This case study was co-produced with Canada Grid, an initiative of The Transition Accelerator.
Introduction
In its pursuit of carbon neutrality by 2050, Denmark has become one of the world’s leading producers of variable renewable energy, with wind power alone accounting for 47 per cent of its domestic supply in 2021. What made that impressive achievement possible, however, was robust connections with other Nordic jurisdictions that can supply power when the wind isn’t blowing. These jurisdictions also provide a market for surplus Danish supply when generation is strong.
For more than 25 years, Denmark has worked with its neighbours Norway, Sweden, and Finland to build a market of two-way trade that facilitates cost efficiency, flexibility, and carbon emission reduction. The inter-jurisdictional co-operation has since expanded to the Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, and increasingly with European Union neighbours.
The experience of the Nordic countries holds some key lessons for Canadian provinces that are facing decarbonization challenges.
Electricity trade, the Nordic experience shows, has to be a two-way street—both to optimize opportunities and to provide political support for greater integration. Co-operation must extend beyond the construction of transmission capacity to include formal links that facilitate planning and grid security co-ordination. Harmonization of data and of supply/demand modelling is required to ensure maximum grid efficiency. And harmonization of markets has been another key feature of the Nordic success; in its absence, co-operation among provinces will be more challenging.
Fundamentally, the Scandinavian countries have benefited from a culture of co-operation that is rarely seen in Canadian interprovincial relations. Even in the absence of such co-ordination, however, Canada can still learn from the Nordic experience, though applying the key lessons will likely prove challenging.
Calls for Canadian interties: Finding a way past balkanization
Canada’s electricity system remains highly balkanized, with most provinces guarding access to markets, maintaining highly concentrated decision making, and championing in-province supply options over regional interties.
For several years, leading industry analysts have concluded that consumers would be well-served by greater interprovincial co-operation on grids, especially as we work to decarbonize. We would see the greatest benefits from increased trade between hydro-rich provinces like Quebec, Manitoba and British Columbia, and fossil-dependent neighbours that are building out renewable power capacity in their efforts to decarbonize (Pineau 2021, Shaffer 2021, van de Biezenbos 2021).
Among those voices:
Natural Resources Canada produced companion reports in 2018 on the Atlantic region and Western Canada, both of which endorsed the desirability for more interprovincial transmission (RECSI 2018, RECSI 2019).
In a 2021 report on decarbonization for the Canadian Climate Institute, Blake Shaffer pointed to the cost benefits of building greater inter-regional transmission capacity to marry hydro-rich systems with those that are building out variable renewable capacity (Shaffer 2021).
The International Energy Agency in a recent review urged greater interconnections among provinces and territories to “ensure balanced progress towards national goals for decarbonizing the power sector” (IEA 2022).
University of Calgary law professor Kristen Van de Biezenbos argued in a 2021 paper that the federal government has constitutional authority—and an urgent need—to assume permitting of interprovincial transmission. Lack of such capacity is “a deterrent to private investment in renewable energy projects, which is holding Canada back from meeting its climate commitments in a way that provides major economic gains,” van de Biezenbos concluded.
Unilateral federal action, however, could run into serious roadblocks. Shaffer described the considerable barriers to greater integration, which include political resistance among provinces and lack of alignment of market structures and regulatory systems (Shaffer 2021).
As the Nordic experience shows, these challenges can be overcome but only through a thoughtful sharing of the benefits, and a deep and long-term commitment from government leaders to break down the provincialism that is the hallmark of the Canadian power sector.
Building Nordic co-operation: They’re all in this together
Co-operation among Nordic countries on electricity markets goes back more than 100 years, to 1915 when the first undersea cable was laid between Denmark and Sweden.
The Nordic Council of Ministers, which was formed in 1972, has consistently made energy co-operation a top priority among the four governments of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland. The resulting market integration has taken a number of forms.
In the early days, the Nordic Council of Ministers outlined priorities for regional efforts that focused on security of supply. Additional transmission capacity was built and interjurisdictional trade was managed by national Transmission System Operators.
In the early 1990s, countries faced an over-supply of capacity and inefficient grids that inflated costs. Led initially by Sweden, governments began to deregulate their electricity markets. In 1995, the four Nordic countries agreed in the Louisiana Declaration to pursue “free and open markets with efficient trade across borders” (Cejie 2017)
At that time, the goals were less about environmental and climate change imperatives, and more about investment, flexibility, and reliability. The next year, Nord Pool was created as the first international power exchange, operating between Norway and Sweden. Finland joined in 1996 and Denmark a few years later. Baltic states Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania joined the market between 2010 and 2012, connected by three underseas transmission lines to their Scandinavian neighbours.
Transmission capacity has since expanded dramatically among the Nordic countries as well as between them and other European nations such as the United Kingdom, Netherlands, and Germany.
In an interview with the Canadian Climate Institute, veteran power broker Tomas Kaberger said the integration achieved significant benefits. “The interconnectedness has increased and resulted in more efficient power generation and reduced costs,” said Kaberger, who was head of the Swedish Energy Agency and is now professor of industrial energy policy at Chalmers Technical University in Goteborg.
The benefits, however, did not accrue solely from more transmission capacity and restructured markets. The Nordic states also assembled regional governance structures to provide an overarching strategy to the market developments.
Today, the council of ministers meet regularly. The Transmission System Operators have joint planning sessions for strategic capacity-building.
In late 2021, the Nordic Regional Security Co-ordinator was spun out from the Transmission System Operators as a jointly owned but independent corporation. Its task is to maintain a reliable power supply for the short-term market as well as in the longer term.
The Nordic Energy Research group, which operates under the council of ministers, provides a shared platform for research and policy development on a range of issues, including some that resonate in Canada: the role of hydrogen and carbon capture utilization and sequestration (CCUS).
The Nordic group also provides a regional perspective as the governments work within the European Union on a continent-wide strategy for clean electricity and decarbonization, efficiency standards, and grid reliability. However, each country retains policy autonomy in setting goals in areas such as emissions reductions, renewable electricity targets, and energy efficiency.
Canadian provinces could similarly benefit from strengthened ties at a regional level while operating their electricity system under an over-arching climate plan that will drive decisions, just as the Nordic group does in Europe.
In recent years, the Nordic group has been operating in a context where the European Union is playing a greater role in driving increased transmission capacity and greater market integration. Indeed, in years of high rainfall, Norway has displaced France as the largest power exporter within Europe. (Norway is not an EU member but participates in the common market of the European Economic Area, which also includes non-EU member Iceland.)
The European policy is driven by three related concerns: decarbonization, keeping costs down, and maintaining grid security as greater variable energy sources are brought online. It is managed by the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E), which comprises the national Transmission System Operators and which has urged continued strong investment in interjurisdictional transmission capacity (ENTSO-E 2020).
European policymakers expect considerable benefits from the market integration. ENTSO-E has forecast that, with an investment of 3.4 billion Euros over 15 years, generation costs would be 10 billion Euros per year lower than the baseline figure. At the same time, the system would avoid 110 TWH of energy curtailment by 2040, while reducing carbon emissions by 40 megatonnes in 2030 and 55 megatonnes in 2040 (ENTSO-E 2020).
As the EU asserts its federal role, the four original Nord Pool countries have recommitted to regional co-operation to advance Nordic perspectives in the broader strategic consultations. In the same way, provinces could do more to advance their regional interests within the Canadian federation.
Provinces already maintain regional forums such as the annual Western Premiers’ Conference and the Council of Atlantic Premiers. However, regional initiatives in the electricity sector are either non-existent (Western Canada) or nascent and struggling (Atlantic Canada.) While the western premiers have failed to advance a regional perspective for electricity, Saskatchewan and Manitoba did recently upgraded an intertie with federal support.
The Atlantic premiers are pursuing federal support for an Atlantic transmission loop which would bolster intertie capacity and could involve Hydro Quebec. However, the provinces have not done the joint analyses and planning that would underpin the proposed five-billion-dollar project. Deep political divisions present enormous challenges, including an ongoing dispute between Quebec and Newfoundland over transmission of power from Labrador hydroelectric sites, and a deep distrust in smaller Maritime provinces over perceived Quebec ambition for market dominance. Nor is it clear if the provinces can forge a financial structure that will make the Atlantic Loop competitive in the long term.
Windy Denmark, water-powered Norway: Charging and discharging the battery
Denmark’s experience in the Nordic energy group holds perhaps the most compelling lessons for Canadian provinces like Alberta that rely on fossil fuels for electricity and are building out their capacity in variable renewable electricity generation.
Denmark is now a major transmission hub connecting to Norway and Sweden as well as with European neighbours to the south.
The country has seen one of the world’s largest expansions of wind capacity, mostly offshore. It has availed itself of its large transmission capacity to provide backup power and exporting surplus power when winds are strong. In 2021, wind provided 47 per cent of the country’s electricity supply. Denmark offers a concrete example of the benefits that interconnections can provide.
Denmark also significant natural gas-fired capacity but has turned to cheap wind power—backed up by hydro imports—as it pursues a decarbonization strategy. Generation from natural gas plants fell from a 20.6 per cent share in 2006 to 7.3 per cent in 2016 and then stabilized (IEA 2019). A key reason for the decline in gas-fired power is the significant levels of interconnection with its neighbours and its participation in the Nord Pool spot market, the IEA noted.
Denmark now has a total of nine interconnections with neighbouring countries. In 2016, the most recent year for which figures are available, seven international transmission lines provided 6.4 GW of export capacity and 5.7 GW of import capacity, which exceeded the country’s peak load of 5.6 GW. That same year, nearly 80 per cent of wind generation was balanced by either exports to the region, or imports from the region.
The Norway-Denmark relationship, in particular, is a model for how Quebec’s electricity trade could evolve more efficiently with Northeastern U.S. states and expand with neighbouring Canadian provinces. When rainfall is low in Norway, as it was in 2021, the country can import power from Denmark and other neighbours to preserve its reservoirs. When rainfall is abundant, Norway can export surplus power and back up variable sources like wind. More two-way capacity would give the Norwegians even greater ability to mitigate the impacts of dry seasons and would improve the cost efficiency of transmission capacity.
Northeast North American would benefit from similar trading patterns. A 2020 study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concludes that the addition of 4 gigawatts of transmission between Quebec and New England would lower the cost of zero-carbon electricity across the entire system by between 17 and 28 per cent. The benefit flows to both partners in the trade. The key condition: Quebec would act less as a baseload power supplier and more as a storage system that backs up a growing capacity of wind and solar generation. That is the role played by Norway’s (and to a lesser extent Sweden’s) hydro resource.
The MIT paper’s lead author, Emil Dimanchev, says he would expect that a build-out of transmission links between Quebec and Atlantic Canada, where provinces have set their own net-zero goals, would also be the most cost-effective route to decarbonization.
In an email, Dimanchev said that both Norway’s and Quebec’s hydro systems are like batteries. New transmission would increase the rate at which these storage systems can be charged from surplus renewable power in neighbouring jurisdictions and then discharged to provide power during periods of scarcity in these regions.
Western Canada would also benefit from more interprovincial electricity trade. Hydro-rich British Columbia and Manitoba would act as batteries for Alberta and Saskatchewan as they begin to rely more heavily on wind and solar. In turn, renewable producers could sell back to hydro provinces when they have surpluses.
It is time for a mindset shift on what the best use of reservoir hydro is: namely as a long-term battery for variable renewables, which would require two-way trading between provinces.
—Emil Dimanchev
Green Sweden: Pursuing a 100 per cent renewable grid
With an historic reliance on hydro and nuclear, Sweden has now almost fully decarbonized its electricity system, a leader among developed countries. Further upping the ambition, the Swedish government has set a target of 100 per cent renewable power by 2040. Achieving that goal would require the replacement of aging nuclear plants with more variable sources of electricity.
The Swedes are facing challenges that are familiar to many Canadian provinces: how to integrate large volumes of low-cost but variable renewable generation into the grid without requiring backup from natural gas-fired plants with the resulting greenhouse gas emissions.
The country has long been a net exporter of power. In 2017, Swedish electricity exports totalled 30.9 TWh while imports were 11.9 TWh. Sweden is well interconnected with neighbouring countries. It relies mainly on land cables to Norway, but also on high-voltage sea cables to Finland and Denmark, as well as Germany, Poland and Lithuania. In 2017, half of Sweden’s electricity exports went to Finland while it was a net importer from Norway.
A number of challenges confront Sweden’s pursuit of its 100-per-cent renewable goal, however; not least the need for large-scale investment in an aging transmission system that is already plagued with bottlenecks. Under its 2040 target, the country will have to phase out an aging nuclear fleet—which accounted for 40 per cent of the country’s generation in 2017—while integrating growing wind capacity.
The International Energy Agency warned in a 2019 review that the country may have to revisit its market approach, which does not provide incentives for building standby capacity. “Sweden needs to make sure that the energy-only power market can deliver a stable electricity supply, while facing higher shares of wind power and a potential nuclear phase-out,” the IEA said. “This will require a well-thought-through market design and further regional collaboration.” Similarly, Canadian provinces will have to consider how their market structures accommodate decarbonization.
Part of Sweden’s solution involves greater investment in transmission, both for the internal grid and for great regional market access. The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) laid out a menu of policies for Sweden in a 2020 report. It included greater digitalization of the grid; robust energy efficiency policies; a greater reliance on distributed energy generation and new sources such as renewable-power-to-hydrogen and renewable-electricity-to-heat; and finally more reliance on Nordic and pan-European markets. Essentially, IRENA concluded,integration has to happen not just horizontally at the level of the national grid, but vertically, from local, to area-wide, to national, to regional, to continental. Sweden already participates fully in what is the most integrated electricity market in the world. Greater co-ordination with the Nordic and Baltic countries, as well as European neighbours, will be a cost-effective way to achieve its renewable target, the international agency has said.
Everyone into the Nord Pool: Building a common market
One of the key elements in the increasing Nordic electricity co-operation over the past two decades has been the role of Nord Pool, the wholesale market jointly owned by the transmission system operators of the four countries.
In the 25 years since its launch as a joint market between Norway and Sweden, Nord Pool has grown into a behemoth—the largest power market in Europe, accounting for 995 TWh in traded power in 2020. In addition to the Nordic and Baltic jurisdictions, it now operates in 15 European countries including Germany, France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
Nord Pool began in the 1990s with Norway and then Sweden deciding to deregulate their wholesale electricity markets, which were plagued by overcapacity, inefficiency, and high costs. As they were followed by Nordic and then Baltic neighbours, expanding trade in electricity by way of more intertie capacity became an obvious next step.
Several authors have noted that mismatched market rules in Canada represent a hurdle for any effort to expand interprovincial trade (Pineau, Shaffer, Van de Biezenbos). It is notable that the Nordic countries did have significant exports and imports prior to the market reforms; this trade was managed by the Transmission System Operators directly. The market reform early this century unleashed investment in transmission capacity that may not have occurred otherwise.
