Canada’s vast landscape, which boasts 20 per cent of the world’s fresh water, a quarter of global wetlands and 28 per cent of its boreal forests, is critical to its economy. Natural resource industries — forests, farms, fisheries, mining and oil and gas — together make up approximately seven per cent of Canada’s gross domestic product. 

Tension exists between expanding these industrialized sectors and protecting the ecosystems on which they depend. In Manitoba, some worry protecting the Seal River Watershed, which spans more than 50,000 square kilometres in the province’s north, will hinder opportunities in mineral resources and hydro; to the east, critical mineral mining ambitions in Ontario’s Ring of Fire clash with the protection of the Hudson and James Bay Lowlands, the second-largest carbon sink on earth; and in B.C., Coastal First Nations have protested that lifting the large tanker ban through their waters will endanger the protected Great Bear Rainforest.

These tensions make it easy to frame nature as the antithesis of economic activity, if it’s always put in opposition to projects that are described as growing Canada’s wealth, sovereignty and security. But a growing chorus of economic and policy leaders, alongside conservation groups, are making the case for nature to be seen as a critical financial asset — not a barrier, but another opportunity for economic growth. 

The federal government’s vision for conservation, laid out in its 2026 nature strategy, is of a nation that “protects, restores, and values nature as a foundation of our economy, sovereignty, and well-being.” 

One of the pillars to achieving that vision is “valuing nature and mobilizing capital,” according to the strategy. It estimated the value of “ecosystem services” — the direct and indirect contributions of nature to well-being and quality of life — to be $3.6 trillion, or “more than double our 2018 GDP.” In other words, the government is looking to spur more private sector investment in conservation by showing businesses how valuable nature is to their bottom lines.

The numbers show conservation is comparable with many of Canada’s major industries. While it may not produce the same scale of economic value as major resource extraction sectors like oil and gas — which does not approach the value of sectors like health care or education — it is a significant contributor to Canada’s economy. And the return on investment is high: a recent analysis by the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS) found every dollar spent on protected areas generated more than $3.50 in visitor spending, helping fuel local economies and generate government revenues. 

Like the oil and gas sector, Canada can choose to invest in the potential of conservation and champion it as a cornerstone of our country’s economic future. And as Canadians grapple with the increasingly severe impacts of the climate crisis, the role of intact ecosystems becomes even more valuable. 

These nine charts capture some of the value of Canada’s natural environments, and the economic potential of conservation.

Economic contributions from protected areas — by province

Gross domestic product (GDP) contributions of selected Canadian industries

How are the industries defined?+

Statistics Canada tracks economic activity indicators for a wide range of sectors using the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), which assigns a code to specific activities and sectors. Industries and government agencies tally these statistics in different ways to determine overall sector impacts. 

This analysis uses Statistics Canada’s data, and defines each industry as follows:

Agriculture: Crop and animal production (farming), related support activities and food manufacturing, including mills, bakeries, meat and dairy production.

Fisheries: Aquaculture, fishing, hunting and trapping and seafood product preparation.

Forestry: Forestry and logging, related support activities, wood and paper product manufacturing. 

Mining: Mineral mining (ore, non-metals, potash) and quarrying activities, including related support. Also includes mineral product manufacturing and metal manufacturing. 

Oil and gas: Oil and gas extraction and related support activities, petroleum and coal product manufacturing, natural gas distribution and pipelines.

Transportation: Air, rail, water, truck and transit and ground transportation (including public transit and taxis). 

Utilities: Electric power generation, transmission and distribution and water and sewage systems.

Jobs and compensation

More than 150,000 people work in protected and conserved areas — not far behind the oil and gas and forestry sectors. As the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society points out, many of these jobs are in Indigenous, rural and remote communities, where unemployment rates are high compared to urban areas. In parts of Canada where other economic opportunities are scarce, protected and conserved areas offer the opportunity to create long-term stable employment. 

Conservation provides value, but how are conservation workers valued? Compensation for the approximately 150,000 Canadians who work in protected areas is low, compared to other sectors; on average, an oil and gas worker makes nearly four times as much annually. 

Tax revenues and subsidies

Governments collected more than $1.4 billion in tax revenues from parks and protected areas in 2024, most of which stemmed from visitor spending, according to the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society’s analysis. That’s comparable to government tax revenues from the forestry industry, at $1.2 billion. Major resource industries like forestry and oil and gas also create government revenue through royalties and other fees. 

But for many of these industries, government revenues can be offset by tax breaks, grants and other subsidies.

