The world is currently facing down what scientists are calling the Sixth Extinction Event — a dramatic decline of the world’s living species, driven in part by habitat loss.

To help combat this, in 2010, 195 countries (including Canada) signed on to an international conservation treaty designed to slow the pace of biodiversity loss by protecting more of the world’s ecosystems.

Last week’s announcement of a new 14,000 square-kilometre Indigenous Protected Area in the Northwest Territories is just the beginning of Canada’s efforts to meet the Convention of Biological Diversity’s 20 Aichi Biodiversity targets.  

As a signatory of the Aichi Biodiversity targets, Canada has developed its own in-house conservation plan that folds Aichi’s targets into 19 specific goals.

One of Canada’s goals — called Target 1 — calls for 17 per cent of terrestrial areas and inland water and 10 per cent of coastal and marine areas to be conserved by 2020.

So, with the latest announcement in mind, how is Canada’s progress coming along?

All eyes on Target 1

Canada contains more than 9.9 million square kilometres. Seventeen per cent of that amounts to roughly 1.7 million square kilometres.

At this point, Canada has protected around 10.5 per cent of terrestrial areas, and 7.75 per cent of marine areas, making it one of the targets with the most progress — but Canada still lags behind other nations.

Tanzania, for example, has set aside more than 33 per cent of land for protected areas.

Canada needs to make a big push — roughly the size of Alberta by land area, over 650,000 square kilometres — in the next year and a half to make it to the finish line.

Canada’s next update on the progress of meeting these biodiversity conservation targets is due in December, but meaningfully and systematically protecting land is harder to do than one might think.

“Most of our population is along the southern border, and that’s also where we have the highest density of species-at-risk,” Laura Coristine, a researcher at the University of British Columbia-Okanagan Biodiversity Research Centre who has studied Canada’s progress on Target 1, told The Narwhal.

“The biggest challenges relate to where people are on the land versus where biodiversity needs protection.”

The collision of population density with biodiversity needs makes conservation efforts that set aside land as “off-limits” more difficult to implement.

Overlapping ranges of Canada’s species at risk. The red area, showing high numbers of species at risk, also overlaps with Canada’s most densely populated areas. Map: Coristine et al. 

Researchers also recognize that protecting species-at-risk is just one facet of what federal, provincial and Indigenous governments should be aiming to achieve with setting land aside.

Beyond the needs of at-risk wildlife, key conservation areas can also help beef up ecosystem diversity, create connectivity by protecting the corridors migratory species use, conserve remaining wilderness and preserve climate refugia — safe havens for species that cannot adapt at the pace climate change is altering their habitat.

“What we really need across Canada is a combination of approaches,” Aerin Jacob, a conservation scientist with the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, told The Narwhal, agreeing that protection for species-at-risk needs to occur in the southern part of the country. But protection for large, intact wilderness areas needs to occur in the north, she said.

“What works in southern Ontario is not going to be what works in Northwest Territories.”

In early 2018 Coristine and Jacob published research that established five key scientific principles for identifying Canada’s high-value conservation areas: considering species-at-risk, diverse ecoregions, preserving wilderness, connectivity and climate change resilience.

The research pinpointed Canada’s conservation ‘hotspots’ and cross-referenced those with other considerations like natural resource extraction, urbanization and existing wilderness areas.

Hotspots for Canadian protected areas identified in the research of Justine Coristine, Aerin Jacob and their colleagues. This map identifies hotspots in relation to Canada’s historic land uses of urbanization, resource extraction and wilderness areas. The researchers use warm colours to “represent areas with the potential to make a greater contribution to reversing biodiversity decline and preserving biodiversity for future generations.” Map: Coristine et al.

Canada should prioritize land conservation in high-priority regions and if low-priority regions are protected, Canada should provide scientific justification for doing so, Coristine and Jacob and their co-authors wrote.

Jacob told The Narwhal that some aspects of conservation are politicized rather than scientifically founded.

No scientific research suggests aiming for specifically 17 per cent — that number, Jacob explains, is a political one.

Numerous studies have shown that in order to conserve biodiversity for future generations, 25 to 75 per cent of global land area should be protected.

While 17 per cent of terrestrial areas locked away in protected areas is a “huge step forward,” Coristine said, from a scientific perspective it’s not going to be sufficient in the long run to reduce species extinction.

Conservation progress? Who’s counting?

Another complicating factor is that some of these targets can be difficult to measure.

And progress isn’t always progress.

Earlier this year, The Narwhal reported that Canada’s big leap forward on Marine Protected Areas, from less than one per cent in 2016 to 7.75 per cent by January 2018 was actually due to a change in accounting, not new area set aside.

Rather than establishing huge protected areas, the government was counting seasonal fisheries closures as protected spaces.