In a 2017 review of the group’s co-operative efforts, Joakim Cejie, chair of the Nordic electricity market group, said better market functioning yielded improved price formation, bigger markets that were more attractive to investors and increased cost efficiency (Cejie 2017).
Nordic electricity ties: Across the wires, a culture of co-operation
Despite the long history of collaboration, Nordic politicians and technocrats cannot take public support for granted when it comes to free trade in electricity and the benefits of large net exports.
Norway’s protectionist Centre Party—formed as the Farmers’ Party a century ago—has called for a major reduction in power exports in order to keep prices low at home. Its platform no doubt gained some traction this winter as prices soared due to low levels in the country’s own reservoirs and high natural gas prices in Europe.
Nordic co-operation has the “weight of history” on its side, but maintaining that co-operation takes continuous work, Andrea Stengel, senior adviser at Nordic Energy Research, said in an interview over Zoom. “It’s not a given because there are always populist voices saying the power should be used at home.”
A vocal minority in each Nordic country has always opposed the relegation of decision-making to intergovernmental bodies. The populists have been most successful in the effort to keep Norway out of the European Union and have become re-energized by the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the EU, Stengel said.
The clear lesson for Canada: Advocates of greater provincial electricity trade need to recognize the inevitable political resistance. They must find ways to communicate the benefits of co-operation. And find ways to strengthen economic and social bonds so that increased electricity trade is part of broader shared agenda.
In the early years of the Nord Pool there were in fact few formal structures in place to manage the multilateral energy relationship. In a 2004 paper, Pierre-Olivier Pineau, Anil Hira, and Karl Froschauer, noted: “Integration has, in fact, been made through a decentralized regional framework, whereby each country has kept all its legislative sovereignty and no common institution has been created” (Pineau et al. 2004).
Since then, we have seen the creation of common institutions that came about both organically, to manage the growing complexity of the regional relationship, and in response to EU action on electricity driven by both environmental and reliability concerns. Legislative sovereignty remains, but important planning and regulatory efforts have been taken up by regional institutions.
Under the auspices of the Council of Ministers, Nordic Energy Research grew from a small collaborative institute when it was formed in 1999, to a sizeable secretariat based in Oslo. The group funds research and manages pilot projects in emerging areas such as nuclear technology, CCUS, and hydrogen, as well as supporting the Nordic electricity policy engagement with the European Union.
In the interview, Stengel highlighted the organic nature of Nordic electricity co-operation. “They saw it worked and they saw that everyone profited, and they had been co-operating for a while so why not have the market and the grid with even tighter co-operation,” she said.
The clear lesson for Canada: Co-operation is something you build piece by piece. It is important to get started with joint projects and some pilot programs. Canada’s patchwork of provincial electricity systems cannot go from virtually nothing to effective integration in one fell swoop.
Canada cld learn from Nordics to value of regional cooperation in electricity. To optimize potential, it takes more than wires but some market harmonization & a culture of cooperation. https://t.co/210j8rXaRs
Conclusion: Lessons from Nordic electricity co-operation
In assessing the lessons Canada can draw from Nordic electricity co-operation, we need to recognize that the Scandinavian experience emerged from the countries’ shared history and culture. While the Nordic countries sometimes “quarrel like siblings” as Stengel put it, there is a greater history of economic co-operation than there is among provinces. The electricity market in Scandinavia has been liberalized and is dominated by private sector firms that are active in all four markets and beyond.
The Canadian power market, by comparison, is highly balkanized. It features largely provincially owned, often vertically integrated corporations that dominate their home market but have no presence in other provinces. Politically, the success of “provincial champions” which provide high-paying jobs in communities all across a province is highly valued and can complicate the pursuit of low-cost, reliable, and environmentally sustainable power that greater integration offers.
Federal intrusion into electricity markets is rare and politically sensitive, especially in Quebec where state-owned Hydro Quebec is seen as an unambiguous success. Finally, there is little evidence in the Nordic region that Indigenous populations play a significant role in project planning and implementation, whereas Indigenous communities in Canada are demanding their seat at the table. The construction of interprovincial transmission lines will require their participation.
Despite the fundamental differences, there are some conclusions to be drawn from the Nordic experience that are relevant to Canada.
As the Nordic model shows, the expansion of provincial interties would yield benefits by marrying hydro-rich systems with those that are decarbonizing through large additions of wind and solar.
The optimal trading pattern would be two-way, with hydro suppliers backing up a growing fleet of variable renewable capacity, which can be used to recharge reservoirs when market opportunities arise.
Grids can still be managed internally by provincial system operators who then collaborate regionally through formal bodies for the purposes of planning, short-term supply adequacy and balancing. Market harmonization is the grease that allows for most efficient trading and lowest-cost electricity supply but is not a prerequisite for greater co-operation.
Transmission planning and market harmonization in the Nordic group are driven by shared values that now include national net-zero commitments. Such consensus does always not exist among provinces in Canada. However, a growing commitment to decarbonization would bring the benefits of interprovincial co-operation into clearer focus.
Fundamentally, the strength of the Nordic system is the culture of co-operation that undergirds it. Such a culture can be built here if provinces focus on the three essential elements of successful grid management: affordability, zero-carbon, and reliability. Joint planning is needed to ensure that benefits are shared. Trust is critical.
Pineau, Pierre-Olivier, Anil Hira, and Karl Froshauer. 2004. “Measuring International Electricity Integration: A comparative study of the power systems under the Nordic Council, MERCOSUR, and NAFTA”. Energy Policy 32(13): 1457-1475.
Indigenous communities, governments, and organizations in every region of Canada have been active developers of renewable energy projects over the past two decades. Today, First Nations, Métis, and Inuit entities are partners or beneficiaries of almost 20 per cent of Canada’s electricity-generating infrastructure, and almost all of that infrastructure is producing renewable energy. Indigenous Peoples are thus at the forefront of the country’s clean energy evolution.
This paper traces the rising waves of Indigenous participation in clean energy over the past two decades. It looks at how to catalyze exponential growth in Indigenous clean energy opportunities, proposing specific actions and initiatives that can materially contribute to Canada’s clean electricity future. The paper wraps with a series of strategic recommendations to forge new electricity relationships and commitments rooted in pan-Canadian collaboration, Indigenous participation in planning electricity futures, using carbon price revenues more effectively, and removing the capital bottleneck for clean electricity systems within the Canadian federation.
Reliable and resilient electricity systems are essential for a prosperous, net zero Canada. While Canadian electricity systems are generally reliable, they face growing challenges as climate impacts worsen and as electricity use increases through decarbonization. This scoping paper examines the expected climate-induced risks to Canadian electricity systems and discusses opportunities to enhance their resilience on the path to net zero.
Canada and other G20 countries have committed to phase out “inefficient fossil-fuel subsidies that encourage wasteful consumption” (European Council 2021). This has sparked debates about the definitions of inefficient and subsidy. On one hand, governments and industry have interpreted this language narrowly to defend measures that support increasing fossil fuel production and consumption. On the other hand, others have taken much broader interpretations that arrive at very high subsidy estimates.
This paper takes a different approach, which we hope will prove useful in guiding Canada’s implementation of its pledge to phase out fossil fuel subsidies. We assess whether existing and proposed government measures support or hinder the private investment needed to drive Canada’s long-term success through the global low-carbon transition. Success, in this context, means both strong economic growth and a smooth transition for workers and communities.
Recent policy efforts in the European Union (EU) to implement a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism for a select number of products have increased the focus on border carbon adjustments (BCAs), moving them from theory to practice.
The EU is exploring a carbon charge on some imported goods to address imbalances in carbon costs between the carbon price levied on EU producers and a lack of carbon pricing in exporting countries. The EU is not alone, with the Canadian government releasing an issues paper on BCAs in August 2021 as part of a broader initiative to consult on BCAs. In the U.S., the Biden administration has made no secret that they are also interested in investigating the application of BCAs. With Canada, the United States, and the European Union now all considering their design choices for border carbon adjustment mechanisms, BCAs are about to get real.
One important aspect in the design of BCAs is the level of cooperation among governments. Some level of cooperation would seem advisable to improve design, increase the understanding of programs among trading partners, smooth the protectionist waters, and, importantly, incent other countries to increase their ambition to avoid the border adjustment.
The Canadian Climate Institute, with the support of the German Embassy in Canada, explores in this paper the technical and administrative aspects of a cooperative agenda that could support the implementation of border carbon adjustments. We explore two important areas of potential cooperation, including:
UNDERSTANDING THE CARBON POLICIES that the BCA credits for equivalent policy.
ASSESSING EQUIVALENCY AMONG SYSTEMS, including developing a legal, fair, and practical approach to assessing the relative policy stringency among traded commodities.
Important elements of the cooperative agenda for countries to pursue include the following actions:
FURTHER ENGAGE to bring BCAs into more widespread discussions under the WTO.
BRING BCA DISCUSSIONS into multilateral alliances and cooperative forums and broaden sectoral deals.
START COOPERATIVE WORKING GROUPS focused on best practices.
PREPARE THE INFORMATION to reveal the average costs of carbon pricing programs
Going further in the conversation
The German Embassy in Canada joined the Canadian Climate Institute on December 15, 2021 to discuss the cooperative agenda that could help smooth the waters for border carbon adjustments. Watch the webinar:
Canada has committed to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050. To support these efforts, the federal government has legally enshrined that goal, created a mechanism for defining five-year milestones on the way to achieving it, and established a governance framework to help keep the government on track.
In January 2021, the Canadian Climate Institute published the first comprehensive study of what this net zero goal means in practical terms, Canada’s Net Zero Future: Finding Our Way in the Global Transition. The report modelled more than 60 different scenarios for Canada’s energy future to determine the feasibility of the net zero goal, consisting of various combinations of established “safe bet” solutions and less certain “wild card” solutions that could be used to achieve it.
The biggest takeaways from that foundational report are that Canada’s net zero goal is achievable, and that getting there requires a massive, early build-out of clean electricity and expanded electrification.
Currently, however, Canada’s aging electricity infrastructure is not aligned with a net zero future. In particular, intermittent renewable energy sources such as solar and wind, which are essential for reaching Canada’s goal, present challenges for electricity systems that aren’t ready to handle them. Furthermore, the regulatory framework governing Canada’s network of provincially managed grids is rigid and often misaligned with net zero goals, which creates major barriers to innovation. Electricity grids are far too important to Canada’s vital progress toward its net zero goal to perpetuate this status quo any longer—something Canada’s new government has acknowledged in its recent commitments to supporting the development of cleaner grids.
Fortunately, Canada is not alone in this energy transition. Upgrades to electricity infrastructure and systems to support decarbonization are already underway around the world. Germany, for example, has led the way for more than 20 years, with a national commitment to producing electricity from renewable sources that has seen the share of renewables on German grids expand from less than five per cent to more than 40 per cent since the start of the century. As Germany pushes on toward even more ambitious goals, including a nationwide phaseout of the coal-fired power plants that still supply about one-quarter of its power and an economy-wide target of net zero by 2045, German insight and expertise can provide valuable lessons for Canada’s own net zero push.
2. German leadership in the global energy transition
Germany’s leadership role in the growth of renewable energy and other climate solutions has been guided since 2002 by a range of federal and state-level policy tools united under the banner of die Energiewende (“the energy transition”). Germany’s pioneering work over the years has included the first industrial-scale ramp-up of the solar industry, innovations in energy efficiency, climate-friendly design for everything from homes to heavy industry, and a lead role in political negotiations to expand its transition goals to the entire European Union.
In some ways, Canada is embarking on its pursuit of net zero with a huge head start over Germany. The German transition began from a massive reliance on coal-fired power plants, whereas Canada’s electricity infrastructure is already more than 80 per cent non-emitting, thanks to an abundance of hydroelectric and nuclear power. But Canada’s national figure masks a sharp regional variation between provinces with predominantly hydroelectric and nuclear grids and those with mostly fossil-fuel-based grids (Shaffer 2021). Both the Canadian and German grids, however, are highly centralized and built around large-scale power plants with readily dispatched electricity supplies. Germany’s Energiewende, which has been dealing for more than a decade with the challenges of ramping up intermittent renewables and rewriting outdated regulatory, legal, and financial frameworks, thus has many lessons to teach Canada about how best to accelerate its transition.
Opening of the NEW 4.0-Roadshow in May 2018 at the Chamber of Commerce in Hamburg. Photo: Daniel Reinhardt/HAW
3. NEW 4.0 and the future of net zero grids
As Germany enters the next phase of its Energiewende, pursuing a target of 65 per cent emissions-free power by 2030 and net zero nationwide by 2045 for all energy production and use, it has begun to tackle the most difficult technical, logistical, and political questions raised by the redesign of its grids for intermittency, distributed generation, and large-scale storage. In support of this, the German government’s Federal Ministry of Economics and Energy launched a “Smart Energy Showcase” in 2016—a funding program to launch experiments in next-generation digital technology to assist the Energiewende in achieving its goals. One of these projects was Norddeutsche Energiewende 4.0 (the North German Energy Transition 4.0, or NEW 4.0).
NEW 4.0 was conceived by local and state officials in the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein and the neighbouring city-state of Hamburg to showcase its leadership in the energy transition and develop tools for even more renewable energy use, both in the state and across the country. Schleswig-Holstein is Germany’s wind energy heartland, home to abundant wind power resources both onshore and offshore along its North Sea coast, as well as a major manufacturing hub for wind turbines. As a leading clean-energy region within a leading clean-energy nation, Schleswig-Holstein stands among the vanguard of the energy transition globally, making it a particularly robust model for Canada’s net zero road ahead.
Northern Germany’s transition is already running into problems that Canada too is expected to encounter. The state of Schleswig-Holstein is deeply entwined economically with the major industrial and port city of Hamburg to the immediate south—the primary customer for the state’s electricity, whose heavy industries and their relatively high emissions require more than simply adding additional wind power to the grid. (Large-scale industrial operations such as aluminum smelters and steel plants, for example, are dependent on the reliable on-demand energy flows from centralized power plants, and retrofitting them to work with technologies such as intermittent wind power and energy storage obliges a rethink of every aspect of both the power market and the respective production processes.) The regional grid already suffers from significant grid congestion at times of peak wind power production, often dealt with inefficiently through re-dispatch or curtailment.
The problems of intermittency, grid congestion, outdated technology, and legal and regulatory barriers present in Schleswig-Holstein mirror challenges Canada’s grids are expected to encounter as its pursuit of its net zero goal accelerates. The experience of Germany’s NEW 4.0 project provides an excellent case study, allowing Canadian jurisdictions the opportunity to anticipate and avoid clear stumbling blocks along the way.
The project
The NEW 4.0 project, which ran from 2016 to 2020, billed itself as a “blueprint for the energy transition,” launched in “a model region for the Energiewende.” The project’s intent, beyond the technical specifics, was to demonstrate that an entire region of Germany—the federal state of Schleswig-Holstein and neighbouring city-state of Hamburg—would be able to operate on 100 per cent renewable energy as early as 2035.
