Five degree increases in temperature by the end of the century, melting glaciers that are not re-generating, more frequent and longer droughts and increased erratic weather patterns — those were just a few of the curve balls a University of Saskatchewan water researcher said the Prairies will face by the turn of the century during his presentation at the Alberta Beef Industry Conference in Calgary earlier this month.
However, John Pomeroy said all is not lost if agricultural producers change their high carbon emission behaviour.
Pomeroy is a director with Global Water Futures, the largest university-led fresh water research program in the world, which has conducted substantial research in Alberta since 2016. The program developed a state-of-the-art water prediction system system and applied it to river basins in Alberta. It also assessed the role of snow and crop residue management in crop and forage water use and productivity.
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While some may question doing anything to reduce Canada’s carbon footprint when other countries continue to increase their emissions, Pomeroy said now is not the time to have a “why bother” attitude when it comes to battling the climate change crisis.
“First thing, all emissions matter,” he said in an interview with the Western Producer following his presentation.
“We are responsible for ours, and by doing that we are doing our job. In the Second World War, we didn’t say, ‘it’s kind of a minuscule impact on the western armies, we’ll sit this one out,’” said Pomeroy, who was elected to represent academia on the United Nations’ Steering Committee of the Water and Climate Coalition and has authored more than 400 research articles, reports and books that have been cited more than 25,000 times.
“We said, ‘we are going to chip in and do our part.’ There is also an aspect where Canada can then use that to pressure other countries to go along by saying, ‘look at what we’ve done, you can do it, too.’ If we are smart about it, we can also be leaders in the (climate) technologies and make money off of it.”
Environmental and economic-driver groups are often at odds when it comes to agriculture, but Pomeroy said,climate change is already affecting the bottom line in overall secondary costs.
“Even the long-term economics point in the same direction. We are seeing this now, we’re paying for climate change through increased insurance rates for crops and homes and everything else. And then also, with to some degree, with our electricity, our power rates,” said Pomeroy.
“Of course, when someone gets their home demolished by a hailstorm or something like that, it hits home that this in fact a very expensive climate change.”
He said most of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions come from a relatively small number of countries: China, the United States and the European Union are the three largest emitters on an absolute basis.
Per capita greenhouse emissions are highest in the U.S. and Russia, but China is by far the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide, putting more than twice as much into the air as the U.S. does.
Pomeroy has traveled to China and has seen the inroads China has made to lessen its carbon footprint. The country’s nationally determined contributions (NDCs) are striving to peak its carbon dioxide emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060.
Pomeroy said China is investing heavily in renewable energy — its cumulative installed wind generation capacity accounted for 39 per cent of the global share and its solar capacity for 36 per cent as of July 2022.
“I was over in China in October, and they showed me all this hydroelectric development, it’s incredible. They’ve got wind farms and solar panels all over the place, and auto electric cars,” said Pomeroy.
“Even in farms in the rural areas, farmers with little electric cars and scooters and stuff. They’re doing it and it’s at a very fast rate.”
Pomeroy also talked about visiting the Kingdom of Bhutan earlier this year, a landlocked country in South Asia, situated in the Eastern Himalayas. Fewer than a million people live there and it is isolated by mountains and foothills. He said the country is carbon negative, absorbing more carbon dioxide than it emits.
“They have about 60 per cent of the country protected in international parks and forests, and they generate their electricity from hydro electricity. So countries can do it.”
With his decades of expertise in climate change and water prediction, Pomeroy hopes to dispel misinformation that says climate change doesn’t exist, despite decades of tracked data to the contrary.
“There is active misinformation out there and there has been for some time. Some of the first major corporations to discover the effect of climate change were the major oil companies, and they did this with their own scientists back in the ‘70s and ‘80s; eventually to misinform rather than to act on it and be part of an energy future,” said Pomeroy.
“The problem with the process is it requires unanimous agreement, and some countries are heavily dependent upon oil and gas and probably will never get that agreement. How do you get Saudi Arabia or Kuwait to sign on to this stuff? So I think the countries that can do something, they just need to get together and sort it out and do it.”
That’s why China is so important, he said.
“The impacts of climate change on China are dire. They got a billion people to manage and feed, they are legitimately quite worried about this. India is as well. India is becoming uninhabitable. So they know they have to shift as well. These are massive populations and rising demands with standards of living,” said Pomeroy.
“A lot of the migration into the U.S. from the south has been driven by climate events in Central America and extreme droughts and floods. Things like that have made rural land holdings untenable — people so desperate that they’re leaving their homes.”
