Key federal departments are scrambling to catch up with climate risk assessments and response plans after the Auditor General of Canada uncovered a dearth of understanding and preparation within government operations and a portfolio of physical assets valued at $113 billion. The audit subjects — Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC), National Defence and Fisheries and Oceans Canada — have unanimously agreed with the recommendations in a newly released audit report, which reveals extensive gaps in risk monitoring and a slow rollout of adaptive actions.

“The lack of progress in this area undermines the protection of federal assets, such as bridges, roads, buildings, harbours and other assets and services under federal control, jeopardizing the nation’s ability to safeguard essential services in the face of accelerating climate change,” the report states. “Immediate and ongoing action is imperative to increase the resilience of federal assets and services.”

The investigative team, under the direction of principal auditor, Marie-Pierre Grondin, examined roughly five years’ worth of documentation tied to the federal government’s climate resiliency specifications and targets, covering the period from Nov. 1, 2020 to Dec. 1, 2025. Treasury Board Secretariat was scrutinized in its role as lead agency for the government’s green operations strategy, while the other three departments’ holdings collectively represent about two-thirds of the value of federal physical assets.

PSPC oversees the largest share of the federal real property portfolio, including office space, highways, bridges and heritage sites; National Defence counts a vast range of military equipment along with buildings and infrastructure on its bases; and the Fisheries and Oceans portfolio encompasses research stations, wharves and lighthouses. As well, the three departments each provide services that could be called upon in a climate-triggered event, including property management/maintenance, emergency response for domestic security and scientific research.

A requirement to assess and respond to climate-related risks was established in the government’s operations strategy in 2020. Departments were initially instructed to determine potential risks by 2021 and begin taking actions to reduce them by 2022.

A 2024 update imposed new deadlines to mitigate “significant” risks to assets deemed to be critical to human health, safety, security or economic well-being by 2035, and improve climate risk resilience for other high-value assets by 2040. The auditors characterize this is as a “concerning” shift from short-term to longer term expectations, which could stretch the schedule out by 18 years in some cases.

“It did not convey a sense of urgency in line with Canada’s commitment under the Paris Agreement to undertake ambitious efforts to adapt to climate change and reduce vulnerability to climate change,” they maintain.

Departmental delivery on expectations

In any case, Treasury Board Secretariat has not been a hands-on taskmaster in driving envisioned outcomes thus far. The auditors highlight slack guidance and monitoring, demonstrated in a lack of interim targets, incomplete data collection, weak quality assurance processes and absence of public disclosure. Departments have been given few resources for executing their obligations, and there has been little effort to map out the “value of money” in terms of the paybacks on resilience measures versus the costs of climate change.

“We found that the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat had not developed a comprehensive measuring and monitoring framework to track progress toward the climate-resilience objective and commitments of the greening government strategy,” the auditors affirm. “We found that the reporting template for climate resilience results was not designed to track progress effectively.”

Theoretically, every federal department and agency must implement the government’s sustainability and resilience directives (outlined in the greening government strategy) within their operations. That requires them to designate senior officials who are responsible for ensuring that real property, projects, procurement and materials align with those objectives.

From there, Treasury Board Secretariat has established four performance criteria related to climate resilience. In the near-term, all department and agencies are expected to:

• complete three separate assessments of how chronic and severe climate-related impacts could affect their critical assets, real property portfolios and service provision functions; and
• develop resilience plans for critical assets, with priority given to those that have been deemed vulnerable to significant risks.

However, follow up monitoring has been more narrowly scoped. In 2024-25, Treasury Board Secretariat searched out progress reports from just 27 of 100 departments/agencies, focusing on those that have real property portfolios. As well, three other departments voluntarily reported.

Those results show that 16 of 27 reporting entities had completed climate risk assessments of their property portfolios as of 2025, but just nine had completed a resiliency plan. Details about critical assets were sketchier, as six of 30 reporting agencies did not provide any information. The remaining 24 identified 1,623 critical assets among them, of which 275 were considered at significant risk.

“Only two departments had developed climate plans to reduce climate risks, covering 3 per cent of the critical assets known to be at significant risk,” the auditors note.

Meanwhile, the auditors are critical of both the extensive omissions from the survey base and the basic “yes-no” format of the reporting template, which does not allow for contextual explanations or tracking of incremental progress. They also uncovered “inaccuracies and deficiencies” in submitted data that leads to the conclusion quality assurance is “not robust”.

All three of the audited departments have completed resilience plans for their real property portfolios. The auditors pulled a representative sample of 43 assets within their holdings to gauge progress on adaptive actions and found most were still at the planning stages within the National Defence and Fisheries and Oceans holdings, while PSPC had implemented some measures. As well, they note that some improvements have occurred through other types of projects “driven by retrofits to address infrastructure repair needs” that aren’t directly linked to climate resilience plans or captured in the reporting.

Responses to recommendations

In response to the auditors’ recommendations, PSPC has pledged to complete climate risk assessments of its real property portfolio by the fall of 2027 and establish a portfolio-level monitoring framework by the spring of 2028. It has also committed to conduct facility-level and site-specific climate risk and vulnerability assessments (CRiVAs) for the Crown-owned assets it oversees by the spring of 2029, and to develop asset-level implementation and monitoring plans for improving resilience of critical assets by the 2035 deadline.

National Defence and Fisheries and Oceans have both agreed to update climate risk assessments of their real property portfolios and broader departmental operations by the spring of 2028. National Defence also plans to conduct site-specific assessments of critical and high-value assets and develop an implementation plan for required resilience upgrades by that date.

Fisheries and Oceans does not commit to a precise date for completing the latter activities, but confirms it will meet the 2035 and 2040 deadlines specified in the federal green operations strategy. The auditors call out the department for initially omitting small craft harbours from its list of critical assets to be assessed, and Canada’s Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, Jerry DeMarco, pointed to the issue when the audit report was released.

“Some small craft harbours, which directly support more than 45,000 jobs, are vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and require immediate repairs and reinforcement,” he said. “Accelerating efforts to protect federal assets and services will sustain communities and save taxpayers’ money over time.”

For its part, Treasury Board Secretariat has outlined several measures it plans to implement, including:

• updating guidance and creating additional issue-specific guidance by March 31, 2027;
• establishing the means for departments to report climate resilience results via RETscreen, to improve data consistency and enable automated year-over-year comparisons, by June 30, 2027; and
• publishing a summary of annual data on climate resilience progress on the Treasury Board Secretariat website by March 31, 2027.

The auditors also noted the absence of funding for either Treasury Board Secretariat or departments/agencies to deliver on the expectations in the federal green operations strategy.

“Since its inception in 2017, no funding was provided through the strategy to the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat and other departments and agencies to support the achievement of the climate-resilience commitments. In contrast, the strategy had a dedicated fund since 2019 to support projects aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions from federal operations,” they state. “The three selected departments told us that having no dedicated funding for enhancing climate resilience created barriers in implementing actions to enhance climate resilience, such as infrastructure upgrades involving significant investments.”