With more than 60 per cent of the regional grid’s capacity consisting of renewables at the project’s launch in 2016 and more than 18,000 jobs already in the regional clean energy industry, Schleswig-Holstein stood at the forefront of Germany’s (and Europe’s) energy transition and provided a strong model for future grid development. The region also faced some of Germany’s steepest costs—around one-third of the approximately €1.2 billion in costs nationwide were borne by Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg alone due to grid inefficiencies and imbalances of supply and demand (the costs of which were heightened by the region’s greater reliance on non-dispatchable generation).
NEW 4.0 brought together 60 partners from both the public and private sectors, including grid operators, public utilities, and local and regional government agencies, as well as technology companies (among them Siemens Gamesa, Acciona, Nordex and Vattenfall) and major producers of steel, aluminum, copper, and chemicals. Total project funding for the five-year project was around €80 million, with €45 million coming from the German government’s Federal Ministry of Economics and Energy.
The conceptual framework for NEW 4.0 was loosely based on an “innovation sandbox” framework. Northern Germany served as a “model region” in which to test new applications, business models, market mechanisms, and technologies. This regulatory space for experimentation hosted approximately 20 simultaneous demonstration projects. The centrepiece was an “Energy Platform”—a digital pricing and load management tool for the region’s grid, powered by blockchain technology and intended to use the flexibilities of supply and demand in the region to stabilize the grid and create cost-cutting and efficiency opportunities for both energy suppliers and electricity consumers. The platform allowed large industrial customers, storage technologies, hydrogen fuel providers, heat generation facilities, and small electricity producers to trade excess supply and demand of electricity on an open marketplace. Developing tools for this kind of load management is a crucial step in the path to net zero in any jurisdiction.
NEW 4.0 proved the clean-grid concept: from a technical standpoint, large-scale industrial economies can be run pretty much completely on renewable electricity and other currently available clean technologies.
Werner Beba, a business professor at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (HAW-Hamburg) and the project coordinator for NEW 4.0, summarized the project’s core focus: “We have taken the next major step [toward 100 per cent renewable power] by testing the coupling of the electricity sector with the heating and industrial sectors. Functioning market platforms have been created to reduce congestion in the electricity grid, intelligently control energy flows, and harness currently curtailed electricity volumes. We have used green electricity to replace gas, coal or oil in heat supply and in industrial operations. We have tested the use of hydrogen in the industry, the heating and mobility sectors, which also helps to reduce greenhouse gases. In addition to the technical innovations, we have also learned which factors are crucial for ensuring broad social acceptance.”
NEW 4.0 demonstrated that electricity can be supplied, as the project summary report explains, “on demand to different consumers at any time in the amount required, while also keeping the grid frequency stable” (Beba et al. 2020). The project provided a successful test of the integration of energy-intensive consumers in Hamburg’s industrial sector with wind power production in Schleswig-Holstein. In short, NEW 4.0 proved the clean-grid concept: from a technical standpoint, large-scale industrial economies can be run pretty much completely on renewable electricity and other currently available clean technologies. NEW 4.0 also revealed some of the non-technical shortcomings of current energy systems—economic, legal, bureaucratic, political—that most urgently need to be addressed to achieve net zero goals in Germany and Canada alike. (These challenges are discussed in Section 5 below.)
Opening of the NEW 4.0-Roadshow in May 2018 at the Chamber of Commerce in Hamburg. Photo: Daniel Reinhardt/HAW
The NEW 4.0 projects
NEW 4.0 involved approximately 100 sub-projects across the region, with particular focus on 20 full-scale demonstration projects. These included:
demonstrations of new technologies, ranging from battery, heat, and hydrogen storage systems to household-scale smart appliance applications
demand-response systems to increase flexibility for large-scale industrial customers
digital trading platforms to create marketplaces for short-term trading of surplus power between producers and consumers
Let’s consider a few of these with the greatest potential relevance to Canada’s energy transition in detail.
The Energy Platform
Developed by Hamburg Energie, the primary public utility company in the city of Hamburg, the Energy Platform is a digital application using blockchain technology to enable “the rapid regional trading of flexible renewable energy, contributing to grid stability and security of supply while also maximizing the value of surplus energy from wind and other renewable sources. Participants in this demonstration project included three of Hamburg’s largest industrial operations: ArcelorMittal (steel production), Trimet (aluminum), and Aurubis (copper). By establishing a marketplace for producers and consumers of renewable energy, the Energy Platform allowed consumers to contract directly with producers to meet their planned electricity demand.
Harnessing peak wind power
In the small city of Norderstedt, a satellite of Hamburg, the local utility company, Stadtwerke Nordestedt, joined the NEW 4.0 project with a demonstration of load management strategies and technologies to take advantage of low-cost excess wind power. The project signed up 1,000 residents to receive a special tariff for using electricity at times of peak wind power production, reducing rates at those times to €0.05 – 0.15 per kilowatt-hour (from normal rates of as much as €0.30). Participating homes were equipped with a switch box and four connected sockets. Large appliances plugged into the sockets were automatically switched on when wind power production was at its peak. Dishwashers and clothes washers were among the most common appliances operated using the sockets, but the mix also included phone chargers, electric bikes, and even electric cars. During the 20 months of the demonstration, the 1,000 homes made use of 371 MWh of power that otherwise would have been wasted; the peak wind use amounted to about 10 per cent of each home’s overall energy use on average.
Power to aluminum and power to steel
At major aluminum and steel production facilities in Hamburg, NEW 4.0 projects introduced systems to efficiently pair industrial-scale energy demand to intermittent renewable energy supplies. At Trimet’s aluminum plant, ten smelting furnaces were equipped with specially designed heat exchangers and control systems, allowing the plant’s production to be scaled up and down as available wind power fluctuates. When there was excess power, production could be increased while the heat exchangers dissipated the excess heat to maintain the constant high temperatures required for aluminum smelting. When there were shortages of electricity, the heat exchangers functioned as insulators, preventing the furnaces from cooling down and in effect acting as virtual batteries for the facility. If the Trimet plant’s 270 furnaces were equipped with the heat exchangers, the result would be a battery capable of storing 3,800 MWh of wind power for several days, reducing the need to switch off nearby wind turbines during periods of particularly high wind.
At ArcelorMittal’s Hamburg steel plant, meanwhile, two NEW 4.0 sub-projects tested ways of adapting steel production to intermittent renewable power supplies. One of these tested the ability to “time-shift” production, increasing the smelter’s output during periods of high wind. This proved to be technically feasible, but it would not make economic sense under current market conditions in the region. The other sub-project investigated the viability of using electricity from renewable sources to replace some of the natural gas currently used to fire the plant’s smelters.
Large-scale storage
In the north of Schleswig-Holstein, near the Danish border, a joint venture of the Dutch utility company Eneco and battery manufacturer Mitsubishi installed the largest lithium-ion battery storage facility in Europe. The 48-MW/50-MWh installation was sited near large-scale wind and solar farms at a spot with excellent grid connections. Though capable of supplying more than 5,000 homes with 24 hours of electricity, the storage facility has to date only been used to balance power load and improve stability on the regional grid.
Power to hydrogen
This NEW 4.0 project combined a 2.7-MWh battery storage facility with an electrolyzer and hydrogen filling station to examine the feasibility of hydrogen fuel as a means of reducing the amount of curtailed wind power on German grids. Wind turbines in northern Germany produce about 80 per cent of all the curtailed power in the country, due to high wind power production overloading the grids. This challenge could be alleviated by storing peak wind power and converting it to hydrogen fuel for use in mobility and heating.
5. Canada’s net zero target and the next-generation grid
The NEW 4.0 project was intended to provide a model for Germany’s future energy infrastructure development as it pursues a nationwide goal of net-zero emissions by 2045. NEW 4.0 focussed on the significant upgrades, technological innovations, re-design work, and regulatory reinvention that will be required to build the grids that the energy transition requires. The most important lessons from this four-year innovation experiment, as noted in the project’s final report (Beba et al. 2020), are:
Grid expansion is not enough. The reliability of the emissions-free grid will require decentralized load management, innovative storage technologies, and electricity markets that reward flexibility. And these features must be available at low cost.
The technology is ready. “We currently already possess the necessary facilities, market instruments, ICT infrastructure and know-how” to build grids ready for a 100-per-cent-renewable future, the NEW 4.0 final report explains. The necessary flexibility required to avoid curtailment, find customers for excess renewable power, and overcome power shortfalls can be provided by a range of stakeholders, helping to improve grid stability and avoid grid congestion.
The financial and regulatory frameworks aren’t ready. “What is missing,” the NEW 4.0 final report notes, “are adjustments to the legal framework as well as financial incentives to implement the newly available technological and market solutions rapidly, effectively and economically.” The rules, regulations, and rate structures of German grids are not yet ready to create markets for these innovations and incentivize deployment of the new technologies. The business case simply isn’t there yet, and the evolution of the legal framework in which electricity infrastructure operates has not kept pace with technological changes. As Oliver Arendt of the Hamburg University of Applied Science, who served as a project manager on NEW 4.0, the project arrived at the same conclusion that the other four projects funded under the same federal “Smart Energy Showcase” initiative reached: “We need to redesign the way we pay for electricity.” The current approach to electricity rates in Germany, even 20 years into the Energiewende, still does not encourage a business case for technologies and systems that improve flexibility and pursue net zero goals, particularly regarding the way revenues are distributed to the energy system’s stakeholders.
Industrial stakeholders have a major role to play. “Industry is a key driving force in decarbonization and effective climate protection,” the NEW 4.0 final report explains, and the industrial participants in NEW 4.0 projects demonstrated that their consumption can be synchronized with renewable energy generation using smart energy technologies and more flexible market mechanisms. “Large industrial electricity consumers are technically capable of using additional wind power even at short notice. Similarly, the industry can also reduce its energy consumption when the production of green electricity is low.”
Better data analysis is urgently needed. Owing to the impact of weather changes on renewable energy production, grid operators need greater data volumes in order to respond quickly to short-term changes, while real-time analysis of data is also vital for the operation of complex, decentralized power generation and more flexible supply and demand. On all fronts, more and better data is crucial for the future of the emissions-free grid.
Thorsten Müller, founder of the Foundation for Environmental Energy Law, who oversaw NEW 4.0’s work on market conditions and the regulatory framework, provided this summary of the project’s main lessons: “Firstly, as a basic prerequisite, we require a great deal more electricity from renewable sources and need to create the necessary preconditions in energy, planning, and approval laws, otherwise it will not be possible to achieve greenhouse gas neutrality. We also need electricity from renewables in the heating and transport sector—the keyword is sector coupling—and in industry. Secondly, we will have to restructure the energy industry in such a way that it consistently focuses on fluctuating renewables and assigns real value to efficiency. Thirdly, we need to transform the largely isolated energy sectors into a unified energy system and fundamentally redesign the law as a control instrument: away from contradictions and complexity and towards coherent, cross-sectoral energy laws.”
Lessons for Canada
There are of course many significant differences between the German and Canadian contexts regarding geography, resources, economies, and politics. Perhaps most significantly, Germany’s federal government has far more authority over energy policy than Canada’s federal government does. Still, the attempts to date to prepare Canadian grids for the coming energy transition have uncovered similar challenges and opportunities to those that have emerged from the NEW 4.0 project. Despite the differences, Canada can learn a lot from the German efforts as both countries pursue net zero.
The primary challenges for Canada, as in Germany, are not technological but regulatory, legal, and structural.
QUEST Canada, for example, is a non-governmental organization that partners with Canadian governments to accelerate the energy transition, and its recent work has included collaborations with the Ontario government and Ontario Power Generation on developing an innovation sandbox for the province’s energy infrastructure. QUEST’s analysis indicates that the primary challenges for Canada, as in Germany, are not technological but regulatory, legal, and structural (QUEST 2021).
Current regulatory mandates in Canada prescribe a very narrow view of costs and benefits, meaning many of the changes necessary to accelerate the energy transition are not incentivized and innovation is not encouraged. “To get more innovation,” says Eric Timmins of QUEST, “you have to consider non-financial aspects.” But regulators can only work with what is in their mandates, and the system in general rewards risk-averse conservatism regarding innovation. Policymakers will have to take the initiative to encourage these changes, including by sending clear signals through a rising price on carbon or regulatory constraints. But given their own risk aversion, they will also need to create spaces for experimentation, innovation, and proof-of-concept work—which is where innovation sandboxes similar to the NEW 4.0 project’s approach become crucial.
The ultimate lesson of Germany’s pacesetting NEW 4.0 project, however, is that it provides clarity on the daunting scale of the change that electricity systems will have to undergo on the way to net zero. The technologies to reduce emissions are increasingly ready to go, but they cannot solve the myriad problems of finance, regulation, and political will that must be addressed. Changes throughout the system are needed to invite innovation and properly reward approaches that accelerate the drive to net zero. Innovation sandbox projects like NEW 4.0 are nonetheless enormously helpful in catalyzing that larger task, giving innovators and regulators alike a space to prove the viability of the net zero toolkit.
We thank Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung for their financial support in producing this case study.
Works Cited (click to expand)
Beba, Werner, Matthias Boxberger, Janina Grimm, Martin Heins, Onnen Heitmann, Kaja Juulsgaard, Hanna Naoumis, Thorsten Müller, Klaus Schweininger, and Matthias Weng. 2020. NEW 4.0: Showcasing the energy landscape of tomorrow. Renewable Energy Hamburg.https://www.ponton.de/downloads/New40Report.pdf
Canada’s federal government should adopt a whole-of-government approach to climate change. Such an approach can leverage executive leadership to encourage cross-departmental collaboration and integrate climate change into all of government policymaking. Canada can learn how to establish an effective whole-of-government approach from the successes and challenges of its peers both at home and abroad. This brief examines whole-of-government approaches to climate change from around the world as well as specific lessons learned from three case studies—the United Kingdom, the United States, and British Columbia.
The House of Commons in the Canadian Parliament Building, in Ottawa, Ontario.
Executive Summary
Climate change is a complex, cross-jurisdictional issue that requires societal transformation. To meet this challenge, governments must be able to make climate policies that work across sectors, communities, and regional borders. A whole-of-government approach can help to mainstream climate change into policymaking processes.
A whole-of-government approach consists of both governance structures (distinct organizational groups within government that are dedicated to cross-governmental coordination and collaboration, such as cabinet committees) and processes (rules, standards, or mandates that direct at least two departments’ policymaking and policy implementation).
Effective climate policies that get Canada where it needs to go will require the active involvement of departments as disparate as Finance, Infrastructure, Transport, Natural Resources, Environment and Climate Change, Agriculture and Agri-Food, Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs, Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, Employment and Social Development, and others, necessitating a coordinated approach to ensure coherent implementation of climate strategy.
Whole-of-government approaches to climate change have become a feature of some national and sub-national governments over the last several years, as countries commit to increasingly ambitious measures to curb their greenhouse gas emissions, adapt to climate change, and pursue clean growth strategies. An integrated, coordinated, cross-department approach can leverage departmental expertise, reduce policy redundancies, mainstream climate change into all decision making, and create cross-departmental synergies for more effective climate governance.
