From Global Pledges to Local Action: Canada’s Environmental Path

Turning Global Declarations into Domestic Action

Each year, global climate and environmental summits produce ambitious statements and renewed commitments to address pressing environmental challenges. Despite this ongoing international engagement, progress on the ground remains slow. Emissions reductions are consistently falling short of agreed targets, critical infrastructure gaps persist, and the issue of affordability is increasingly central to domestic political debates.

This persistent gap is not due to a lack of ambition, but rather a deficiency in practical mechanisms. Over the past fifty years, the most meaningful improvements in air quality, water security, and industrial performance have resulted not from international communiqués, but from robust domestic legislation. Such laws are enforceable, attract investment, and are designed to fit market realities.

Domestic Law: Delivering What Declarations Cannot

Significant environmental advances over recent decades have been driven by national and sub-national actions. Examples include clean air legislation, water protection laws, market-based pollution controls, and energy standards that have reshaped entire sectors. These policies have proven effective because they combine clear rules with accountability, and are implemented on timelines that matter to investors, utilities, and operators.

Institutions such as courts, regulators, permitting authorities, procurement rules, and tax frameworks are the true catalysts for change, influencing investment decisions and operational behaviour far more than summit declarations. While international forums play a valuable role in setting norms and facilitating coordination, they lack enforcement mechanisms and rely on voluntary compliance. In contrast, domestic legislation creates binding obligations and, in doing so, establishes new markets.

For Canada, this distinction is crucial as environmental goals increasingly intersect with issues of competitiveness, affordability, and trade.

Reframing Environmental Policy: From Cost to Demand Signal

Environmental policy is often portrayed as a cost or constraint. In reality, well-crafted domestic policy serves a different purpose: it acts as a demand signal. It guides markets towards the problems that need solving, identifies the capabilities that will be scaled, and signals which investments will yield returns. These policies shape innovation pathways and determine whether Canadian firms become solution providers or are merely forced to adapt to regulations established elsewhere.

Canada does not need to surpass every peer economy in environmental ambition; instead, it should focus on effective execution in areas where the country already has technical, regulatory, or operational strengths, where global demand is growing regardless of COP outcomes, where domestic rules can stimulate near-term commercial activity, and where domestic standards could drive market access requirements. Notably, there are opportunities for action in the 2026–2027 timeframe to develop and operate affordable and sustainable solutions supporting water and energy security. Two key areas, both of which already have existing examples to build upon, are outlined below.

Opportunities for Canada: Water and Energy Systems

1. Water Security, Treatment, and Reuse: A Quiet Global Growth Market

Water scarcity is no longer a distant concern; it is already influencing industrial site selection, infrastructure investment, and geopolitical stability. Yet, water remains underrepresented in global climate negotiations. Canada is well-positioned to lead in this area—not because of water abundance, but due to its engineering expertise, regulatory credibility, and experience in delivering complex public infrastructure. Canadian companies are active globally in municipal treatment, industrial water reuse, and systems serving remote and Indigenous communities.

The opportunity for Canada goes beyond basic freshwater management to encompass systems-level water engineering, including advanced treatment and reuse, integration of seawater desalination, and energy–water co-design models that reduce operating costs. Recent projects highlight how integrating energy and water systems can significantly cut emissions and costs:

Northern Waters (Fort McMurray): A pilot project testing scalable, nature-based water treatment technologies for remote and Indigenous communities. Canada Water Agency Stream 2
Deep Lake Water Cooling (Toronto): This district cooling system uses cold water from Lake Ontario, reducing electricity demand for cooling by up to 75% and avoiding approximately 40,000 tonnes of CO₂ emissions annually. Deep Water Enwave
Ras Al-Khair Power & Desalination Plant (Saudi Arabia): A large-scale hybrid facility that combines power generation and desalination to meet both electricity and freshwater needs simultaneously. Ras Al Khair

Affordable and reliable water systems not only lower costs but also boost productivity and attract investment. Markets with secure water access consistently outperform those without.

2. Innovative Clean Energy Systems: Execution Over Ideology

The energy transition is likely more feasible than generally perceived, with the main challenge shifting from increasing power generation to integrating new energy sources into the grid without compromising reliability or affordability. This challenge falls primarily within the jurisdiction of national and sub-national governments.

Globally, about 41% of electricity generation now comes from clean energy sources: hydro (14%), wind and solar (15%), nuclear (9%), with the remainder from technologies such as geothermal and biomass. As clean energy’s share continues to grow, the key issue moves from expanding generation capacity to system integration—ensuring stable, affordable, and reliable energy delivery as the mix of variable and low-carbon resources increases. This integration is vital for building resilient energy systems at scale.

Large-scale hydro faces environmental, regulatory, and water-availability constraints, with investors now asking if the water source will last for the term of the investment / loan.
Wind and solar are cost-effective and quick to deploy, but storage and grid stability are ongoing challenges.
Nuclear energy, while valuable, is hindered by long approval times and high capital requirements. Aside from refurbishments, this will limit its impact over the next 15 – 20 years.

