Thank you, Madam Chair. In terms of climate change, the departments, of course, have been dealing with a changing climate for the last 20 years or so. We have modified, adapted our activities in quite a number of different areas, both on the maintenance side of things where we are using more sand, salt to deal with more freezing, thawing conditions. We have adjusted our maintenance efforts, the work schedule of our equipment operators to cut and have more hours covered in a week. So quite a few changes on that side as the challenges have arisen and we have seen the need and we have brought those needs forward to the government. We have been able to adapt to the climate on an O and M perspective.
On the infrastructure side of things, there has been a lot of research around permafrost, and changes in permafrost and best practices in permafrost. DOT has participated in those and we do take all that work and use it to help us manage our infrastructure, and as we are doing design, work related to upgrading an infrastructure, then we may consider those protocols and the issues that are brought forward there.
In terms of specific work underway right now, we recently completed a vulnerability assessment on Highway No. 3 that follow the protocol of the Engineering Association of Canada, and to do that work we, of course, are doing lots of work around Inuvik-Tuk road, and considering climate change and collecting baseline information around that at the present time to ensure that those impacts are fully considered as we design that road and move forward with construction. We did have consultants hired right now to prepare a Climate Change Adaptation Plan for the department. The one area that we do need to do a little bit more risk assessment on is in the marine infrastructure, so that is a specific part of that and then we will be doing some more consultations within the department and with some of our other stakeholders and work on preparing the full departmental Climate Change Adaptation Plan. That will bring together all of the previous research and efforts that the department has done directly
itself, and then it has been involved with at the national level a number of other work.
The one additional area that we do hope to get to in the next year or two is we still implement the BCP R and D funding to develop work on a runway vulnerability protocol as well. Thank you, Madam Chair.