In this paper, eight countries were surveyed to identify whole-of-government structures and processes dedicated to climate change, and three of these cases (the United Kingdom, British Columbia, and the United States) were analyzed in depth to determine the benefits and risks of such an approach.
Of course, not all whole-of-government approaches are created equal. In theory, a whole-of-government approach can leverage public-sector expertise across departmental boundaries to increase climate ambition. In practice, this approach can be difficult to implement. On the one hand, establishing well-resourced structures and processes to foster inter-departmental collaboration can lead to more effective climate policy. But competing interests within government, and constraints on financial and human resources, mean that a whole-of-government approach is not easy to maintain. In support of finding that balance, there are five lessons to be learned from the cases examined here for implementing a cohesive and effective whole-of-government approach to climate change:
The success of a whole-of-government climate initiative depends on sustained executive leadership directing departmental priorities and inter-departmental coordination.
An effective whole-of-government climate initiative requires adequate funding, a clear mandate, and capacity to enact change across departments.
An effective whole-of-government climate initiative requires effective and empowered personnel acting in whole-of-government structures.
The mandates of participating departments must align, or be brought into alignment, with the mandate of the whole-of-government climate initiative.
A whole-of-government climate initiative should report publicly on its progress and be as transparent as possible about its deliberations, findings, and research.
Interior of Parliament Hill, Ottawa, Canada.
1. Introduction
1.1. The whole-of-government approach
Climate change is a complex and urgent issue that requires a coordinated government response. Historically, climate change policy has fallen under the auspices of environment departments, while most other departments engage with it only as it affects their overall mandate and priorities. But in order to respond to the climate emergency quickly and effectively, governments must be able to mobilize the full breadth of their policy expertise to implement climate policies that work across sectors, communities, and regions.
The whole-of-government approach, which works across vertically organized departmental silos to encourage cross-government collaboration, is one approach to leverage that expertise. The approach sees government departments working together to solve complex issues like climate change that cross departmental boundaries (Christensen & Lægreid 2006).
As the Australian Management Advisory Committee’s Connecting Government (2004) report defined, “whole-of-government denotes public services agencies working across portfolio boundaries to achieve a shared goal and an integrated government response to particular issues. Approaches can be formal or informal. They can focus on policy development, program management, and service delivery.” Often, the whole-of-government approach manifests in creating high-level inter-departmental committees that share information and collaborate to implement legislation and government mandates. Most times, these groups are under the jurisdiction of executive offices (e.g., Cabinet Office, Office of the President), which results in stronger and more effective central leadership.
The historical precedents for inter-departmental coordination on complex and urgent issues date back at least to the Second World War. The war committees and cabinets established in Canada in the 1940s saw high-level interdepartmental cabinet committees directing and sustaining a co-ordinated emergency response across government (Klein 2020). The formalized whole-of-government approach, however, emerged in the mid-1990s, when some governments shifted focus from disaggregated, single-issue departmental governance and towards a more integrated approach to complex issues that cross jurisdictional and departmental boundaries (Christensen & Lægreid 2007). The shift was most significant initially in the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, but has gained popularity in other countries like the United States.
This paper will proceed with an overview of the characteristics of whole-of-government approaches, focusing on the use of inter-departmental committees and high-level government mandates, and then will present three climate-specific case studies: the United Kingdom, which has created several new cabinet committees to support inter-departmental coordination on climate; the United States, which has recently established the high-level National Climate Task Force; and British Columbia, home of the Climate Action Secretariat.
1.2. Characteristics of whole-of-government approaches
In a survey of international cases, we find that there are several characteristics that define the whole-of-government approach to climate change. These characteristics are listed for eight global whole-of-government approaches in Section Two and evaluated in depth for each of the case studies (the United Kingdom, British Columbia, and United States) in Sections Three through Five.
1.2.1. Whole-of-government structures to address climate change
Whole-of-government structures are distinct organizational groups or bodies that are dedicated to cross-governmental coordination and collaboration, including cabinet committees, task forces, and working groups (Christensen & Lægreid 2007; Verhoest et al. 2007). Multiple whole-of-government structures can exist simultaneously within governments. These are separate and specific forums for inter-departmental coordination on climate issues. Examples include cabinet committees dedicated to climate change or new offices under executive leadership (such as British Columbia’s Climate Action Secretariat or the United States National Climate Task Force). In whole-of-government structures, a clear mandate and involvement of the highest levels of leadership are crucial to success
To dig into that point specifically: A clear mandateis crucial to the success of any whole-of-government initiative. Interdepartmental committees’ authority depends on their ability to create new forums for collaboration and compel participation. Is their function primarily to share information and coordinate, or do they have some ability to collaborate in the development of integrated strategies, plans, and policies? Some whole-of-government structures are centrally located in the executive office, which allows for top-down pressure across departments and helps centralize climate action. Others are smaller, led by one department which relies on lateral pressure on its counterparts to affect change. Whatever its makeup, a clear mandate will help ensure an initiative’s success.
The membershipof these structures is also key to their success. Executive leadership decides on departmental membership in these whole-of-government groups and where they fit in the reporting structure. For instance, some groups may have a smaller membership and work on a narrower issue area, while others involve a bigger, more inclusive cross-departmental group with a broad mandate to address climate change across all areas of responsibility. Smaller groups are best suited to addressing specific initiatives that require only a few departments’ input, like enhancing disaster response to growing wildfire threats. Larger structures are useful for coordinating overarching climate action and tackling more complex issues like developing a national climate resilience strategy.
1.2.2. Whole-of-government processes
Whole-of-government processes are rules, standards, or mandates that direct at least two departments’ policymaking and policy implementation (Meadowcroft 2009). In the context of climate change, these processes prioritize climate change for every government department, even when there is no explicit structure for inter-departmental coordination. These processes are mostly used to direct an explicit assessment of climate change in departments that would otherwise consider climate a peripheral issue for their mandate, or to assign financial and human resources to climate action.
Procedural mechanisms include mandate letters or executive orders to Ministers or Secretaries that instruct cross-departmental collaboration on core government goals (like a government-wide net zero strategy). Legislation that requires integration of climate change into decision making (like Denmark’s 2020 Climate Law, which requires a climate assessment in every new piece of legislation) can also act as whole-of-government processes.
1.2.3. External advisory bodies
Independent climate advisory bodies are an effective mechanism for supporting whole-of-government climate initiatives, providing sound policy advice on climate change-related issues (Meadowcroft 2009). Such advisory bodies have benefits beyond whole-of-government approaches: they provide independent analysis of climate plans and go beyond government mandates to ask tough questions and help advise the government on policy decisions.
External advisory bodies often report to cabinet committees, the legislature, or the executive office as opposed to a single department. This helps keep climate change front and centre in all policy discussions. Where there is a relationship with whole-of-government structures like cabinet committees, external advisory bodies can help shape inter-departmental coordination on climate change as well as provide sector-specific advice. Their findings are often publicly available, providing a benchmark with which to measure policy outcomes from other whole-of-government mechanisms. Advisory bodies can ask questions that push for more ambitious and effective policymaking. They can help set both interim and long-term goals, provide policy advice, and ensure continuity through changes in government.
Ottawa, Canada – July 30, 2010: Interior view of the Canada Commons of Parliament, Ottawa. It houses Canada’s federal government. The parliament Building was built in 1859, before the 1867 formation of the country.
2. Survey of global whole-of-government climate change approaches
Whole-of-government approaches to climate change have become a feature of several national and sub-national governments over the last 20 years as countries commit to increasingly ambitious measures to curb their greenhouse gas emissions, adapt to climate change, and pursue clean growth strategies. Here, we survey a selection of whole-of-government approaches. Many of these countries have only recently given climate change whole-of-government recognition, with a few exceptions. Singapore has had several task forces and working groups dedicated to climate issues since 2007 (National Climate Change Secretariat n.d.). France was one of the earliest creators of an inter-ministerial forum for climate change in 1992, but that forum was absorbed into the Department of Ecology, Energy, Sustainable Development and Spatial Planning in 2008 (Bardou 2009).
This table provides a high-level overview of whole-of-government structures, processes, and external advisory bodies.
Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament framed in an arch next to Westminster Bridge in London
3. Case study: United Kingdom
3.1. Context
Due in part to the relative consensus on the need for climate action across parties, climate governance in the United Kingdom has been comparatively ambitious in the last two decades, with the near-unanimous passage of the 2008 Climate Change Act. However, weak coordination and lukewarm uptake of specific climate goals across departments has made implementation uneven and unstable (Lockwood 2021).
The structure of the United Kingdom government can keep policy issues siloed, as each department is ultimately responsible for issues under its portfolio. For instance, the Department of Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy is the department responsible for climate change, although other departments have been directed to integrate climate action to varying extents as a part of a whole-of-government approach (Dray 2021). The 2008 Climate Change Act requires net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, as well as shorter-term five-year carbon budgets to guide policymaking to achieve the 2050 target. Accomplishing these goals requires coordination across government departments, especially with cross-cutting issues (for instance, transportation, which requires input from multiple departments like Transport, the Treasury, and International Trade in addition to the Department of Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy).
The Prime Minister has the authority to create whole-of-government structures like cabinet committees or task forces and to decide on their jurisdiction and membership. Whole-of-government structures can be helpful because they allow for flexible responses to specific issues, and do not always require legislative consensus. However, because they are largely established by the executive, they can be disbanded easily by successive governments. As such, whole-of-government structures in the United Kingdom are based on the sitting Prime Minister’s commitment. This reliance on executive leadership is common among whole-of-government approaches.
3.2. Whole-of-government structures for climate change
The United Kingdom has had a spotty history with defining climate change as a whole-of-government issue. In 2006, the inter-departmental Office of Climate Change was formed “to work across Government to support analytical work on climate change and the development of climate change policy and strategy” (National Archives 2008). The Office was absorbed into the (then) Department of Energy and Climate Change in 2008, and the United Kingdom did not establish another whole-of-government structure specifically for climate change until 2019.
3.2.1. Cabinet committees
In October 2019, Prime Minister Boris Johnson created and chaired the Cabinet Committee on Climate Change. In June 2020, the Prime Minister split this committee into two: the Climate Action Strategy Committee and Climate Action Implementation Committee (Institute for Government, 2020). These committees are both meant to convene senior officials from over a dozen departments, bimonthly, to discuss cross-cutting issues relating to the government’s approach to climate change.
The Prime Minister chairs the Climate Action Strategy Committee, which is mandated “to consider matters relating to the delivery of the U.K.’s domestic and international climate strategy” (Cabinet Office 2020). The Climate Action Strategy Committee has six departmental members: the Chancellor of the Exchequer; the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Affairs; the Minister for the Cabinet Office; the Secretary of State for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy; the Secretary of State for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs; and the Minister of State for Pacific and the Environment.
The Climate Action Implementation Committee, meanwhile, considers “matters relating to the delivery of COP26, net zero and building the U.K.’s resilience to climate impacts” and is chaired by the Minister for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy. Membership includes all the Climate Action Strategy Committee members (except for the Minister for the Cabinet Office) as well as the Secretary of State for International Trade, and the President of the Board of Trade; Secretary of State for Work and Pensions; Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government; Secretary of State for Transport; and the Secretary of State for Scotland (Cabinet Office 2020). In this committee, there is concern regarding whether the Department of Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy “has sufficient influence to ensure other parts of government take enough action in their areas of responsibility,” as one anonymous source from within government stated in 2021 (National Audit Office 2021). However, both committees provide a forum for high-level leadership to coordinate. The Prime Minister can also provide support to the Department of Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy in ensuring cross-departmental climate action via chairing the Climate Action Strategy Committee.
3.2.2. Supporting groups
Two other groups support the cabinet committees: the Climate Change National Strategy Implementation Group, and the Net Zero Steering Board, as seen in Figure 1 below. A director-general from the Department of Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy chairs the National Strategy Implementation Group. This Group is comprised of senior officials from the main departments across government and is responsible for implementing a cross-government climate action strategy and covering both domestic and international aspects of mitigation and resilience (National Audit Office 2020). The Net Zero Steering Board supports the National Strategy Implementation Group regarding a net zero strategy specifically (National Audit Office 2020). Both groups report to the two cabinet committees.
Figure 1: Whole-of-government structures in the United Kingdom, 2021
3.2.3. Inter-ministerial groups
Besides cabinet committees and advisory groups, two Inter-Ministerial Groups were established in 2018 to focus on issues relating to climate and net-zero policy. The Inter-Ministerial Group for Environment and Clean Growth brings together ministers and officials from across government. The Inter-Ministerial Group for Net Zero, Energy and Climate Change helps coordinate between the devolved administrations (Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland) on climate change (Inter-ministerial Group for Net Zero, Energy and Climate Change 2021). 1 Unlike cabinet committees, inter-ministerial groups rarely have the ability to make any binding decisions but can support policy development in areas where Cabinet consensus is not required. These groups can provide a regular forum for the devolved administrations to communicate and share information on climate policy with a variety of departments, whereas cabinet committees do not tend to have this representation.
In the United Kingdom, cabinet committees can make some binding decisions on specific policy issues to reduce the burden on Cabinet as a whole. Other types of groups, like sub-committees, implementation task forces, or informal groups, do not have this decision-making capability. The precedent in the United Kingdom is to keep details of committee meetings private, so their true impact on policy is difficult to measure (Institute for Government 2020). Complete transparency from these committees is extremely unlikely and may be unnecessary in the presence of other accountability mechanisms. The external Climate Change Committee provides a forum for public debate and analysis, and the Climate Change Act and Net Zero Strategy provide goals by which to measure departmental performance. However, there is a need for more clarity on what these cabinet committees actually do, and the inter-departmental activities they foster.
3.3. Whole-of-government processes
The above structures are tangible mechanisms with clear placements in the government hierarchy—but the United Kingdom has had less success with embedding a whole-of-government approach for climate change into its broader policy processes. At a high level, the 2008 Climate Change Act sets short- and long-term targets for climate action, culminating in net zero by 2050 (as amended in 2019). These targets are one instrument that dictates climate action in each single department, although enforcement of these targets within departments is lacking.
Policies like the 2017 Clean Growth Strategy (under the auspices of the Department of Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy) included some whole-of-government processes, although there were persistent gaps between ambition and policy pathways. For example, the Clean Growth Strategy set targets for specific sectors and their respective departments (e.g., a goal of 19 per cent reduction in agricultural emissions, managed by the Department of Agriculture), and referenced the Inter-Ministerial Group on Clean Growth to coordinate between departments (Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy 2019). However, in its 2019 progress report to Parliament, the Climate Change Committee stated that a significant gap between policy ambition and climate goals remained, and that many targets were not on track (Climate Change Committee 2019; 2021). These failures are not solely due to an inefficient whole-of-government approach, but nor is this approach the cure-all for missed climate targets in the United Kingdom. It does call into question the efficacy of the current whole-of-government approach.