Creating sustained progress, in other words, can be more challenging than the plain numbers reveal.

Politics and public perception go a long way to directing conservation goals. In order to improve Canadians engagement with and stewardship of nature, one of Canada’s four goals, is to get more Canadians out into nature.

Kelly Torck, manager of Environment and Climate Change Canada’s national biodiversity policy, told The Narwhal efforts to get more Canadians out into parks has so far been successful.

“We’ve seen a positive trend in terms of number of Canadians spending more time in nature,” Torck said. “The Canada 150 free parks pass exposed a lot more people to that.”

But that effort was one-and-done.

In the years to come, more work is needed to create lasting changes.

What about that $1.3 billion for conservation?

One of the main sources of support for this will be The Nature Fund.

In the 2018 federal budget, the government earmarked an unprecedented $1.3 billion over the next five years for the protection and conservation of nature, with $500 million committed to saving species-at-risk and establishing protected areas, as well as creating opportunities for Indigenous-led conservation efforts.

Canada’s new Indigenous Protected Area heralds new era of conservation

The problem with targets

The Aichi targets resemble climate targets signed onto under the Paris Accord in that both are non-binding agreements meant to fend off global catastrophe and both contain signatory countries that are way, way off track.

Such problems have led people like Shannon Hagerman, a social scientist at the University of British Columbia, to question targets-based approaches for conservation in general.

In 2016 Hagerman co-authored a case study looking at Canada’s implementation of the Aichi Targets over the five years between 2011 and 2016 and found only 28 per cent of Canada’s responses to Aichi were implemented.

Most were merely aspirational.

For Hagerman, this only led to more questions about the fundamental challenge of using targets.

“Mid-term assessments and more recent assessment confirm that almost all elements of all the targets will not be met by the achievement date,” she says.

Canada is not alone. As of December 2016, 20 per cent of reporting signatory countries had made no progress at all.

Higher income countries, however, have set weaker goals than lower-income nations and, resultantly, have reported slightly more progress.

And yet, there is an allure to announcing targets — even if they remain unmet.

“Despite these difficulties, there is still this enduring appeal of targets for environmental governance — in terms of measuring progress, enhancing accountability and promoting awareness,” Hagerman told The Narwhal.

What leaders and planners need to be careful of is replacing meaningful conservation action on the ground with too heavy of a preoccupation of global measurements.

Protected areas, for example, don’t mean much if they don’t promote connectivity between them.

“The challenge is how to solve these shortcomings,” Hagerman says.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

In less than three years, Canada has to increase the amount of land and inland waters it protects by 60 per cent to meet a commitment under the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity.

The commitment requires signatories to legally designate 17 per cent as “protected areas.” Those can include national, provincial and territorial parks, as well as Indigenous protected areas, tribal parks and privately protected spaces. But to qualify, the areas must be closed to industrial activity.

It’s not going to be easy.

At last count, Canada protects a mere 10.6 per cent of its land and inland waters. That’s compared to Venezuela (53.9 per cent protected), Brazil (29.5 per cent protected) and Australia (17 per cent protected).

Canada is officially behind every other G7 country on this front.

“In the last decade — from 2006 to 2016 — we’ve only protected two per cent of our landbase,” said Alison Ronson, national director of the parks program for the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, in an interview with DeSmog Canada. “We just need our government to do more. Often, they make announcements that they’re going to protect an area, but then they don’t put that area into a legal designation.”

With such slow progress, time is running out to act.

Canada Has 3 Years to Increase Protected Areas by 60% And, Um, It’s Not Gonna Be Easy https://t.co/fYaKk1s34X @cpaws @ParksCanada #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/Qx88EUkiPF

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) August 25, 2017

Scientific Consensus Suggests Countries Must Protect More Than 50% of Land

Canada signed on to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity in 2010.

As with many environmental pledges made under former prime minister Stephen Harper, there were few steps actually taken to meet that target. But Ronson said that “not a lot has happened under the new government,” aside from announcing a new national park in Manitoba and opening the Mealy Mountains National Park Reserve in Newfoundland (which was announced in 2010 under the Conservatives).

However, she did note that the Liberals have kicked off a process to at least get the country to meet its commitments by 2020.

In March 2016, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and then-president Barack Obama made a joint announcement that included: “Canada and the U.S. re-affirm our national goals of protecting at least 17 per cent of land areas and 10 per cent of marine areas by 2020. We will take concrete steps to achieve and substantially surpass these national goals in the coming years.”

The latter sentence is key. Ronson emphasized that 17 per cent by 2020 is simply an “interim target,” and there’s a growing scientific consensus that countries need to be protecting at least half of their landscapes.

That’s right, half.

