iStock.com/shaunlThe Office of the Auditor General is determining whether three major departments are taking steps to protect their billions in federal buildings, vehicles and infrastructure from the ever-worsening impacts of climate change. The Department of National Defence owns a lot of federal assets. The military is particularly vulnerable to one impact of climate change: thawing permafrost, which can seriously degrade Canada’s military investments, said Henstra. “Another of the high-confidence projections on climate change is sea level rise … and that means problems for coastal assets,” Henstra said. One is adapting to deal with the impacts of climate change and the other is slowing or stalling climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, for example, by retrofitting old buildings to be more energy efficient or building new low-emissions buildings and avoiding fossil fuel heating systems.