The United Kingdom has made some progress on whole-of-government procedures since 2019. Following advice from the Climate Change Committee, in 2020 the Johnson government directed the Treasury to undertake a broad review of options for financing the net zero transition, indicating a broader prioritization of climate change across (and beyond) government (Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy 2019). In response, the Treasury released an interim Net Zero strategy in December 2020 (HM Treasury 2020). However, critics point to significant existing gaps between Treasury plans and Climate Change Committee goals (Serin 2021).
The Net Zero Strategy, released in October 2021 just days before COP 26, has the potential to galvanize a more coherent whole-of-government strategy. The Strategy indicates a commitment to “further embed climate change in spending decisions,” and “to require the government to reflect environmental issues such as climate change in national policy-making” (Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy 2021). The Strategy is relatively comprehensive, informed by the Climate Change Committee’s recommendations, and sets sector-specific pathways with an overall goal of net zero by 2050. However, the projected impacts of specific policies are vague as the government has not quantified the impacts of each policy proposal, and some funding schemes (for buildings and agriculture, in particular) are still in development (Climate Change Committee 2021).
3.4. External advisory bodies
The Climate Change Committee is the United Kingdom’s independent non-departmental public body that advises the government and devolved administrations on climate change. Their public reports and advice to government are crucial in setting long-term climate goals, measuring progress, and developing policy (Cabinet Office 2020). The Climate Change Committee provided several recommendations for the recent Net Zero Strategy, released in October 2021. As discussed above, the whole-of-government approach in the United Kingdom suffers from a lack of accountability and clarity over what these structures and procedures accomplish, and the extent of their capacity to affect change. The Climate Change Committee helps provide some of this accountability by tracking the progress of specific sectors and government action plans, identifying gaps in ambition, and advising the government on ways to close those gaps. The Climate Change Committee provides regular reports to Parliament and advice on specific issues upon Ministerial request, although its operations are wholly independent (Climate Change Committee 2021).
3.5. Key findings
The approach of relying on cabinet-level committees to fulfill a coordinating role for climate change has both best practices to learn from, and pitfalls to avoid. The United Kingdom has established several whole-of-government structures and processes since 2019, notably the Climate Action Strategy and Climate Action Implementation committees. But the country is behind on its climate targets and there is a need for more coherent, cross-government strategy (Climate Change Committee 2021; National Audit Office 2020). Given cross-party consensus on climate change in the United Kingdom, dedicated climate committees will likely endure, ensuring that climate change stays front and centre in government operations.
There is high-level commitment from leaders to climate action between and within departments.Cabinet committees and working groups, established by the Prime Minister and relevant department heads, encourage inter-departmental collaboration on climate change. The cabinet committees in particular provide a tangible forum for departments to coordinate on policy, share information, and discuss climate strategy informally.
However, a change in government could wipe the slate clean of the whole-of-government approach, making these structures and processes fragile. Reliance on Cabinet leadership to advance policy issues is a long-standing issue in the United Kingdom due to a lack of inter-departmental coordination (which this whole-of-government approach aims to mitigate) and frequent turnover of leaders. The nature of the whole-of-government approach depends on central leadership; this dependence can lead to strong inter-departmental coordination if backed by the Prime Minister but is also a fundamental weakness of the United Kingdom approach.
The effectiveness of cabinet committees and working groups depends on the capacity and resources assigned to them by executive leadership, and on the ability to create new policies and plans between departments. However, these committees signal senior political buy-in and committed leadership, which could lead to more concrete action from these structures in the future.
A lack of transparency and accountability mechanisms make it difficult to assess the efficacy of the United Kingdom whole-of-government approach to climate change, and the extent of inter-departmental collaboration and concrete policy change resulting from this approach is unclear. Cabinet committees and working groups rarely release detailed reports, and so the outcomes of these structures are difficult to assess. We need more accountability from these committees to identify the outcomes of these meetings and whether this form of whole-of-government structure actually increases climate action across and within departments.
Case summary
The United Kingdom has established several whole-of-government structures and processes since 2019, notably the Climate Action Strategy and Climate Action Implementation committees.
These structures and processes indicate a high-level commitment to climate action between and within departments and encourage inter-departmental collaboration on climate change.
However, a lack of capacity, transparency, and accountability mechanisms make it difficult to assess the efficacy of the United Kingdom whole-of-government approach to climate change, and the extent of inter-departmental collaboration and concrete policy change resulting from this approach is unclear.
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada – June 25, 2018. Rotunda detail of the Victoria Legislative Building in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.(Public building)
4. Case study: British Columbia
4.1. Context
Following the 2007 Speech of the Throne that stressed the urgency of climate change and British Columbia’s responsibility to act, the province positioned itself as a climate leader in North America and the world. This manifested itself in an ambitious greenhouse gas emission reduction target of 33 per cent by 2020 and 80 per cent by 2050 below 2007 levels, and the implementation of a host of policies to deliver on these targets, which included the first carbon pricing policy in a North American jurisdiction—a revenue-neutral carbon tax (Government of British Columbia 2008). Such ambitious legislation came about as a result of a personal learning experience from then-Premier Gordon Campbell, who had engaged personally on the issue and worked with influential figures such as then-Governor of California and outspoken climate spearhead Arnold Schwarzenegger (Harrison 2012).
The Campbell government adopted a whole-of-government approach to coordinate the various departments whose sectors are responsible for and affected by climate change. The government created a Cabinet Committee on Climate Action and established a Climate Action Secretariat to manage the cross-governmental approach. In addition, an external advisory body that consisted of representatives from civil society—the Climate Action Team—was also established to provide recommendations on short-term greenhouse gas reduction targets for 2012 and 2016. Since then, the Cabinet Committee on Climate Action and Clean Energy, a Cabinet Working Group on Climate Leadership, a Planning and Priorities Secretariat, and the Climate Solutions Council (a new advisory body) are other examples how the B.C. government further enshrines the whole-of-government approach in climate change policymaking.
4.2. Whole-of-government structures
Several whole-of-government structures dedicated to climate change have been established in British Columbia since 2007 when the issue was a top priority for the government, but there have been important changes in line with changes in government.
4.2.1. Government Secretariats
The Climate Action Secretariat was first established in 2007 within the Premier’s own office and was therefore centrally located in British Columbia’s Executive Council, which provided it with significant weight. This Secretariat was tasked with coordinating climate change across the government and working with almost every ministry, and was accountable to a new Cabinet Committee on Climate Action (Government of British Columbia, n.d.). Moreover, it was also set up to engage with First Nations, local governments, industries, environmental organizations, and the scientific community, support the Climate Action Team, and report on progress. Information on the Climate Action Secretariat and its work was publicly available on a separate subpage of the government’s website.
From 2008 onwards, the Climate Action Secretariat was resourced by the Ministry of Environment but remained located inside the Premier’s Office and accountable to the Cabinet Committee on Climate Action, before it was completely removed from the Premier’s Office after a change in leadership in 2011, when Premier Christy Clark assumed office. While the Secretariat remained in place following this change, its work eventually became less prominent and influential, with fewer updates and less information provided in the Ministry of Environment’s annual reports—it was not mentioned at all in the 2015/16 and 2016/17 editions—and the separate webpage was also taken down and could not be accessed any longer. This resulted from shifting priorities following the outbreak of the 2008 financial crisis and the change of provincial leadership (Lee 2017). It also came at a time when issues like carbon pricing were de-prioritized at the national level in Canada as the federal government of the day preferred regulation as opposed to pricing approaches like the one British Columbia had previously championed, leaving B.C. isolated. Today there is not even an archive of the Secretariat website available publicly, and information on its past work is difficult to obtain.
However, the relevance of the Climate Action Secretariat increased again after a change in government in mid-2017, which led to the development of the CleanBC strategy, British Columbia’s next ambitious set of climate change policies. While a greater leadership and coordination role had been hampered because of the Secretariat’s limited human resource capacity, the number of staff seems to have slowly increased over the last few years (Government of British Columbia n.d.; Klein 2020).
After the 2020 election, the government also established a new secretariat within the Premier’s office—the Planning and Priorities Secretariat—to ensure that the scope, direction, sequencing, and delivery of key policy initiatives are aligned with the intentions and priorities of the Premier and Cabinet. This secretariat has been staffed throughout 2021 and will work with ministry executives to define timelines and deliverables for these key commitments and to support effective cross-government responses to emerging high-priority issues such as climate change.
4.2.2. Cabinet committees and working groups
The Cabinet Committee on Climate Action was established in 2007 and came together every two weeks. It was chaired by the Premier himself and brought together the Ministries for Community Services, Finance, Forests & Range, Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources, Environment, Labour and Citizens’ Services, Small Business and Revenue, and Transportation to make policy related to greenhouse gas reduction and climate change adaptation (Government of British Columbia 2008). The Committee was established by amending regulations from 2005, and its job was not only reviewing policy options on how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but also hearing suggestions from key civil society groups (Government of British Columbia 2007). To support this directive, the Cabinet Committee on Climate Action and the Climate Action Secretariat engaged with over 450 groups, individuals, and businesses between May 2007 and June 2008 (Government of British Columbia 2008).
Following the Cabinet Committee on Climate Action, a Cabinet Committee on Climate Action and Clean Energy was in place from October 2009, as well as a Cabinet Working Group on Climate Leadership from January 2016 until mid-2017, when they were both repealed by the new government (Government of British Columbia 2007). It remains unclear which ministries were involved in these committees, how often they met, and what outcomes they achieved.
Figure 2: Whole-of-government structures in British Columbia, 2008-2011
Figure 3: Whole-of-government structures in British Columbia, 2018-present
4.3. Whole-of-government processes
Regarding processes, a whole-of-government approach in B.C. was mostly reflected in the two climate change mitigation plans the government implemented. According to the 2008 Climate Action Plan, “the government is taking focused action to support reductions in each of the Province’s major economic sectors” (Government of British Columbia 2008, 25). Notably, this approach included ministries responsible for transportation, buildings, waste, agriculture, industry, energy, and forestry—which are all emissions-intensive sectors. According to the 2008/09 Annual Service Plan Report of the Ministry of Environment (2009), the “initiatives included in the plan are a result of policy development within the Climate Action Secretariat and ministries, as guided by the Cabinet Committee on Climate Action.” Moreover, the report highlights that the Climate Action Secretariat assisted the ministries in developing policy, legislation, and regulations as required.
Similarly, CleanBC, the climate mitigation plan published in December 2018, also provides a holistic view of addressing climate mitigation by focusing on the various sectors where emissions occur, emphasized also by forewords from the Premier, the Minister of Environment and Climate Change Strategy, the Minister of Energy, Mines, and Petroleum Resources, and Minister of Jobs, Trade, and Technology (Government of British Columbia 2018). The role of the Climate Action Secretariat was once again instrumental in developing and implementing this plan: the 2019/20 Annual Report of the Ministry of Environment praised the Climate Action Secretariat for “coordinating dozens of new policies and programs across multiple ministries” (B.C. Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy 2020).
In addition, the amended Climate Change Accountability Act required the Minister of Environment and Climate Change Strategy to establish sectoral emission reduction targets and report on progress and future proposed actions annually (Government of British Columbia 2019). In March 2021, sectoral 2030 emission targets below 2007 levels were set for transportation (27 to 32 per cent), industry (38 to 43 per cent), oil and gas (33 to 38 per cent), and buildings and communities (59 to 64 per cent), further strengthening B.C.’s whole-of government approach to climate change (Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy 2021).
Finally, the advisory bodies appointed by B.C. governments (discussed below) to provide guidance and recommendations for further climate action also followed a whole-of-government approach when they gave advice. The report of the Climate Action Team in 2008 included specific recommendations regarding the transport, buildings, energy, industry, agricultural, waste, and forest sectors (Climate Action Team 2008); the recommendations from a similar Climate Leadership Team also addressed all these sectors (Pembina Institute 2015); and the Climate Solutions Council advised on various specific topics, such as a strengthened zero-emissions vehicle target, the Low Carbon Fuel Standard, and support for British Columbia’s Emissions-Intensive Trade-Exposed (EITE) industries.
4.4. External advisory bodies
A Climate Action Team comprised of 21 leaders from environmental organizations, private enterprise, the scientific community, First Nations, and academia was formed in November 2007 (Government of British Columbia 2008). Its mandate was to offer expert advice to the Cabinet Committee on Climate Action on identifying interim targets for 2012 and 2016 to complement the 2020 emission reduction target of 33 per cent; identify further actions to meet the 2020 target; and advise on the provincial government’s commitment to become carbon neutral by 2010. It met monthly until the summer of 2008 when it was set to release its recommendations. While the greenhouse gas reduction targets became legislated, many other recommendations became lost in the “bureaucratic shuffle after the Climate Action Secretariat […] was moved out of the premier’s office and into the Ministry of the Environment” (Devine n.d.), according to a former member of this advisory group.
In 2018, the Climate Change Accountability Act legislated a new advisory committee called the Climate Solutions Council that consists of members from First Nations, environmental organizations, industry, academia, youth, labour, and local government to provide strategic advice to government on climate action and clean economic growth (Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy n.d.). This external advisory body provided advice four times in 2020 and, so far, nine times in 2021, including on ways the government can strengthen a whole-of-government approach to climate action through improved communication, coordination, and ambition, such as a whole-of-government “buy clean” policy (Climate Solutions Council 2021). As part of this advice, the council also called the establishment of the Planning & Priorities Secretariat an “excellent first step in ensuring decisions coming to Cabinet committees consider their effects on B.C. climate policy.”
4.5. Key findings
The British Columbia experience is a case study of the highs and lows of a whole-of-government approach to climate action. Launched with much fanfare and a high degree of transparency, at its height it represented a world-leading approach. However, it also became an example of the fragility of these approaches when changes in priorities and leadership of government led to its diminished role and eventually a disappearance from the public eye. That it is difficult today to even find a public record of its past activities speaks to the risks of these approaches if the executive branch of government, which is so critical to their success, no longer carries the motivation and commitment to transparency needed to be successful in the long term. British Columbia’s whole-of-government approach to climate action provides important lessons for jurisdictions that consider a similar approach.
The Climate Action Secretariat was an effective, well-placed whole-of-government structure when organized under the Premier’s Office. At that time, it could benefit from the leverage of the most powerful figure of the Executive Council, which emphasized that climate change was a top priority for the administration and helped it adopt ambitious targets and policies. In contrast, the influence of the Secretariat decreased after it was moved to the Ministry of Environment and lost this prominent (and very public) position.
Lack of sufficient resources was another factor that negatively impacted the results achieved by the Climate Action Secretariat. With more resources, a longer timeframe with these resources, and political support, the experience under the new government from 2017 onwards, when the Climate Action Secretariat regained some of its earlier prominence, shows that it would have been possible to sustain its momentum. With that said, in its heyday around 2008 as well as since mid-2017, the Climate Action Secretariat and the Cabinet Committee have proved relevant and successful, although progress was fleeting in between.
Case summary
British Columbia’s whole-of-government approach has ebbed and flowed with changes in leadership.
In particular, the Climate Action Secretariat was an effective, well-placed whole-of-government structure under Premier Gordon Campbell, who established and championed the Secretariat. However, its influence lapsed under successive governments, and transparency remains an issue.