New nuclear facilities typically take 15–20 years from approval to operation. Therefore, attention for near-term emissions reductions should focus on solutions deployable within 12–24 months, particularly hybrid systems, energy storage, and transition pathways for existing assets. This suggests a more measured approach to nuclear expansion than recent media coverage might imply. Canada’s advantage lies more in regulatory credibility, refurbishment expertise, and long-term operational services (including supporting Small Modular Reactor (SMR) deployment by international vendors) than in outright reactor ownership.

2.a) Transitioning While Preserving Value: Hybrid Coal Facilities

A significant opportunity exists in managing coal-fired power plants that still have substantial technical life remaining. Instead of decommissioning these assets, operators are increasingly adopting hybrid energy configurations that introduce cleaner sources alongside coal—such as LNG, waste-to-energy, biomass, battery storage, and renewables. This strategy allows operators to:

Lower emissions intensity without sacrificing reliability
Maximize return on existing capital investments
Preserve valuable grid interconnections
Enable a gradual, financially viable transition off coal

Importantly, these facilities are not being retired—they are transitioning. Two recent examples from Indonesia illustrate the potential:

Paiton Power Plant (East Java, Indonesia): Converted Units 1 and 2 to integrate biomass co-firing technology, making it the largest biomass co-firing facility in Southeast Asia. This has reduced carbon emissions while maintaining baseload reliability. [aseanenergy.org]
Hotelkamp Power Plant (Papua, Indonesia): This conventional coal-fired plant has achieved the highest biomass co-firing mix in the ASEAN region, showing how remote coal plants can incorporate renewable fuels to cut emissions. [aseanenergy.org]

Within Canada, a variety of other hybrid generation and management solutions are also underway:

Alberta Industrial Reuse Initiatives: Projects such as rainwater harvesting, industrial heat recovery, and water reuse for agriculture and industry demonstrate integration of reuse within resource sectors. ReuseWater.ca
City of Toronto Waste to Energy Program: In collaboration with Enbridge Gas and private partners, the city converts organic waste to renewable natural gas (RNG), generating 4.6 million cubic metres of RNG annually from approximately 130,000 tonnes of organic waste for use in city operations. Toronto WTE
Gwa’yasdams Hybrid Smart-Grid (BC): A hybrid solar PV, battery, and diesel project in a remote First Nations community, designed to reduce diesel reliance and enhance energy resilience with 72 hours of storage capacity. Natural Resources Canada

These hybrid models offer a practical pathway for both emerging and developed markets, reducing dependence on fossil fuels while minimizing the risk of creating stranded assets during the transition.

2.b) Repurposing Existing Assets: Energy Storage

Beyond hybrid generation, energy storage is crucial for stabilizing power grids and integrating more renewable energy sources. Notable examples include:

Tent Mountain Pumped Hydro Energy Storage (Alberta): A former coal mine repurposed as a pumped hydro storage facility, utilizing existing topography and infrastructure to provide long-duration energy storage. This project demonstrates how legacy extractive sites can be converted into clean energy assets, enhancing grid resilience. Tent Mountain
Kalayaan Pumped Storage Plan (Philippines): With a capacity of about 738 MW, this facility provides peak load support and frequency regulation, helping balance intermittent renewables in the Luzon grid. [renewablee…gyasia.org]
Ontario Pumped Storage Project (Meaford, Ontario): Currently under development, this will be Canada’s largest pumped hydro storage facility, with a proposed capacity of 1,000 MW and 11 GWh, developed in partnership with the Saugeen Ojibway Nation. [energy-storage.news]

Canada’s experience in grid operations, permitting, and developing complex infrastructure across diverse regions positions it well to export these models internationally.

Execution as a Competitive Advantage

While Canada possesses valuable intellectual property, technological ownership is not essential for participation with locally based partners in global markets. Canada can remain competitive by providing regulatory and licensing expertise, engineering and refurbishment capabilities, long-term operations and maintenance, and a trusted supply chain for complex systems.

These strengths apply to hybrid coal transitions, geothermal energy, waste-to-energy, battery storage, pumped hydro, and nuclear services. In a future article, we will explore the challenge of adding intermittent power to grids meant for stable baseloads, and the benefits of updating existing energy and water facilities compared to new developments.

From Declarations to Delivery

Global environmental agreements will continue to play a role, but lasting progress will come from countries that convert ambition into domestic policies that reward effective execution. For Canada, the 2026–2027 period presents an opportunity to move beyond symbolic commitments and towards policies and actions that deliver measurable environmental results, maintain affordability and reliability, and enable Canadian firms to succeed globally.

Real environmental progress begins not at the conference table, but at home—with legislation that transforms intent into investment, and execution into a competitive advantage.