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Canada will be unable to meet its greenhouse gas pledges—of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 30% over 2005 levels by 2030—without transitioning away from the current high-carbon economy. This transition will bring new challenges, especially to the Canadian boreal zone. The boreal zone continues to experience intensive natural resource activities including the extraction of forest, mining, oil and gas, and renewable energy products, which in combination with climate change, is placing the future sustainability of the boreal zone at risk. We explored policy options to reduce the risk to the future sustainability of the boreal zone in light of the inevitable energy transition to either a higher or a lower dependence on carbon and the uncertainty of society's capacity to adapt to change. Current policies are putting us on a path towards failure to achieve sustainability of the boreal zone. While current policies may be moving us towards a low-carbon future, they lack a shared vision of what the energy transition will be and engagement by those members of society most impacted; they are top-down, prescriptive, and fragmented, and they lack capacity, accountability, and enforcement. Together these limitations create barriers to society's capacity to adapt to the low-carbon future. Sustainability of the boreal zone will not only require a transition to a low-carbon economy but will require policies that overcome these barriers and create a higher capacity for society to adapt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The policy landscape is changing as Canada considers its energy future. The Canadian boreal zone has a large amount of natural resources, giving Canada options in terms of its energy future. However, the sustainability of the boreal zone has been deemed at risk because of the cumulative effects of intensifying natural resource activities (forestry, mining, oil and gas, and renewable energy) on ecosystems in the face of the uncertainty associated with climate change. As Canada considers the future of the boreal zone, there will be additional challenges to ensure that we do not further disadvantage marginalized human populations living in the boreal zone who are at high risk of the consequences of climate change. In response to these challenges, the Boreal 2050 project was initiated to understand the risk of failing to achieve the future sustainability of the boreal zone using the ISO 31000 risk management framework. First, we identified the major drivers of the risks to the sustainability of the boreal zone, which include atmospheric change, the demand for provisioning and nonprovisioning ecosystem services, demographics and societal values, industrial innovation and infrastructure, and governance. Second, we analyzed the risk of failing to achieve a sustainable boreal zone using scenario analysis, where we framed four plausible future scenarios around two axes of change: the global economy's energy and society's capacity to adapt. Third, we evaluated the risk and determined that present governance systems are driving Canada towards failing to achieve a sustainable boreal zone. To ensure the future sustainability of the boreal, we need to shift from an oil/gas/coal-producing country to a renewable energy leader and shift from using a top-down strategy where Canadians have a low capacity to adapt towards a mixture of top-down and bottom-up participatory strategies where Canadians—particularly Indigenous peoples living in the boreal zone—have a higher capacity to adapt. To facilitate this shift in governance, substantive changes will be required in institutional arrangements designed to protect boreal ecosystems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to global climate change, Canada is transitioning towards a low-carbon economy and the need for policy approaches that are effective, equitable, coordinated, and both administratively and politically feasible is high. One point is clear; the transition is intimately tied to the vast supply of ecosystem services in the boreal zone of Canada. This paper describes four contrasting futures for the boreal zone using scenario analysis, which is a transdisciplinary, participatory approach that considers alternative futures and policy implications under conditions of high uncertainty and complexity. The two critical forces shaping the four scenarios are the global economy's energy and society's capacity to adapt. The six drivers of change are atmospheric change, the demand for provisioning ecosystem services, the demand for nonprovisioning ecosystem services, demographics, and social values, governance and geopolitics, and industrial innovation and infrastructure. The four scenarios include: (i) the Green Path, where a low-carbon economy is coupled with high adaptive capacity; (ii) the Uphill Climb, where a low-carbon economy is instead coupled with low adaptive capacity; (iii) the Carpool Lane, where society has a strong capacity to adapt but a reliance on fossil fuels; and (iv) the Slippery Slope, where there is both a high-carbon economy and a society with low adaptive capacity. The scenarios illustrate the importance of transitioning to a low-carbon economy and the role of society's adaptive capacity in doing so. However, they also emphasize themes like social inequality and adverse environmental outcomes arising from the push towards climate change mitigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]