By: James Wilt (Policy Development Manager for Climate Action Team Manitoba)
Manitoba’s politicians often downplay the province’s greenhouse gas emissions, even arguing that the province should be rewarded for its almost zero-emissions electricity grid. However, this disguises the reality that Manitoba still pollutes the atmosphere with a sizable amount of emissions.
In 2023, emissions in Manitoba were over 21 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e), which also includes methane, nitrous oxide, and F-gases. Yes, that’s “only” 3 per cent of Canada’s total emissions, and may seem marginal compared to Alberta’s, which are ten times as much. But when you break it down per person, Manitoba’s emissions remain high in the global context: we are polluting at a rate of two-and-half times the global per-capita average, despite our extremely low-emissions electricity sector.
As we discussed in a recent blog post, it’s essential that Manitoba cuts its emissions as quickly as possible in line with national and international climate commitments. Yet due to the incredible range of fossil fuels and land-use changes in society—along with the huge variety of emissions reporting methods and outputs—it can be difficult to know where to even start.
This article provides a ranked list of the top 5 largest-emitting sectors in Manitoba. At a general level, the three highest-emitting sectors in 2023 were agriculture (7.1 MtCO2e, or 33 per cent), transport (6.6 MtCO2e, or 31 per cent) and buildings (2.8 MtCO2e, or 13 per cent). What’s driving the emissions in these sectors? Here are the top 5 emitters that collectively make up almost 60 per cent of Manitoba’s emissions—and they might surprise you.
1. Animal production: 3.3 MtCO2e
This large but often-ignored emissions source includes all livestock farming. Unlike most other sources, a vast majority of livestock emissions are methane, which is 28 times more powerful than CO2 over the course of a century. Most of this methane comes from burping by ruminants like cows and sheep. Another chunk of methane, along with some nitrous oxide, emits from animal manure, including from the province’s huge hog industry. Combined, the livestock sector accounts for more than half of all recorded methane in Manitoba. It’s also worth noting that a lot of crop production—like wheat, soybeans, and corn—ends up consumed by livestock as well, meaning that some of that subsector’s emissions are also tied to livestock production.
2. Passenger SUVs, trucks and cars: 3.2 MtCO2e
This emissions source is probably a more obvious one: all of the CO2 from the tailpipes of passenger vehicles, and increasingly from heavier and less-fuel efficient SUVs and trucks. Winnipeg has one of the highest percentages of people commuting by automobile of any major city in the country, with 84.1 per cent of people driving to work. Private vehicles are relied on even more in Manitoba’s smaller cities, rural areas, and Northern region where public transportation is limited or non-existent. While purchases of zero-emissions vehicles (which include both battery electric and plug-in hybrid) are slowly rising in Manitoba, with about 3,200 bought in the last year, they remain dwarfed by the almost 45,000 vehicles fueled by gasoline that were bought in the same span.
3. Crop production: 2.5 MtCO2e
The third largest source of emissions in Manitoba is from the production of a wide variety of crops including canola, wheat, soybeans, potatoes, and corn. In this case, the major greenhouse gas emission of concern is nitrous oxide, which is 265 times more powerful than CO2 over the course of a century. Nitrous oxide is produced through the complex activities of microbes in agricultural soils, especially due to the large-scale application of synthetic fertilizers; other sources include spreading manure on fields as fertilizer, decomposition of unused crops, and tillage. Emissions from crop production are some of the more difficult to reduce: unlike electrifying transportation or producing less livestock, this complex problem requires a broad reconfiguration of how soil is fertilized, managed, and used.
4. Freight trucks and rail: 1.8 MtCO2e
Enormous quantities of goods are transported across Manitoba and Canada every day: agricultural and food products, machinery and automobiles, manufactured goods, chemicals and plastics. While rail accounts for some of this freight transportation, a majority of shipments are made by heavy-duty vehicles, including from the Winnipeg-based national trucking giant Bison Transport. Shipping freight in trucks uses a lot of diesel, emitting about two-thirds of freight-related CO2 in the province; rail emits another one-quarter. Electrification of this sector remains slow, still representing a fraction of fleets. Unlike Quebec, which recently introduced legislation to accelerate freight electrification, Manitoba does not have a dedicated sales mandate or incentive program for this sector.
5. Commercial and government buildings: 1.7 MtCO2e
Residential buildings, responsible for 1.1 MtCO2e in 2023, have been the traditional focus of efforts to curb emissions from burning fossil gas for space heating, especially through the installation of ground-source heat pumps. But the emissions “leader” in this sector is in fact the much larger commercial and government buildings—including offices, retailers, schools, and hospitals—that require a great deal of fuel to keep warm, especially older buildings without energy-efficiency measures. About 13 per cent of global heating effects from this sector come from notorious hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) that are thousands of times more powerful than CO2, especially from large refrigeration systems in food retail.
Honourable mentions:
- On-farm fuel use: 1.3 MtCO2e
- Landfills and municipal solid waste: 1.3 MtCO2e
- Other transport (e.g. ATVs, snowmobiles, boats, generators, lawnmowers): 1.1 MtCO2e
- Upstream oil and gas: 0.9 MtCO2e
- Fertilizer production: 0.8 MtCO2e
This list of Manitoba’s largest emitters—involving many different sectors and even types of emissions—may feel overwhelming to read. But the first step in the fight for rapid emissions reductions and climate justice is to establish a clear foundation of facts that we can build our collective work upon. And many of the solutions to these interlinked problems have already been researched and identified through our multi-part “Road to Resilience” series, including dedicated reports about agriculture, transportation, and buildings. As we’ve said previously: “Solutions to feed, shelter, and transport ourselves without fossil fuels exist…but Manitobans need government support to implement these solutions.”