Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault answers your questions on climate change in Labrador

Climate change is shifting the landscape of coastal Labrador, as the early departure of sea ice affects everything from local teachings to food security and mental health.

CBC Newfoundland and Labrador has highlighted the region's changing climate through Thin Ice, a series detailing the shift on Labrador's north coast and the Indigenous-led responses to it.

The series prompted questions from our audience about what is being done at the government level to address climate change, so the CBC's Peter Cowan brought them to federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault.

The discussion has been edited for length and clarity. If you'd like to watch the full conversation, you can do so in the video player above.

Charlotte Wolfrey, Rigolet: The ice and the snow are really important to the Inuit. We have a lot of cultural teachings and information that we've gathered over the years that was passed on to us from generation to generation. What are your plans to slow down climate change to ensure that future generations of Inuit can maintain our culture and our way of life?

Steven Guilbeault: To fight climate change we have to fight our dependencies to fossil fuels. In every sector of our society, we have to find new ways of doing what we're doing. Transportation,for example. We are in the process of ensuring that every new car that is sold by 2035 in Canada will be a 100 per cent non-emitting vehicle — so either a hydrogen vehicle or electric vehicles. It's not going to happen overnight. Our goal is to have 20 per cent of new sales by 2026, and in provinces like Quebec and B.C., we're already at 13, 14 per cent.

We're working with companies in different sectors: steel, cement, aluminum, oil and gas, to find ways to really reduce the amount of carbon pollution that goes into the atmosphere that creates global warming and the climate change that we're seeing in Canada and around the world. We're investing a lot of money — in fact, record-level investment in greening the economy. More than $110-billion that our government has been investing over the last six years, and we'll continue to do so. So it's a combination.

There's a number of things that we have to do, but we also have to recognize that we've already entered the era of climate change. The faster we can reduce our pollution levels, the less we'll have to see the impacts of climate change.

Novalee Webb, Nain: It's easy to pay lip service to stopping climate change, but we need action now. What are the specific plans, including actions and timetables, for helping to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by a substantial amount, and how will you fund and implement them?

When we came in power in 2015, Canada's targets for 2030 were to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 30 per cent. Unfortunately, the previous government had made no plans whatsoever to achieve those targets. So what we realized when we came in … is that far from going down, emissions and pollution levels were going up in Canada. And by 2030 instead of being 30 per cent below, we would have been 12 to 14 per cent above.

We've flattened that curve, and in the last couple of years … the emissions, the pollution levels has started coming down. We now have a more ambitious target for 2030, which is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40 to 45 per cent. The curve has started shifting downwards, but we need to accelerate this trend downwards in the coming years.

How do we know that we're getting there? Well, every year the government of Canada has to publish what's called a national inventory. All of the figures we have on the amount of pollution we've created, the different measures we've put in place to reduce that amount of pollution, and this is something we have to submit that to the United Nations … to keep our feet to the fire.

Peter Cowan, St. John's: What about Bay du Nord? It seems contradictory to say we're cutting emissions and then approve a big oil and gas project that will produce a lot more oil that will be burned and put into the atmosphere.

It could seem counterintuitive. When you look at the studies from organizations like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or the International Energy Agency, both of these organizations say that we have to reduce the amount of pollution, the amount of fossil fuels that we use. But both organizations also recognize that in 2050 we will still be using fossil fuels.