Processes like the CleanBC plan, implemented in 2018, are an attempt to embed climate change in decision-making processes across government.
The interior of the US Capitol dome.
5. Case study: The United States
5.1. Context
The United States has attempted to use a whole-of-government approach to address a variety of issues historically, especially regarding national security and intelligence (Brook 2012). Attention to collaborative public sector reform and whole-of-government initiatives lagged slightly behind early pioneers in the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, but has increased in the 21st century. The Biden administration committed to a sweeping whole-of-government approach to climate change early, and also pledged to integrate COVID-19 economic recovery plans with climate goals (United States, Executive Office of the President [Joe Biden] 2021a).
Executive leadership (i.e., the President) establishes and controls whole-of-government structures, since use of executive orders to achieve Presidential policy goals is much quicker and more efficient than going through the Congress given the gridlock that has become the norm over the past decade. Because of the deeply partisan character of climate change in the United States, few new climate governance mechanisms have been established in the last two decades, although new responsibilities have been passed onto existing institutions, usually at the executive level (Mildenberger 2021; Dubash 2021). The drawback of this is, of course, that executive orders are easily undone by subsequent Presidents.
The United States tends to make use of Secretary-level task forces for whole-of-government structures. Like Cabinet committees in the United Kingdom and British Columbia, there is a wide spectrum of responsibilities, authority, and capacity to address issues in these task forces. The Biden administration is the first to establish an explicit whole-of-government approach related specifically to climate change.
5.2. Whole-of-government structures
President Biden moved quickly to implement his whole-of-government approach to climate change. Just days after he took office, the Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad was issued. This executive order established a National Climate Task Force and appointed two climate czars: National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy (who previously served as the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under Barack Obama) and Special Presidential Envoy for Climate Change John Kerry.
5.2.1. National Climate Task Force and White House Office of Domestic Climate Policy
The National Climate Task Force “assembl[es] leaders from across 21 federal agencies and departments to enable a whole-of-government approach to combatting the climate crisis” and is chaired by McCarthy. The Task Force focuses on ensuring that each agency integrates climate change into their policy-making processes, with an initial focus on government procurement, sustainable infrastructure investment, clean energy investment, and community revitalization (United States, Executive Office of the President [Joe Biden] 2021a).
Also included in this January 2021 executive order is the establishment of a White House Office of Domestic Climate Policy, also led by McCarthy (although with a team of White House aides as members, not departmental representatives), that is “charged with coordinating and implementing the President’s domestic climate agenda” (United States, Executive Office of the President [Joe Biden] 2021a). The Obama administration established a similarly named body—the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy—in 2008, but Congress defunded the office in 2011 after failing to pass a broad climate bill, when priorities shifted towards health care.
Unlike the United Kingdom, which uses existing departments and personnel, Biden has created two new climate-focused offices. Gina McCarthy leads and coordinates the American whole-of-government approach, and so the success of the Task Force and the White House Office relies heavily on her leadership. Thus far, the Task Force seems to be actively encouraging inter-departmental coordination and policy collaboration. McCarthy has directed the establishment of several bilateral interagency structures and processes, like a Working Group to address drought issues with the Secretaries of Agriculture and the Interior, and increased cooperation between the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Transportation on fuel efficiency standards (United States, Executive Office of the President [Joe Biden] 2021c). Additionally, the Biden administration is mitigating some of the transparency issues identified in British Columbia and the United Kingdom by releasing a new climate change informational website, meant to showcase the progress of its whole-of-government approach and the actions of the Task Force.
5.2.2. Smaller working groups
In response to Biden’s January 2021 Executive Order, several departments have established their own climate working groups or task forces (United States, Executive Office of the President [Joe Biden] 2021a). The Departments of Health and Human Services, Interior, Homeland Security, Defense, and Treasury have all established climate action working groups or task forces. These groups signal a commitment to climate action across government from Biden and from the Department Secretaries he has appointed.
Biden has also established or re-organized several smaller, issue-specific whole-of-government structures (as seen in Figure 4) like the Interagency Working Group on Coal and Power Plant Communities and Economic Revitalization, 2 the White House Environmental Justice Interagency Council, 3and the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council4 (United States, Executive Office of the President [Joe Biden] 2021a). The two groups on environmental justice often collaborate, but each operates independently. All groups convene with the mandate to increase whole-of-government attention to specific issues (which include but are not limited to aspects of climate action).
Figure 4: Whole-of-government structures in the Biden administration
5.3. Whole-of-government processes
There are signs of procedural changes that direct increased climate ambition within individual departments as well. Biden’s Executive Order on Tackling Climate Change at Home and Abroad explicitly called for “bold, progressive action that combines the full capacity of the Federal Government with efforts from every corner of our Nation, every level of government, and every sector of our economy” (United States, Executive Office of the President [Joe Biden] 2021a).). Departments are responding to this directive; for example, incumbent Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin released a memorandum showing his support of the directive and outlined steps for his department to take to integrate climate change at all levels (Austin 2021).
Biden has embedded climate change into his American Jobs Plan for economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, job creation, and infrastructure investment, although parts of this proposal face a steep uphill battle in Congress (United States, Executive Office of the President [Joe Biden] 2021b). Biden’s January 2021 executive order also supports the American Jobs Plan by directing all federal agencies to purchase carbon pollution-free electricity and zero-emission vehicles going forward, and to stimulate clean energy industries (United States, Executive Office of the President [Joe Biden] 2021a). The American Jobs Plan is a good example of a whole-of-government initiative that embeds climate change into an economic policy that affects the activities of almost every agency in the American national government. Questions remain about the outcomes of this policy, if it passes—for instance, it’s not clear how or when agencies will have to incorporate climate action in their reporting—but it is a clear and strong signal from the White House that climate action is a problem for all agencies to solve together.
5.4. Key findings
Biden’s whole-of-government structures are still in their infancy, so it is difficult to ascertain the extent of their authority to make cross-departmental change. However, Biden has shown considerable commitment to climate action within the whole-of-government method compared to both Trump and Obama.
In 2021, the United States has demonstrated committed leadership and has delegated sufficient authority to its whole-of-government structures. The creation of new structures and the appointment of key personnel like Gina McCarthy indicates cross-departmental prioritization of climate change, as does Biden’s record of integrating climate action into COVID-19 recovery efforts.
The National Climate Task Force is the foundational structure of this approach, and thus far results are promising, with issue-specific initiatives coming out of regular meetings. Smaller groups allow for certain sub-groups to work together on specific issues or sectors, while still operating under the broader umbrella of the Task Force.
However, this approach is fragile and may not survive a change in government or a re-allocation of resources. Biden established the Task Force, the White House Office on Climate, advisory positions for both McCarthy and Kerry, and departmental directives to integrate climate action via a few executive orders during his first days in the White House—and these actions are just as easily undone. The ability to quickly establish whole-of-government structures for climate, and give them a fair amount of decision-making capability, is offset by the instability of these structures over time. The National Climate Task Force, likewise, has the potential to make big moves on climate action in the U.S. across departments, but there is still a lot of uncertainty regarding how the Task Force will interact with other agencies and what kinds of policy outcomes will result. Time will tell whether the American whole-of-government approach can serve as a blueprint for climate governance.
Case summary
The Biden administration has committed to the whole-of-government approach, using executive orders to direct both structural and procedural changes in support of cross-government climate action.
The National Climate Task Force is the foundational structure of this approach, and thus far results are promising, with smaller cross-departmental initiatives coming out of regular meetings.
However, this approach is fragile and may not survive a change in government or a re-allocation of resources. Time will tell whether the American whole-of-government approach is best-in-class.
The interior of Parliament, Ottawa, Canada
6. Lessons from whole-of-government approaches to climate change
Using a whole-of-government approach, which can encourage inter-departmental coordination and leverage the full expertise of government for ambitious climate action, has appeal for jurisdictions working to achieve climate targets. The whole-of-government approach does not, on its own, equal perfectly implemented climate policy; what it can do is provide central climate leadership that increases accountability and responsibility for all departments (not just environment) and provides a forum for coordination on cross-departmental issues (like building codes or transport standards).
There are several key lessons from these cases that can inform Canada’s governance choices in the future:
The extent and success of the whole-of-government approach depends on sustained central leadership. In all the cases examined here, executive leaders decided to establish whole-of-government structures (including assigning their membership and areas of responsibility) and create whole-of-government processes. Committed leaders direct the prioritization of climate change in decision-making processes, establish new structures early, and equip them with the resources they need to create new policies and plans across departments.
The whole-of-government approach is not a silver bullet for good climate governance. Whole-of-government mechanisms are defined by their scope of funding, mandate, and capacity to implement change. Strong legislation can offset some of these issues (like the United Kingdom Climate Change Act), but legislation rarely includes structures like cabinet committees which are established on an ad hoc basis. There is also a question of the ability of these structures to enact change across departments, and to ensure buy-in from a variety of portfolios. Many of these initiatives are at risk of failing because of a lack of direction and resources. As a result, departments that have other priorities and directives have a hard time addressing additional issues meaningfully.
Installing effective and empowered personnel in whole-of-government structures is essential. Ministers and Department Secretaries or Deputy Ministers have a great deal to do with the buy-in of the whole-of-government approach from single government agencies. If empowered with strong mandates from executive leadership (e.g. in mandate letters), they can leverage this empowerment for action. This is especially apparent in the American case with the post of National Climate Advisor, which directs both the National Task Force and the President’s climate advisory team in the White House Office on Domestic Policy.
Inter-departmental coordination on climate change must be balanced with allowing departments to fulfill their mandates. Whole-of-government processes can provide direction for prioritizing climate change via mandate letters, department plans, and policies that explicitly require action from multiple departments working together. However, creating too many mechanisms for inter-departmental coordination places an additional burden on departments that already have substantial portfolios. This balance between additional whole-of-government processes and allowing departments to fulfill the rest of their mandate is complicated and difficult to get right. For instance, the United Kingdom case has many of the pieces in place (cabinet-level committees headed by the Prime Minister, directives for each department to address relevant pieces of climate action, broad net zero strategies and external advisory committees to provide policy guidance). However, these pieces have yet to coalesce into an effective whole-of-government approach that truly improves climate governance, largely due to lack of resources, capacity, and vague expectations.
The whole-of-government approach needs to address accountability, transparency, and reporting requirements in some fashion. Generally, cabinet committees do not release detailed meeting outcomes, which makes it difficult to accurately assess the outcomes of these governance mechanisms. To complicate matters, in some cases, public information is removed with government turnover (as noted in the British Columbia case). Full transparency of these structures is unlikely and implausible, and there are benefits to having closed-door forums for government officials to communicate. However, regular high-level reports that indicate the outcomes of meetings, as well as explicit goals for inter-departmental coordination in mandate letters or delivery plans, would help define the outcomes of this approach. External advisory bodies can provide an important role in increasing the accountability of whole-of-government structures through regular reports on governance approaches and specific advice to government that cuts across departments.
A close-up of wrought iron railings, with the Canadian Parliament’s tower defocused in the background.
7. Looking ahead for Canada
At the federal level, Canada has already established some whole-of-government structures for environment and climate change, and there are indications that the current government plans to do more. However, Canada could add critical pieces of what would comprise a true whole-of-government approach, such as a cabinet committee, coordinating structures, and clear lines of reporting and accountability.
The Cabinet Committee on Economy and the Environment, chaired by the Associate Minister of Finance, considers climate change as one of several priorities, but there is no cabinet-level committee solely dedicated to climate change. The lack of Prime Ministerial presence in this committee keeps its discussions partitioned, and departmental membership is limited.
Within the Privy Council Office, a small three-person climate secretariat, headed by former Ambassador of Climate Change Jennifer MacIntyre, was established in 2021 to work with the top climate advisors in the Prime Minister’s Office to encourage increased climate action across departments. These postings also indicate a trend of assigning key personnel with strong environmental commitments to multiple key posts, beyond the Ministry for Environment and Climate Change. However, there is room for assigning more ministers and deputy ministers that could play a constructive role in a whole-of-government approach to climate change. Mandating key climate-focused ministers would lead to better uptake within departments and more effective cross-jurisdictional policymaking.
The federal government has proposed a broad integration of climate goals across departments in their 2021 Healthy Environment, Healthy Economy plan, stating that they plan to “apply a climate lens to integrate climate considerations throughout government decision-making.…This transformation will require an aligned approach that ensures that government spending and decisions support Canada’s climate goals” (Environment and Climate Change Canada 2021). More details on how they plan to structure this climate lens will be helpful, as this lens can play a crucial whole-of-government role.
The Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act, passed in June 2021, enshrines a net zero commitment by 2050 in law and may prove to be an important whole-of-government process for climate change. For instance, the Act requires the Minister for Finance (in cooperation with the Minister for Environment and Climate Change) to produce annual reports on financial risks related to climate change (Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act 2021). These reporting requirements indicate an opportunity for enhanced inter-departmental collaboration, and for additional expertise to assist non-environment departments in developing climate reports. To this end, the Accountability Act also established the Net-Zero Advisory Body, meant to provide independent advice to the Minister for Environment and Climate Change and other government officials as requested (Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act 2021).
The Advisory Body and the Canadian Climate Institute (established in 2020) serve as external advisory bodies that provide climate policy expertise to government and release independent public research.5 The National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy, established in 1988 and closed in 2012, played a similar role. The Advisory Body and the Institute produce rigorous, transparent, independent research, both to government and the public.
While these plans and legislation signal a commitment to a stronger whole-of-government approach, there is room for more ambition. There are several key pieces that could be added to the Canadian approach, such as a centralized coordinating body and a Cabinet committee.
There are a few ways the Canadian federal government could strengthen its whole-of-government approach:
A new Cabinet Committee on Climate Change and Net Zero, chaired by the Prime Minister (like the Climate Action Strategy committee in the United Kingdom).
A high-level coordinating structure to support the Cabinet Committee—a Climate or Net Zero Secretariat—in the Privy Council Office or Prime Minister’s Office, akin to the initial formulation of British Columbia’s Climate Action Secretariat or the United States National Climate Task Force. (The current climate secretariat team in the Privy Council Office would need more financial and human resources to fulfill this role.)
Under the direction of such a Secretariat, smaller working groups and task forces (like those coming out of the American Task Force) focused on specific issues or sectors. The Secretariat would also develop policy packages for the Cabinet Committee’s approval.
To mitigate accountability issues, the Secretariat would ideally have a corresponding online repository outlining its progress and plans for whole-of-government work, as the United States has recently released.
Canada is no stranger to inter-departmental coordination or high-level ministerial collaboration, but has not yet designed a truly all-inclusive, cross-jurisdictional approach to climate governance. Taking an effective whole-of-government approach to climate change would go beyond establishing internal committees to instil cross-government climate action across departments, policies, and sectors.
The whole-of-government approach is intended to keep climate action at the centre of all policymaking, leveraging the breadth of public service expertise to mitigate emissions and adapt to impacts more effectively. Inter-departmental collaboration is a foundational aspect of this, since there are multiple departments that need to be involved in solving the cross-jurisdictional aspects of the climate crisis.
