Climate change and environmental research at the NRC

The future of green transportation

24% of Canada's greenhouse gas emissions come from everyday transportation-related activities. The electrification of public transportation is an important step to meet national sustainability goals while targeting one of the largest sources of GHG emissions.

In collaboration with Transport Canada and the Toronto Transit Commission, the Automotive and Surface Transportation Research Centre is conducting North America's largest electric bus trials in the City of Toronto. This research brings Canada closer to a green public transit system.

Sustainable grown-in-Canada pulses

Pulses grown in Canada are considered sustainable, and assessing Canadian pulse processing methods to limit water use, improve energy efficiency and reduce negative impacts on the environment requires credible and representative data.

The NRC's Aquatic and Crop Resource Development Research Centre, in collaboration with the University of British Columbia, are creating a national life cycle inventory database, which will include pulse proteins like beans, lentils and peas. Pulse processing companies will help generate industry-level datasets and confidential sustainability assessments.

This database will enable life cycle analysis with the help of McGill University to identify sustainability gaps and process improvements to support both environmentalism and economic development.

Sustainable forest management

Sustainable forest management requires high-quality information on tree species, biomass and growth rates. The ability to do this is limited not by data, but by the ability to extract this information from very large, complex datasets.

The NRC's Digital Technologies Research Centre, through the Digital Health and Geospatial Analytics Cluster Support program is working on deep learning algorithms that can extract this information from a wide range of remote sensing and other geographic data. This work has the potential to improve forest management practices and measure the impacts of climate change.

Lowering our carbon footprint

Canada has committed to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.

To help meet this goal, the NRC's Construction Research Centre and Energy, Mining and Environment Research Centre lead the Low-carbon assets through life cycle assessment initiative, a collaboration between federal government departments, academia, non-government organizations, industry and low-carbon asset experts from across Canada.

The initiative aims to develop a science-based approach for supporting the selection of construction materials and designs that offer the lowest carbon footprint with the lowest total cost.