The vast 68,000 square kilometer wilderness of the Yukon’s Peel watershed is the northern anchor of the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative. Photo by Juri Peepre via Flickr

Some Protected Areas Allow Industrial Activities

Another major problem is the actual quality of the protection.

The federal Liberals have already demonstrated that they’re willing to make concessions to industry pressures with the potential allowance of oil and gas exploration in the Laurentian Channel, a proposed Marine Protected Area off the coast of Newfoundland. As previously reported by DeSmog Canada, such a capitulation has angered many in the scientific community, with oil and gas activities in the region undermining any other formal protections.

The same applies to protected land bases.

Ronson said that “across the country, we see protected area legislation that’s fairly weak and allows the ministers a lot of discretion to allow activities which should just be de facto absent from a protected area.”

ICYMI: Industry Sways Feds to Allow Offshore Drilling in Laurentian Channel Marine Protected Area

For instance, in Alberta, the responsible minister can allow rights-of-way and industrial activity within protected areas on a case-by-case basis.

This situation is complicated further by the role of privately protected spaces, such as those held by the Nature Conservancy of Canada, which buys up land and announces it as protected. Ronson noted that often private protection isn’t enough to extinguish some mineral rights, meaning it’s not fully protected from future industrial activities.

Such private lands often protect rare ecosystems like grasslands and Carolinian forests. But she emphasized that “the biggest opportunity in Canada for land protection is on public lands.”

Indigenous Circle of Experts Gathering Perspectives on Process

There’s also huge potential in the process for the expanded acknowledgment of Indigenous sovereignty and stewardship.

To reach “Canada Target 1” of 17 per cent protected areas by 2020, the federal government created three roundtables of sorts. They include the National Steering Committee (including directors of provincial and federal environment and parks departments), the National Advisory Panel (providing recommendations “reflecting a broad spectrum of perspectives”) and the Indigenous Circle of Experts.

Eli Enns, a Nuu-chah-nulth Canadian political scientist and co-chair of the Indigenous Circle of Experts, said in an interview with DeSmog Canada that they’re in the process of completing four regional gatherings to gather perspectives on how to meet Target 1 in the spirit and practice of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples.

He said the outcome will include a written report and a narrative in the Indigenous oral tradition that won’t be written down but instead be provided in spoken form to the ministers.

“In broad terms, the recommendation would be to honour the treaties,” he said. “The so-called historical treaties have not been honoured. But they do have a lot of potential to give us guidance and help us to achieve our biodiversity targets such as Target 1.

“As soon as you talk to the elders about Target 1, the kneejerk reaction is to say ‘you’re richer than you think.’ Because built into the treaties themselves are ideas, values and laws of respecting the land and respecting one another. These treaties, which are sometimes referred to as numbered treaties, are actually peace and friendship treaties.”

ICYMI: ‘It’s No Longer About Saying No’: How B.C.’s First Nations Are Taking Charge With Tribal Parks

There have already been a series of protected areas created in collaboration with Indigenous communities, including Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve in Haida Gwaii and the proposed Thaidene Nëné National Park Reserve in the Northwest Territories (national park reserves specifically allow Indigenous communities to continue traditional land use practices in the region).

Other Indigenous conserved areas, including Dasiquox Tribal Park in Tsilhqot’in territory and K’ih tsaa?dze in Doig River territory, could receive provincial or federal regognition.

CPAWS Outlined Nine Steps To Help Reach 2020 Target

In its most recent report on protected areas, titled “From Laggard to Leader?” CPAWS listed nine “overarching recommendations” for immediate progress.

They include the implementation of existing commitments to protect land and inland waters, planning beyond 2020 to ensure that at least half of Canada’s land base will be rapidly protected, banning the issuing of permits for industrial development in such areas and developing “landscape scale ecological connectivity strategies.”

It also zeroed in on 13 opportunities for “early action on-the-ground” including the Peel River Watershed in the Yukon, the South Okanagan-Similkameen National Park Reserve in B.C., the Bighorn Backcountry in Alberta, the Saskatchewan Grasslands and the Three Wild Watersheds in Western Quebec. They’re all places where governments have been working for a long time, often with Indigenous partners.

Source: CPAWS Parks Report 2017

Almost everything that needs to happen for the process is already known. The challenge now is simply implementing such knowledge.

Ronson said she suspects the lack of inaction on the subject has been entirely due to a lack of political will. But that may be slowly changing.

“We’re really encouraged that a lot of people are paying attention to parks this year,” she said. “Obviously, a lot of it has to do with the free access to national parks. But we’re hoping that people will realize that parks and protected areas are important not only for protecting species at risk and maintaining biodiversity in our country, but they’re also really important for us: they provide us with clean air and fresh water, and also when people connect with nature they see extremely important physical and mental wellness benefits.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.