The cases presented here identify the need for sustained political leadership, centralized coordination of a whole-of-government approach, clarity of climate goals for departments, and some type of accountability, transparency, and reporting mechanism to assess outcomes. With a well-designed whole-of-government program, Canada can leverage the expertise of its entire public service to raise climate ambition and turn targets into results.
Works Cited
“A Stronger B.C. for Everyone.” BC Budget 2020. https://www.bcbudget.gov.bc.ca/2020 (November 8, 2021).
Australia Management Advisory Committee. 2004. Connecting Government: Whole of Government Responses to Australia’s Priority Challenges. Canberra: Australian Government/Australian Public Service Commission.
Bardou, Magali. 2009. “Public Policies and the Greenhouse Effect.” Ethnologie francaise Vol. 39(4): 667–76.
Brook, Douglas A. 2012. “Budgeting for National Security: A Whole of Government Perspective.” Journal of Public Budgeting, Accounting & Financial Management 24(1): 32–57.
Brook, Douglas A. 2012. “Budgeting for National Security: A Whole of Government Perspective.” Journal of Public Budgeting, Accounting & Financial Management 24(1): 32–57.
Dubash, Navroz K. 2021. “Varieties of Climate Governance: The Emergence and Functioning of Climate Institutions.” Environmental Politics 30(sup1): 1–25.
Environment and Climate Change Strategy. 2021. “B.C. Sets Sectoral Targets, Supports for Industry and Clean Tech | BC Gov News.” BC Gov News. https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2021ENV0022-000561 (November 8, 2021).
National Archives. 2008. “Records of the Department of Energy and Climate Change: Departmental Websites, and Websites of Associated Agencies and Bodies-—Office of Climate Change”. https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C18110
Verhoest, Koen, Geert Bouckaert, and B. Guy Peters. 2007. “Janus-Faced Reorganization: Specialization and Coordination in Four OECD Countries in the Period 1980—2005.” International Review of Administrative Sciences 73(3): 325–48.
Published as part of our Indigenous Perspectives series featuring Indigenous-led initiatives to address and respond to climate change.
Summary
This case study focuses on the way that climate policy in Canada is failing to appropriately build relationships with Indigenous people and incorporate Indigenous ways of knowing, and the need to decolonize Canada’s climate policy and address the violation of Indigenous rights in the framework that built it. The current policies in place are paraded around as a job well done, despite major violations in the government’s responsibility to Indigenous people. The 2016 Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Energy and Climate Change and the updated 2020 plan, A Healthy Environment and a Healthy Economy, missed the mark on Indigenous inclusion, consultation, and accommodation, as the recent Indigenous Climate Action (ICA) report Decolonizing Climate Policy in Canada explains in detail.
Governments have a responsibility to build a climate plan that incorporates the best available information, and they can not do so without the inclusion of Indigenous generational knowledge. To include Indigenous knowledge, there is a level of respect and understanding that is required. To access this knowledge, Canada must decolonize by divesting its colonial power and approaching its relationship to this land’s First Peoples on a nation-to-nation basis focused on respect for the land and living well together, and do the hard work necessary in repairing the damaged relationship with this land’s First Peoples.
This case study offers an entry point into the efforts underway to decolonize climate policy in particular by addressing glaring issues within the Canadian government’s policy development process with regard to the meaningful involvement of Indigenous Peoples as rights holders. The process by which the climate policies were constructed has failed to see Indigenous Peoples as rights holders with agency and authority. Understanding and incorporating Indigenous ways of knowing is vital to addressing the climate crisis, and the way to access this information is to consult with Indigenous rights holders and respect the generational knowledge of their territories.
Moving forward, Indigenous-led initiatives need to be championed and listened to with the same respect and attention given to the scientific community. Indigenous relationship building will not have one linear path to follow and will take a lot of hard work and determination, with the onus on federal, provincial, and territorial governments.
Disclaimer
I would like to acknowledge all the efforts of our Indigenous communities and Nations in raising a collective cry regarding the injustice that our Sacred Earth has suffered. I want to acknowledge that this collective voice is created through conversations and relationship building, through ceremony and mutual respect, that in no way am I the lone voice and that I have the force of Ancestors speaking with me, through me, and with others. I can’t lay claim as a sole author on this case study, as it draws on a collective of strong Indigenous voices and experiences. When I speak of Indigenous Peoples, I use this in a collective sense to represent the First Nations, Inuit, and Métis. When I refer to Earth, I am doing so with the premise I am talking of an actual person that is capable of feeling, hurting and is very much alive and sentient. When I speak of my Ancestors, I am referring to the old ones, the ones that have gone on to the spirit realm, the ones whose physical bodies are no longer able to stand on our sacred Earth. I use the words in English in order to convey to you in the best way I can the intent and responsibility I have to the land, though even as I am learning, this language does not do it justice.
We must honour the Sacred. Ceremony is in all that we do.
Many of my most impactful life experiences have come from moments of understanding and connecting to the first and foremost love of my life, the land. As a young person I got to experience the beauty of the sacred land and was able to take, extract, and utilize all it had to teach me in a one-sided way. The years have taught me that anything of beauty, transcendence, and magnificence cannot remain this way for seven generations unless we nurture it and live in reciprocity. For me this looks like ceremony. For many Indigenous people this is the physical, spiritual, and deliberate act of ceremony. Ceremony is in all that we do, even the very languages we speak (Tssessaze, V. Personal Communication, February 14, 2021). It is through understanding this and acting on it that we can come to recognize the inherent duty to protect the sacred, to see how the Earth is a finely tuned system connected to our beings and everything that we do. We must honour the sacred (Whitecloud, 2021, 27:17).
I am sure you have heard it all before. I’m certain you have. As the resounding collective voice of Indigenous people across the world has said, the Earth is sacred, the Earth is an embodiment of our being and sustains us all (Bone, et al., 2012). We have cried out, protested, become educated in the ways of the settler colonial state in order for colonial governments to hear our plea in protecting the sacred. Though, much like my young self, they only see what they can take, a resource. This extractive approach to the land is not different from the extractive approach they took with our people. First by attacking our identity. Through disrupting our generational learning, it was thought they would be rid of “the Indian problem” (TRC, 2015). It is true, much damage was caused, and lineages of ancestral knowledge were lost, languages gone, and whole generations of Indigenous people violently erased from this physical world (Palmater, 2015). The settler colonial state failed to eliminate their Indian problem, but the damage they caused is still being mended today.
As with our oral history, they have only delayed our teachings, as it is through the language of the land and the language of our Ancestors in the spirit realm that we gather our collective strength. Our knowledge does not just come from our generational learning, it comes from ceremony and connection to this land (Tssessaze, V. Personal Communication, February 14, 2021). If my Elder were not here to teach me, my Ancestors would reach me. We are in tandem with this land and water, much like the heart that pumps the blood into your veins, your nervous system that triggers actions and reactions, and the brain that mediates your human experience. It is an important premise to understand that Indigenous people are stewards of this land. To understand each other, you must understand this (Wildcat, 2009).
Decolonizing climate policy is in no way a singular effort and cannot be limited to any one event or action. This fight has been born of many different advances all over our sacred Earth. Through this case study I will summarize the process of how I became a part of a team working to decolonize climate policies in Canada, as a contributor to Indigenous Climate Action’s report Decolonizing Climate Policy in Canada. Specifically, we found, the processes and policies enacted within the Pan-Canadian Framework and Healthy Environment and Healthy Economy policy documents entrench settler colonial relations and the outright exclusion of Indigenous people as rights holders and defenders of the land, all the while claiming to recognize “the importance of traditional knowledge in regard to understanding climate impacts and adaptation measures” (PCF, 2016 p. 3).
The façade of Indigenous engagement
The Pan-Canadian Framework had failed to engage in true nation-to-nation relationship with Indigenous Peoples, and to prioritize the intersectionality of climate issues to those most affected. It further extended its poorly imagined framework into the newly created Healthy Environment and Healthy Economy climate plan. Together, a team consisting of myself, Dr. Jen Gobby, Rachel Ivey, and Indigenous Climate Action found that these two documents violate Indigenous rights from the development process all the way through to content, plan, and policies (ICA, 2021 p.10). The report Decolonizing Climate Policy in Canada was developed through interviews with policy officials and employing a critical framework matrix, Intersectionality-Based Policy Analysis (Hankivsky, 2012), that aims “to critique and develop policy that contributes to transforming the inequitable relations of power that maintain inequality” (ICA, 2021).
Our analysis also took the federal plans and compared them to existing Indigenous documents asserting Indigenous rights such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action, and the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. ICA co-founder Eriel Deranger’s experience and frustrations with climate policies in Canada led to ICA’s collaboration with myself and Dr. Jen Gobby to address where climate plans in Canada are failing. In the next phase of Decolonizing Climate Policy in Canada, we will work to introduce Indigenous-led climate policy into Canada’s climate discourse.
The most glaring issue with these policy documents was the lack of Indigenous representation and the lack of transparency regarding how Canada’s climate policies were to be inclusive of Indigenous people. Additionally, Indigenous involvement in the engagement process was substandard at best, with “no descriptions or pathways of policy development to Indigenous communities, failing to provide Free, Prior and Informed Consent” (Deranger, E. Personal Communication. February 19, 2021).
The current policies showed that the exclusion of Indigenous people in building climate policy was the consequence of a lack of effort in relationship building. In seeking to summarize the process of being a part of a team analyzing federal policy in Canada, I investigated further the spark that led to this fire, as I had entered this project midway through. It was evident that there was not one event, but rather a collection of distasteful and outright disrespectful stories of engagement, consultation, and extraction of knowledge over many years. Though not outlined specifically in this case study, it does not take much investigation to find the stories of disrespectful engagement processes with Indigenous people.
The structure of the Pan-Canadian Framework was led by working groups that skirted real engagement and consultation. Even in the structure of developing these working groups, there was no Indigenous representation at these tables: the Decolonizing Climate Policy in Canada report found “Indigenous people were structurally excluded from the working groups” (ICA, 2021). Further, the main issue at the engagement level, seen all too often at different levels of government engagement, was the insufficient time allowed for a meaningful response (ICA, 2021). The very lack of Indigenous representation is at the heart of the problem. “This is not inclusion, this is tokenism” had been the response of Indigenous leaders to the Alberta policy that was used as a framework and best practice guide for the Pan-Canadian Framework (Deranger, E. Personal Communication. February 19, 2021).
Though the Pan-Canadian Framework and Healthy Environment and Healthy Economy have admirable climate targets, it is a gross understatement to say that they miss the mark on Indigenous engagement, inclusion, and accommodation (ICA, 2021). “Through my direct experience, there is zero interest, both provincially and nationally, to find ways of incorporating Indigenous rights and Indigenous knowledge in a tangible and real way to inform policy. Tangible solutions are built through relationships and built through hard work” (Deranger, E. Personal Communication. February 19, 2021). It was because of this experience that it became clear that a strong analysis and critique was needed on the development of federal climate policy. Indigenous engagement has been more about the optics and communications plan of government bodies than about just and meaningful relationship building.
The inclusion of Indigenous political bodies such as the Assembly of First Nations, Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, and the Métis National Council does not constitute adequate consultation. Though it is an important first step to build relationships with Indigenous political bodies, engagement and relationship building start at the community level. Looking to the Indigenous political bodies further demonstrates the reluctance to disrupt the status quo in consultation (Wildcat, 2009). Indigenous generational knowledge is not housed in political bodies alone, it is with the people on the land. Further, engaging only political bodies on climate issues displays how much these governments undervalue Indigenous traditional knowledge and the years that are spent learning the land intimately. The findings in Decolonizing Climate Policy in Canada further support that the consultation with Indigenous political bodies was weak at best and did not include them as decision makers (ICA, 2021). Throughout our policy analysis of the Pan-Canadian Framework and Healthy Environment and Healthy Economy, it became evident that there was a lack of understanding and acknowledgement of the historical impacts and interconnectedness of Indigenous issues. The report finds, “The federal climate plans egregiously fail to address the fossil fuel industry as a driver of climate change, a violator of Indigenous rights, and a major contributor to the vulnerabilization of Indigenous communities and Nations by way of impacts on waters, lands, livelihoods and food systems,” (ICA, 2021 p.10).
Colonialism is at the root of Indigenous issues related to climate change; displaying them in the climate policy as mitigation solutions is inaccurate at best. Supporting ways to decolonize and disrupt the current policy-making habits is a step toward reconciliation. It is not to say that we do not have hard-working people in government bodies, in environmental organizations, and allies in the field of climate justice. The issues lie in the actual relationships between Indigenous people and settlers in Canada (Whyte, 2019). Environmental organizations are continually sought for their expertise on policy and rarely ever address their own organizational shortcomings. This is not to say they need to speak for Indigenous people, but instead should provide and hold the space to uplift Indigenous knowledge by Indigenous people by recognizing the space they are holding and asking if that space should have an Indigenous voice.
Addressing the inequalities in the very systems that maintain Turtle Island is quite literally a necessity. The failure to appropriately build relationships can no longer be acceptable practice, and frameworks that fail to address this need should no longer be used (Wildcat, 2009). It should also be noted that when attempting to understand the extractive drive behind the behaviour of settlers, that drive does not stop with all our relatives in the natural world, and all that our Sacred Earth has offered and continues to offer. It extends to the very knowledge of this land gifted to us over generations and the ceremonies that are used to heal this land. Broken relationships take time and effort to fix, and it starts with integrity (Whyte, 2019).
Failure to incorporate Indigenous ways of knowing and the interconnectedness of the sacred
The first step to meaningful consultation is repairing the relationships with Indigenous people, and giving respect to rights and authority. In order to do this, settlers need to stop assuming that Indigenous people will always be available to educate them on the sacred. We are tired. It is emotionally exhausting to be in a room filled with people who uphold the systemic racism, settler biases, and colonial ideologies that we have so long had to contend with. The unacknowledged work that Indigenous people are having to do to get a room up to speed on Indigenous ways of knowing is rarely if ever incorporated into the duty to accommodate, let alone Indigenous views on accommodation such as the spiritual offering of tobacco (McGregor, 2014). Policy frameworks such as the Pan-Canadian Framework and Healthy Environment and Healthy Economy want to say that they have consulted with Indigenous people. As an Indigenous person, I see no real evidence that consultation happened, only sentiments and empty words. This language used in both policies does not address the structural problems and power imbalances that the government upholds today.
As with the disclaimer at the very beginning of this case study, the understanding of sacred Indigenous ways of knowing is vital to a successful relationship, and the onus is on settlers to undertake the work, research, and conversations to develop that understanding. I often use analogies in my storytelling, as stories are often told to the young ones to teach them and help them to understand the history (Deloria, 2015). Canada is the bully and the abuser who has hurt Indigenous people and caused a rightful distrust. Now this bully and abuser is apologizing and demanding trust while doing the bare minimum to earn it.
