role of these important technologies is lacking in the NZAB report.

Budgets or targets?

The concept of a carbon budget dominates one volume of the report. This is a distraction. The Paris Agreement does not even mention the term.

Defining emission limits based on a carbon budget is simply a different way of reporting on annual targets. The Paris Agreement makes this clear in Article 4, where it asserts, “Developed country parties should continue taking the lead by undertaking economy-wide emission reduction targets.” Targets, not budgets.

The report talks about Canada’s “excess emissions,” another distraction. It’s a notion related to the concept of a carbon budget – the total carbon that can be emitted before the temperature limits set by the Paris Agreement are exceeded.

The limit is fast approaching and all countries emit greenhouse gases. How should the remaining budget be allocated among them?

Fairness and equity

Industrialized countries are collectively responsible, of course, for most of the existing atmospheric content of carbon dioxide. So should the remaining budget space go to developing countries? After all, they bear little or no responsibility for the worsening climate. It would be a fair move but unworkable.

Canada’s emissions would far exceed the tiny space left to it in a “fairness-based” rebalancing. Canada cannot avoid emitting substantial quantities of greenhouse gases over the next 25 years even as it transitions to net zero. It’s an unfair fact that applies to all high-income industrial countries, though Canada’s culpability is almost irrelevant compared to the U.S., Europe, and increasingly China.

The NZAB report concludes that Canada would end up with a zero or negative budget under a fairness-based approach. It’s a result that has no practical value.

Going forward

Any discussion of Canada’s pathway to net-zero emissions must tackle the difficult question of the oil and gas sector, which accounts for almost one third of all Canada’s emissions of carbon. In second place is the transport sector, responsible for about a quarter of the total.

Yet the NZAB report does not specifically address the different characteristics of these sectors, but policies should be designed for each sector and include regulations, incentives and disincentives.

Also notable is the computer model the advisory group used to run its numbers. It chose a model used by the Canadian Climate Institute to verify that its recommendations actually produce the desired outcome of a specified emission reduction by 2030 or 2035.

There needs to be an explicit examination and discussion of the set of assumptions, constraints, and formulae that the model uses for the simulations. Normally, a series of sensitivity analyses would also be run to determine the robustness of the model’s outputs. This would enable the NZAB to identify the policies that are critically important for meeting emission targets.

The NZAB needs to strengthen its analysis so it can tackle the most difficult questions. It can do this by:

• Clearly explaining why negative-emission technologies are integral to the net-zero condition in 2050.
• Defining emission-reduction targets for 2030 and 2035 based on a pathway to net zero in 2050 that shows residual and negative emissions.
• Providing a realistic assessment of the present status of negative-emission technologies and advising where research and development need to focus.
• Advising on policies for the fossil fuel, transport, and building sectors aimed at significantly reducing their emissions by 2050.
• Running sensitivity analyses on the simulation model to identify policies with the greatest influence on cost-effective outcomes.