Environment

Description: The National Fire Information Database (NFID) is a pilot project with the objective of gathering ten years of microdata information on fire incidents and fire losses from provincial/territorial Fire Marshals and Fire Commissioners Offices across Canada, standardizing the data, and creating a centralized national system for the collection of fire statistics.

Description: Ecosystem accounts are based on the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting - Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA-EA) framework, which was adopted as an international statistical standard by the United Nations Statistical Commission in March 2021. This framework complements, and builds on, the accounting for environmental assets described in the United Nations System of Environmental-Economic Accounting Central Framework (SEEA-CF), which was adopted as an international standard in 2012.

Description: The Environmental tax statistics (ETS) product is one of the elements of the United Nations System of Environmental-Economic Accounting - Central Framework (SEEA-CF), which was adopted as an international standard in 2012. This product records, in monetary units, government revenues generated from environmental tax from industry, households, government institutions and non-profit organizations and gross fixed capital formation.

Description: The Canadian indexes of social resilience and vulnerability were created to provide area-based information on resilience and vulnerability to natural hazards and disasters across Canada.

Description: The Environmental and Clean Technology Products Economic Account (ECTPEA) is one of the main elements of the United Nations System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA) Central Framework, which was adopted as an international statistical standard in 2012. This account provides statistics on the production and use of environmental and clean technology (ECT) products in the Canadian economy, expressed in monetary values.

Description: This is non-Statistics Canada information.

Description: These data sets are developed for the purpose of longitudinal analysis of the Census of Agriculture for both Soil Landscapes of Canada and Drainage Area (Watershed) spatial frameworks.

Description: In early 1998, 3 successive storm fronts dropped as much as 110 millimeters of freezing rain through parts of Eastern Canada. This ice storm had a notable impact on the hundreds of thousands of people who suffered electricity outages which, in some cases, lasted longer than one month. But other effects were also felt and continue to be: human lives were lost, livestock perished, ecosystems were damaged, economies were disrupted, emergency response systems were strained beyond capacity. In short, Ice Storm 98 was an event that will not soon be forgotten.

This Statistics Canada publication gathers a series of six annotated maps and tables illustrating some of the impact the meteorological event had as it stormed through the St. Lawrence River Valley: population, employment, retail sales, vegetation cover, dairy cows and sugar maple taps are illustrated and briefly discussed.

Description:

The federal government's Canadian Environmental Industry Strategy consists of a number of initiatives to achieve a cleaner environment and a stronger environmental industry. Statistics Canada received funding from Industry Canada, under Initiative 8 of the strategy, to develop a national statistical database on the environment industry. Statistics Canada began a program consisting of new surveys, modifications to existing surveys and integration of statistics from various components of its economic statistics framework.

The environment "industry" does not exist as an explicit element in any existing classification. This is not surprising, because the environment industry consists of business involved in activities that span a number of different industries in the Standard Industrial Classification. Attempts had been made to identify environmental goods and services in existing classifications, but without appreciable success. It was necessary to develop new ways and new tools to obtain the information. These methods are outlined.

A major objective of the approach adopted by Statistics Canada is to provide sufficient detail to permit comparability of the results with other countries and to satisfy a variety of data needs.

Description: This infographic presents the movement of plastic materials in the Canadian economy in 2022, using data from the Physical Flow Account for Plastic Material. It describes the various stages of their life cycle, from production to recycling.

Description: Release published in The Daily – Statistics Canada’s official release bulletin

Description: This article presents data on the extent and condition of Canada’s ocean and coastal ecosystems, as well as the ecosystem services—also known as “nature’s contributions to people”—they provide. Building on earlier pilot accounts, this article offers new physical and monetary estimates of ocean ecosystem services. It also marks the release of experimental monetary valuations of selected ocean ecosystem services, such as commercially harvested wild fish and seafood, nature-based tourism, and blue carbon sequestration.

Description: The articles published in EnviroStats use statistics to illustrate topical environmental issues. The publication is intended for a general readership rather than an expert audience.

Description: This infographic explores ocean and coastal ecosystems from a natural capital accounting perspective. It presents the extent of ocean and coastal areas, examines ocean condition through warming trends, and highlights ecosystem services such as fish and seafood harvests and the experimental monetary values of three selected ocean and coastal ecosystem services: commercial fishing, carbon sequestration, and nature-based tourism.

Description: Release published in The Daily – Statistics Canada’s official release bulletin

Description: Despite Canada’s ambitious climate goals and the global transition toward more sustainable economic development models, empirical evidence on how the green transition affects Canada’s productivity growth is limited because of a lack of comprehensive data. This study fills this gap in two steps. First, it constructs a first-of-its-kind measure of green intensity at the detailed industry level by synthesizing multidimensional data, including information on green outputs and processes. Second, it investigates productivity dynamics by decomposing productivity growth using this newly developed green index.