Incorporating Indigenous ways of knowing is vital to understanding the oral history and generational knowledge of the land. There is a balance and interconnected nature that must always be honoured. The current disconnect with the sacred reinforces the colonial mindset of the hierarchy of power and the assumed right to extract (LaDuke, 2020). The indoctrination of religion has framed western science as outside of the realm of sacred. This disconnect of sacred and science can be seen through western science, which attempts to replace traditional knowledge with words like animism and epigenetics. It is through our generational knowledge and oral history that we know the Earth’s creations are alive and are sentient beings and that our knowledge is transitioned through our blood memory. Communication of that history starts to close those gaps. While it’s not expected that settlers study and learn the sacred, it is expected that this way of knowing will be given the respect and understanding it is due without attempting to squish it into colonial language and paradigms (LaDuke, 2020). Traditional knowledge and oral histories should be understood as valid in the same sense that the data and research of settler scientists is valid (McGregor, 2014).
Moving forward
The critique of the Pan-Canadian Framework and Healthy Environment and Healthy Economy presented in the report Decolonizing Climate Policy in Canada was produced in two phases. Phase One focused on analyzing the failures, from an Indigenous perspective, of the two documents. Phase Two of the project will focus on highlighting and giving space to Indigenous-led climate policy. To set the direction for Phase Two, we have created an Advisory Council of Indigenous experts from Canada’s five biomes, which will allow for the land to speak through them.
The formation of the Advisory Council came from identifying that all too often, consultations seek to take representatives almost exclusively from National Indigenous Organizations. In doing this, there is a perpetuation of the notion that First Nation, Inuit, and Métis representatives are homogenous and can speak for the hundreds of unique nations spread across Canada. This notion also reinforces who is Indigenous under the Indian Act, excluding many First Nations knowledge keepers who are not status Indians but who should be considered. This system of “inclusion” is problematic and does not directly seek all the unique Indigenous traditional and generational perspectives on climate mitigation initiatives.
Through the creation of an Advisory Council, we will be seeking to address this challenge by selecting the Council members based on the five distinct biotic ecosystems known as biomes of Canada. It was through this intention that the land would have a representative who transcends political, treaty, territorial, and language boundaries. There will be an Indigenous person who would represent the traditional biome, of which they have direct knowledge and community connections, ensuring the solutions are land focused. Additionally, we have added a youth representative. It is among Indigenous ways of knowing that we are continuing and making a place for our next generation of leaders. The Advisory Council, in collaboration with Indigenous Climate Action, will then produce commitments that are needed to have a just and meaningful climate policy for all Indigenous people and non-Indigenous people.
The path forward is stained with past failures and missteps, and no one person has the answer for achieving reconciliation in Canada. Reconciliation is a collection of initiatives and a balance of ideas, with space to incorporate a two-eyed-seeing perspective. This case study, this nehiyaw iskwew’s perspective, is focusing on the current government’s pitiful attempts to repair the integrity of relationship building with Indigenous people. That same government has the convenience of readily available English-language resources on how to build relationships with many nations, whereas my ancestors and teachers have had to, and continue to, struggle with translation that doesn’t leave them open for interpretation. As my teachers tell me, the work is never done.
Acknowledgment/ Kinanáskomitináwáw
To our life giver, Earth, for teaching me and guiding me.
I want to express my deepest gratitude to all the Elders and knowledge keepers who have guided me spiritually and through ceremony. Special mention to Victor Tssessaze who aided directly in the spiritual care of my words for this case study. I want to thank the team at Indigenous Climate Action for doing great and hard work for our Mother Earth, particularly Eriel Deranger and Lindsay Monture.
I want to thank Dr. Jen Gobby for being a beautiful ally in the work of decolonizing climate action and graciously bringing me on board to support the work of decolonizing climate policy. I also want to thank the Indigenous youth, who, against the odds, strive and continue the fight of our elders, land, and waters. With special mention to Carlie Kane who helped me immensely in this case study.
To my husband, Tyler, and my children Dominic, Zoe, and Elena. It is through your love I am nourished.
References
Bone, H., Courchene, D. &, Greene, R. (2012). The Journey of the Spirit of the Red Man: A Message from the Elders. Van Haren Publishing.
Environment and Climate Change Canada. (2016). Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change: Canada’s Plan to Address Climate Change and Grow the Economy. Government of Canada. http://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/9.828774/publication.html
Hankivsky, O. (Ed.). (2012). An Intersectionality-Based Policy Analysis Framework. Vancouver, BC: Institute for Intersectionality Research and Policy, Simon Fraser University.
Indigenous Climate Action, Gobby, J. & Sinclair, R. et al. (2021). Decolonizing Climate Policy in Canada. Indigenous Climate Action.
LaDuke, W. (2020). To Be A Water Protector: The Rise of the Wiindigoo Slayers. Fernwood Publishing.
Mcgregor, D. (2014). “Lessons for Collaboration Involving Traditional Knowledge and Environmental Governance in Ontario, Canada.” AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 10(4), 340–353. https://doi.org/10.1177/117718011401000403
Palmater, P., & Sinclair, N. J. (2015). Indigenous Nationhood: Empowering Grassroots Citizens. Fernwood Publishing.
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC). (2015). Truth & Reconciliation: Calls to Action. United Nations, National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, & United Nations.
“A country cannot have a comprehensive economic plan without a comprehensive climate plan,” were the words of Jonathan Wilkinson, Canada’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change, at an April 2021 Canadian Chamber of Commerce Executive Summit. It is here, at the intersection of Canada’s climate and economic planning, where the opportunity lives.
This paper will focus on applying the concept of Indigenomics—a new model of development that advances Indigenous self-determination, collective well-being, and reconciliation—to the economic risks and opportunities that are arising from the global low-carbon transition. I will highlight issues such as Indigenous climate justice, sovereignty, self-determination, and risk management, and explore traditional Indigenous knowledge and data systems and the importance of elevating the role and voice of Indigenous stewardship in a climate action response.
What is Indigenomics?
Indigenomics draws on ancient principles that have supported Indigenous economies for thousands of years and works to implement them as modern business practices.
Indigenomics, as a new word and concept, serves to call into visibility the relevance of an Indigenous worldview in today’s modern economy. Indigenomics is the conscious claim to, and the creation of, space for the advancement of today’s emerging Indigenous economy. Indigenomics is essentially a statement of claim of Indigenous space in modern existence. It is a call-out or invitation into an Indigenous worldview that seeks to centre that worldview in the concepts and experience of “development” and “progress.”
Indigenomics is the conscious claim to, and the creation of, space for the advancement of today’s emerging Indigenous economy
While the Western mainstream economy is geared toward monetary transactions as a source of exchange, the Indigenous economy is based on relationship. Indigenous economies are the original sharing economy, the original green economy, regenerative economy, collaborative economy, circular economy, impact economy, and the original gift economy. The Indigenous economy is the original social economy.
Indigenomics is the process of claiming a seat at the economic table. It involves centring Indigenous rights to an economy, rights to modernity, and rights to be consulted and to provide consent. It is interwoven with the establishment of legal pressure points for economic inclusion, higher standards of stewardship, collaborative decision making, and reciprocal prosperity.
Economic inclusion, reconciliation, and equality do not just happen by themselves. They must be designed. Governments can use a variety of policy tools to support and enable Indigenous efforts to capture economic opportunities, including those that emerge in the transition to a low-carbon economy (Table 1).
The connection between Indigenous rights and knowledge and climate change
The concept of environmental justice refers to the impacts of both historical and current inequitable distribution of the costs and benefits of environmental degradation, including the consequences of climate change. This includes the experiences of Indigenous Peoples bearing a significantly greater portion of the costs, while receiving relatively little in return.
Indigenous Peoples live the long-term cumulative effects of climate change from within an inherent sense of place that is directly connected to identity. Some of these effects include rising sea levels, leading to increased salination of freshwater, which results in needing to adapt to the effects of a significant decrease in food security and access to traditional medicines, amongst other impacts. Indigenous knowledge systems offer a critical foundation for localized, community-based adaptation and mitigation actions that work to fundamentally sustain the resilience of social-ecological systems locally, regionally, and globally.
There is a growing recognition that Indigenous Peoples’ rights and knowledge systems are critical to developing solutions to the climate crisis and achieving climate justice. Indigenous Peoples have a crucial role in this national and global response. Indigenous Peoples are on the front line of the effects, and stewards of critical ecosystems that store vast amounts of carbon. With memories of place going back thousands of years, subtle changes to the lands and waters are noticed immediately. Indigenous Peoples have been the eyes on the land for thousands of years and will continue to be in the future.
Indigenous concepts of risk, land and resource management, governance, and decision making were systematically devalued in the development of what we call Canada today. This systematic economic displacement also displaced Indigenous ways of being, knowledge systems deeply connected to land, and resource management frameworks expressed within a way of life. Indigenous cultures had, and continue to have, the key features for long-term success and relationship with our environments.
As enshrined in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), the principles of upholding free, prior, and informed consent and self-determination are pillars of climate justice and central to building a response to climate change. UNDRIP recognizes the right to continue as distinct peoples and to practice our culture, which becomes increasingly difficult in rapidly changing ecosystems impacted by climate change.
The process of colonization established the reserve system, which fundamentally isolated Indigenous Peoples from their territories and created economic isolation and displacement. The Indian Act removed Indigenous inherent sense of responsibility for place, replacing it with externally imposed structures and deepening the marginalization of Indigenous Peoples.
Indigenous Peoples cannot remain on the margins of the transition to a low-carbon and climate-resilient economy. Subtle changes in seasonal patterns and other imbalances are noticed. In the words of Indigenous climate leader Eriel Deranger of Indigenous Climate Action, “It is a close relationship with the environment, and deeply spiritual, cultural, social, and economic connections with that environment, that makes Indigenous peoples uniquely positioned to anticipate, prepare for, and respond to the impacts of climate change.” She emphasizes that Indigenous science is rooted in profound and lasting connections with the natural world: “You learn to have a different relationship with the environment, it exposes to you a different way of seeing and relating to the world.”
Today we round out our series on Indigenous perspectives on Canada's future low-carbon economy with "#Indigenomics: Our eyes on the land" by Carol Anne Hilton @Hesquiahthttps://t.co/K9GxeuWkwA
There are so many great examples of Indigenous climate leadership laying the groundwork for a response to climate change rooted in Indigenomics. Here are six initiatives that demonstrate Indigenous climate leadership on the front lines of environmental justice:
Indigenous Climate Action is demonstrating real-time leadership in the establishment of an Advisory Council on Decolonizing Climate Policy. Some may wonder, what does it mean to decolonize climate policy? It is effectively a response to the overreach of, and blind spots within, existing climate policy. The failure to include Indigenous voices within emerging climate policy has left out important perspectives and led to incomplete and inequitable policies. As a recent article titled “How Are Vulnerable Populations Impacted by Carbon Pricing Schemes in Canada?” points out, Canada’s extensive focus on developing provincial pricing schemes and benchmarks has neglected to consider how these policies will impact vulnerable populations and Indigenous communities in Canada.
Coastal First Nations, a unique alliance of nine B.C. First Nations, is establishing structures that align the development of Indigenous-led sustainable economies through marine, land, and resource regional planning in order to increase local control and management of the forests and fisheries. By establishing ecosystem-based management plans and legal frameworks, and by empowering Indigenous Guardians to act as stewards of the land, the Coastal First Nations have rooted their governance and resource management systems in a sustainable development framework capable of responding to the threat of climate change. By pairing scientific data and traditional knowledge, these initiatives provide better insight into adapting to changes.
Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCA) are increasingly being established by Indigenous communities. Often referred to as Indigenous Protected Areas, or Tribal Parks, these conservation areas are declared under an Indigenous nation’s own inherent authority. There is a good example of this in my own home territory in the Nuu chah nulth region near Tofino, where the Tla o qui aht Nations Tribal Park has been established. The nation’s mandate for the Tribal Park is to recognize and uphold their people’s ancient relationships and responsibilities within the web of life that exists in this place—and to use their traditional teachings to welcome, balance, and inform newcomers’ influences and impacts. The park includes local Guardians who tend to what is referred to as “our Ancestral Gardens,” which includes the largest intact ancient coastal rainforest on Vancouver Island. With a growing network of Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas nationally, these Indigenous-led structures can play a significant role in the inclusion of Indigenous knowledge and data development to support a low-carbon regional response.
The Indigenous GuardiansProgram is playing a growing role inclimate-relevant nature conservation. Through land-based management and knowledge systems, Indigenous Peoples exercise responsibility in the stewardship of traditional lands and waters. This program serves to support Indigenous rights and responsibilities in protecting and conserving ecosystems while developing and maintaining sustainable economies.
The RELAW program recognizes the shifting interface between law and Indigenous lands. This program draws on the role of traditional stories and the wisdom of elders to help develop a summary of legal principles related to land, resource, and environmental governance in the community’s legal tradition. Part of this includes the development of a written law, policy, agreement, or plan grounded in the community’s own laws and ratified by community dialogue. Finally, the group works to develop and put into action a plan for implementing and enforcing the nation’s laws on a particular environment or resource development issue. Indigenous law is playing an increasingly important role in driving climate solutions, policies, and responses at a local level.
The Great Bear Forest Carbon Projectis led by nine coastal First Nations. It makes up the world’s largest forest carbon initiative, selling annual offsets from protected forest areas that were previously designated, sanctioned, or approved for commercial logging. Considerable amounts of carbon are stored within the extensive area of old growth forest within the Great Bear Rainforest located on the North and Central Pacific Coast and Haida Gwaii. This forest represents over one quarter of the world’s remaining coastal temperate rainforests. Indigenous leadership has driven the development of this carbon project. The Indigenous Peoples of this region have lived in this location for over 14,000 years, and their land use laws and practices are rooted in the understanding that keeping the ocean and forest ecosystems healthy is the key to our collective success. Indigenous-led carbon initiatives are an essential pathway forward.
Integrating Indigenomics into economic and climate plans
To the words of Minister Wilkinson—“A country cannot have a comprehensive economic plan without a comprehensive climate plan”—I would add: or without Indigenous knowledge systems.
The Indigenous economy exists within our relationship to ourselves, to each other, to the Earth, to our past, and to our future. The concept of interconnectedness within the Indigenous worldview pushes the boundaries of time within community development and decision making. The underlying principles of emerging economic constructs such as the green economy parallel Indigenous values and ways of being—at the core of which is the commitment to remember how to be in relation to each other and to the Earth.
It is not possible to develop a green economy or low-carbon transition strategy without recognizing the need for economic reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples. The core of economic reconciliation is supporting Indigenous communities so that they have access to the capital, resources, and opportunities needed to succeed. This includes capturing growing opportunities in clean energy and other economic development opportunities linked to climate action.
It is time to integrate Indigenomics into both economic and climate plans.
Carol Anne Hilton is founder of the Indigenomics Institute and an advisor to business, governments, and First Nations. She is a Hesquiaht woman of Nuu chah nulth descent from the west coast of Vancouver Island. She holds an MBA and comes from 10,000 years of the potlatch tradition. She lives in Victoria, BC.
