'Serious Omission' in G7 Wildfire Charter Leaves Climate Change Unnamed

Canada News.Net

5 days ago

Leaders of the G7 countries have agreed to cooperate on efforts to manage the impacts of devastating wildfires, in Canada and around the world, but held back from naming climate change as a primary cause of the problem.
The leaders are calling it the Kananaskis Wildfire Charter-and they're pitching it as a groundbreaking commitment for G7 leaders, reports The Canadian Press. But a former Canadian diplomat said the G7 will have to be more explicit about the climate crisis if it hopes to stay relevant.
"To maintain its status as a leading body, the G7 must return to its longstanding tradition of having climate change as an important item on its agenda, and find a way to do so even when there's not a consensus at the table," Patricia Fuller, president and CEO of the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), told The Energy Mix.
The charter, published on the final day of the summit Tuesday, includes a pledge to mitigate and respond to the impact of fires on human health -an apparent reference to volumes of wildfire smoke that have travelled oceans and crossed borders in recent summers. The countries say they will reduce the risk of extreme fires through sustainable forest management and Indigenous land management techniques, such as controlled burning.
"The world has experienced record-breaking wildfires across every forested continent over the past decade, often overwhelming available national resources and requiring governments to request assistance from other countries," it states. "These increasingly extreme wildfires are endangering lives, affecting human health, destroying homes and ecosystems, and costing governments and taxpayers billions of dollars each year," the leaders wrote.
The G7 resolved "to boost global cooperation to prevent, fight, and recover from wildfires by taking integrated action to reduce the incidence and negative impacts of wildfires and ensure our readiness to help each other, and partners, when needed."
View our latest digests
Leaders also committed to collecting and sharing data and finding better ways to provide timely access to basic firefighting equipment.
The charter was endorsed by guest participants from Australia, India, Mexico, South Africa, and South Korea in addition to the G7 countries. The declaration comes as Canada battles yet another devastating wildfire season and almost one year after flames ripped through Jasper, a town 250 kilometres north of Kananaskis, the Rocky Mountain tourist community that hosted the summit, CP writes.
Going into the summit, there was no expectation that climate change would be named out loud in the final declaration-or that there would be any final declaration at all, with Donald Trump in the room to block substantive agreements. Prime Minister Mark Carney's published priorities ahead of the summit made scant direct reference to past G7 commitments in areas like power sector decarbonization, methane controls, forest and land degradation, and elimination of fossil fuel subsidies-a promise the countries made in 2016 and were supposed to deliver on by this year.
The summit ultimately produced a chair's summary from Carney as G7 President, as well as statements on critical minerals, artificial intelligence, quantum technologies for computing, sensing, and communications, migrant smuggling, and transnational repression.
The chair's summary says the G7 leaders and guest participants-including UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres and World Bank President Ajay Banga-"discussed just energy transitions as well as sustainable and innovative solutions to boost energy access and affordability, while mitigating the impact on climate and the environment." Fuller said it was noteworthy that the climate and energy references came in the section of the chair's summary that reported on the G7's interactions with guests.
"That speaks to the point that if the G7 is to maintain leadership as a global institution, it needs to be addressing issues that are of concern to the wider world, and climate change is a concern to all countries," she told The Mix. "It's certainly a concern to these large developing nations, important players on the global stage, that are experiencing very extreme impacts of climate change."
As Canada and other G7 countries build stronger relationships with the Global South, "part of doing so is showing leadership on addressing climate change and advancing the energy transition, as a means of increasing energy security, diversifying energy sources, and increasing affordability," she added. "On these questions of security and affordability, there's a very broad consensus. But what is not being brought into the space as much as it should be is the importance of renewable energies in achieving those goals."
The G7 previously committed to triple renewable energy deployment and double the rate of energy efficiency improvements, and "these are goals the G7 needs to continue to work on," Fuller said. "It also needs to make good on its commitment to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies, which are an impediment to an energy transition that can achieve these goals of security and diversification."
Before the summit, news analysis suggested the wildfire references in what ultimately became the Kananaskis Charter would serve as a proxy for explicit climate commitments. When Canadian officials first began planning the meeting last year and knew they had to deal with the possibility of a Trump presidency, they understood "that if they start with the standard stuff on climate change, Donald Trump and his people would get out their red pens and just say 'no way,'" John Kirton, founding director of the G7 Research Group, told Globe and Mail freelancer Arno Kopecky. "So then, what is your strategy? And wildfires was the answer."
The difference, Kopecky wrote, was that while Trump refuses to listen to climate science, he's seen a rash of wildfires since he returned to the White House in January, and his country is now receiving smoke from the blazes in Canada. "So Donald Trump's got a reason to be seen to be doing something about it," Kirton said.
The end result-a wildfire charter with no reference to climate change-drew sharp criticism from several expert observers.
Caroline Brouillette, executive director of Climate Action Network Canada, said Canada "cratered to the lowest common denominator" to appease the U.S. president and failed the test of climate leadership, CP writes.
"They're missing the whole point in that we're seeing more fires, a longer fire season, more intense fires, more severe fires, because the climate is changing due to human activities," said fire and climate professor Mike Flannigan of Thompson Rivers University. "It's a serious omission, and that's being very polite."
The wildfire charter "misses the most important, and most controversial point, about wildfires around the globe: that increasingly they are made so much more frequent and dangerous to human life and infrastructure by climate change," agreed Stephen Legault, senior program manager, Alberta climate at Environmental Defence Canada. "To have a serious conversation about wildfire necessitates a discussion about climate change."