Description: Statistics Canada regularly prepares presentations with statistical findings about the country’s economy, society and environment. These presentations may be intended for conferences, meetings with stakeholders, or other events held throughout the year to provide Statistics Canada with an opportunity to promote the role of official statistics and to better understand data users’ needs. This series provides online access to these presentations as well as new presentations created to help communicate research findings on a wide range of subjects to a broad audience.

Description: Environment fact sheets will include short, focused, single-theme analysis on key issues within the changing environment with regards to all Canadians. Over the course of the series, analysis will include topics on: air and climate, pollution and waste, environmental protection and quality, and natural resources.

Description: Release published in The Daily – Statistics Canada’s official release bulletin

Description:

Environment Accounts and Statistics Division is Statistics Canada's focal point for the collection, analysis and dissemination of environmental information. This reference guide briefly describes the division's programs, as well as all publications and electronic products offered on a quarterly, annual, biennial and occasional basis.

Description: Quantifying how Canada's water yield has changed over time is an important component of the water accounts maintained by Statistics Canada. This study evaluates the movement in the series of annual water yield estimates for Southern Canada from 1971 to 2004. We estimated the movement in the series using a trend-cycle approach and found that water yield for southern Canada has generally decreased over the period of observation.

Description:

In 2008, Statistics Canada conducted the first Agricultural Water Use Survey. This pilot survey is part of the Canadian Environment Sustainability Indicators initiative and collects information on volumes of water used for irrigation, irrigated areas, irrigation practices and the quality of water used for agricultural purposes. This technical paper describes the methodology used for the pilot survey and includes recommendations for future cycles of the survey. The validation process seems to indicate that the method used to estimate the volumes of water used and the irrigated areas calculated underestimates the results. The report gives recommendations to minimize this bias in the next iterations of the survey. First, it is recommended to simplify the level of information collected by the survey; to review the sampling methodology; and to examine other means of collecting information on volumes of water used for irrigation. This pilot version of the survey remains a reliable source for consistent data on agricultural water use.

Description: In this paper, we present the methodology developed by Statistics Canada to calculate the average annual water yield for Canada. Water yield, for the purposes of this paper, is defined as the amount of freshwater derived from unregulated flow (m³ s^-1) measurements for a given geographic area over a defined period of time. The methodology is applied to the 1971 to 2000 time period.

This research was conducted to fill data gaps in Statistics Canada's water statistics program. These gaps exist because estimates of freshwater flow for Canada have not been calculated regularly and have been produced using a variety of methods that do not necessarily generate comparable results. The methodology developed in this study produced results that are coherent through space and time. These results will be used in the future to investigate changes in water yield on a more disaggregated basis.

To achieve the water yield estimate a database of natural streamflow observations from 1971 to 2000 was compiled. The streamflow values were then converted to a runoff depth and interpolated using ordinary kriging to produce spatial estimates of runoff. The spatial estimates were then scaled to create a National estimate of water yield as a thirty-year average. The methodology and results were then validated using a stability analysis and several techniques involving uncertainty. The result of the methodology indicates that the thirty-year average water yield for Canada is 3435 km³.

Description:

Statistics Canada administers a number of environmental surveys that fill important data gaps but also pose numerous challenges to administer. This paper focuses on two on-going environment surveys - one newly initiated and one in the process of a redesign.

Description:

The objective of the present study is to understand and explain how the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment (CCME) Water Quality Index (WQI) behaves, and at the same time determine its limitations to make a better use of it in the future. In order to do so, four data sets were made available to us thanks to participation of the following provinces: Newfoundland, Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec.

Description:

Part of Statistics Canada's Econnections: linking the environment and the economy statistical series, this publication describes in detail the conceptual frameworks, data sources and empirical methods used to compile the Canadian System of Environmental and Resource Accounts (CSERA). Designed to be compatible with the accounting frameworks of the System of National Accounts, the CSERA allows users to easily analyze the linkages between economic activity and the environment in terms of material and energy flows, environmental expenditures and natural resource stocks. This publication will be of interest to researchers in both the economic and environmental fields who want to familiarize themselves with the accounting concepts of the CSERA. It is a companion volume to Environment-economy indicators and detailed statistics (catalogue no. 16-200-XKE), another product in the Econnections series.

Statistics Canada has updated its 1997 documentation on environmental accounts, Econnections: Concepts, Sources and Methods of the Canadian System of Environmental and Resource Accounts, with publication of the Methodological Guide: Canadian System of Environmental-Economic Accounting.

Description:

This activity focuses on how water is used for irrigation, the benefits and risks associated with irrigation and the ways farmers manage their water use.

Description: The purpose of the survey is to produce estimates of the production of environmental goods and services by industry. This survey collects data on sales of environmental and clean technology goods and services.

Description: The survey provides information on waste management financial and employment characteristics. It also collects information on collection, disposal and recycling quantities reported by municipalities and other public bodies that provide waste management services.