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Science Response 2013/011

Risk-based assessment of climate change impacts and risks on the biological systems and infrastructure within Fisheries and Oceans Canada's mandate - Freshwater Large Aquatic Basin

Context

In keeping with the Federal Adaptation Policy Framework, Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) received funding for the Aquatic Climate Change Adaptation Services Program (ACCASP; 2011-2016) in order to implement a science-based climate change program focused on adaptation and delivery of Fisheries and Oceans’ mandated areas of responsibility.  The Program will undertake risk assessments, foster the development of applied science-based tools and research projects to increase our understanding of the impacts of climate change and enable adaptation in support of DFO’s strategic outcomes.

To tackle the primary objective of the Program, an assessment of the risks that climate change poses to the delivery of DFO’s mandate across the diverse aquatic ecosystems of Canada were performed. To focus these assessments country was divided into four Large Aquatic Basins (LABs), namely the Arctic, Pacific, Freshwater and Atlantic, which share broad ecosystem features. The assessment of regional risks will help front-line managers respond to climate change.

As a first step, a nationally-led Science Special Response Process (SSRP) consisting of face-to-face expert meetings was held for each of the four LABs to assess the risks to the biological systems, services, and infrastructure that fall under the purview of DFO.  This work follows two internal DFO climate change national risk assessment reports (Interis 2005, 2012) which provided a preliminary assessment of the impacts of climate change to the Department’s strategic priorities, and focused these national evaluations of risks down to the scale of each of the large aquatic basins. This served as the departure point for the four LAB assessments. An SSRP was used instead of a full CSAS peer review because of the short timeframe for this Science advice. An SSRP can be used to respond to urgent or unforeseen requests when there is not sufficient time to prepare a full CSAS review.

The urgency of the advice stemmed from the need for linkages between the science, socio-economic and policy risk assessment background documents in preparation for the Integrated Risk Assessment meetings, scheduled for early winter 2012/2013. Following these Canadian Science Advisory Secretariat (CSAS) meetings, the results of the SSRPs, along with the results of concurrent socio-economic, and policy analyses (developed with linkages to the outcomes of the SSRP meetings) will be used collectively to inform an integrated risk assessment workshop for each of the large aquatic basins. The objective of these integrated workshops will be to take the evidentiary base provided by science, socio-economics, and policy and incorporate DFO program area (e.g. fisheries management, oceans management, etc.) considerations to determine the most acute basin-level climate risks for the Department. The results will help DFO decision-makers adapt decisions to reflect climate change considerations so that Canadians may continue to derive benefits from our oceans and inland waters. This information will also be instrumental in informing priorities for ACCASP’s competitive funding envelopes, which are aimed at understanding climate change impacts and developing applied adaptation tools, for the 2013-14 funding year and beyond.

This Science Special Response Report is the product of the expert meeting for the Freshwater Large Aquatic Basin that provided peer review of Risk Summary Sheets developed for each of the six departmental risks established in the national risk assessment reports. Participants carried out their review having first considered background documents that presented scientific information available on trends and projections and the impacts, vulnerabilities and opportunities for each LAB. The basin risk assessments first considered descriptions of climatic “Trends and Projections”Footnote 1 (TP) on the near-term (10 year) and long-term (50 to 100 years) time scales. Then the assessments considered evaluations of “Impacts, Vulnerabilities and Opportunities”Footnote 2 (IVO) for each temporal scale. The detailed TP and IVO reports, which are extensive and detailed assessments of the climatic changes and impacts at the sub basin level in each LAB will be published at the beginning of the 2013-2014 fiscal year (to be published¹,²). A separate review process for the background TP and IVO documents will occur once they are finalized.

This Science Response Report (SRR) details the results from the National SSRP that assessed the risks of climate change on the freshwater large aquatic basin. This meeting took place on November 20-22nd, 2012 in Winnipeg MB. The Science Responses resulting from each of the four large aquatic basin expert meetings will be posted as they become available on the Fisheries and Oceans Canada Science Advisory Schedule.

Accessibility Notice

This document is available in PDF format. If the document is not accessible to you, please contact the Secretariat to obtain another appropriate format, such as regular print, large print, Braille or audio version.

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