How Does Canada Combat Climate Change

Canadians Combatting Climate Change
Climate change, produced by global warming, is the natural fluctuations in global or regional climate patterns. Global warming affecting this would primarily alter the Earth’s weather patterns to lead into numerous consequences. This worsening issue has affected numerous regions of the world with bizarre events and catastrophes ranging throughout the entire world. Among these regions, Canada is one that is often affected with its Arctic Circle and colder regions altered by the heat of the Earth, what’s worse is the fact that the temperature is also rising. From 1948 to 2013, the average annual temperature of Canada has raised by 1.6 °C (Government of Canada, 2015) with the temperature affecting other factors

However, how does Canada compare with a similar country? America, being Canada’s neighbor, also owns a portion of the Great Lakes and shares similar conditions with Canada. Forcing them to face the same issue being the algal blooms of the lakes. These hazards altering the behavior of the environment and the ecosystem itself, algal blooms can cause trophic cascades: when the predators of the food web suppresses the abundance or alters the behavior of their prey (Stephen Carpenter, 2016). This results in dramatic changes in the ecosystem structure and nutrient cycling in the environment. Occurring in Canada as well, the algal bloom in Lake Erie of 2011 and once again last year in 2015 (Scott Sutherland, 2015) this issue is recurring throughout the years, gradually worsening. Canada and America share many similarities, algal blooms affected by temperature (National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), 2016) states that the temperature in the regions are incredibly similar being able to force the same hazards. Just as Canada has, the temperature of the United States of America has increased by roughly 0.65-1.1 °C since 1895 (John Walsh et al., 2014), however, most of this rise occurred during and since the 1970s, the main period when industrialization began. Though it is lower than Canada’s 1.6 °C escalation, it is still an immense change in temperature if the effects were considered. In terms of GHG emissions, America has always been above Canada. Since the 1990s, both countries have had a D rank in GHG emissions, though the US had originally declined the Kyoto protocol, has actually decreased in emissions by 5.2% which still exactly met the Kyoto protocol requirement in 2008 (Anthony Watts, 2013) while Canada who had originally signed the protocol had instead raised their emissions by 24.1% since the