Governments invested $2.3 billion in parks and protected spaces in 2024, generating $0.62 in revenue for every dollar invested. By comparison, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) estimates the federal government spent $3.17 billion USD (or $4.34 billion CAD) on fossil fuel subsidies — almost $1 billion USD more than the United States spent on subsidies, despite their industry’s far greater output. That number is likely an underestimate, as a lack of clear data and complex incentive structures make it difficult to track how much governments give out to industry. 

Environmental Defence, which releases an annual report tracking Canadian fossil fuel subsidies, estimates the government doled out more than $30 billion in subsidies and financing to fossil fuel companies in 2024. Most of that funding came in the form of a $20-billion loan for the Trans Mountain Expansion project. 

Carbon storage

The Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society estimated the carbon stocks stored in Canada’s existing protected areas by comparing protected area boundaries to data showing the carbon concentration in soil, vegetated areas and seabed sediments. 

It found a total 51.4 gigatons of carbon stored in the country’s protected forests, peatlands, wetlands, soil and seabeds. 

If this carbon was all emitted as carbon dioxide, the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society estimates, it would equate to 188.4 gigatons of emissions. 

By protecting these regions from industrial disturbances like mining, logging or draining, that carbon stays in the ground. If released, that carbon comes at a cost. 

Canada’s industrial carbon price, which charges businesses for emissions that exceed a predetermined limit, is $110 per tonne as of 2026. A carbon credit — doled out for activities that remove or avoid carbon emissions — is worth the same.

At that price, the carbon stored in Canada’s protected areas is worth $20.7 trillion. 

That’s about 10 times the value of Canada’s global mining assets ($352.6 billion), global energy assets ($827 billion) and domestic farm sector assets ($992.4 billion) combined.

Annual carbon capture

Protected and conserved areas remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, a process known as “carbon capture.” Manitoba’s Riding Mountain National Park, for example, removed an average of 108,328 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year from the atmosphere between 1990 and 2020. This is significantly less than Shell’s Quest carbon capture and storage project, but it’s also just one of hundreds of parks and protected areas across Canada.

Most parks, like the ones included in this chart, are sequestering carbon each year. However, when parks or protected areas are hit by wildfires, they can become carbon emitters.

– With files from Michelle Cyca

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This story is part of a series called Shockwave: Rising energy demand and the future of the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes region is in the midst of a seismic energy shakeup, from skyrocketing data centre demand and a nuclear energy boom, to expanding renewables and electrification. In 2026, the Great Lakes News Collaborative will explore how shifting supply and demand affect the region and its waters.

Summary

• Reusing waste heat could help the Great Lakes reduce climate change emissions from heating and cooling buildings.
• The region has a huge opportunity for energy innovation that could reduce costs to consumers and limit damage to land and water.
• The biggest barriers are political and organizational.

We’re trying out staff-written summaries. Did you find this useful? YesNo

The energy system in the Great Lakes region, as in most parts of North America, is wasteful. Stupendously wasteful.

Consider these data points. Two-thirds of the energy generated by the 2,100-megawatt Pickering Nuclear Generating Station, east of Toronto, comes in the form of heat, not electricity. The excess heat is transferred to cooling water that is dumped into Lake Ontario.

For data centres, a booming, voracious energy user, nearly all the electricity that enters a facility to power servers turns into heat. Ejecting that heat so that the servers continue to support Zoom calls and ChatGPT queries can consume gobs of energy and water.

Even underground business and household waste holds wasted energy. Sewage flows in pipes at an average temperature of roughly 15 C, a thermal energy source waiting for an enterprising soul to tap into and extract the heat.

A movement is underway to do just that — mine the region’s power plants, data centres and sewers for heat and use it to develop cleaner, cheaper energy that helps reduce or remove carbon emissions from heating and cooling. The same practices cut the expense of adding new electric generating capacity.

Such a transformation is certainly possible and has been embraced in northern Europe. But it will not be easy here. Though the physics and equipment for waste-heat recovery are tested and proven, other barriers — financial, organizational and political — are more formidable hurdles for a region and a country in which energy efficiency is less valued than energy expansion.

“It’s not a technology issue,” said Luke Gaalswyk, president and chief executive officer of Ever-Green Energy, a district energy company based in St. Paul, Minnesota, that is eyeing wastewater as a heat source. “The engineering of this is well understood. It’s an awareness issue, it’s a funding issue, it’s a priority issue. We, the United States, don’t have the same policy frameworks or funding mechanisms that Europeans do as it relates to these sorts of projects and incentivizing waste-heat recovery.”

Gaalswyk and others see tantalizing opportunities for waste heat in aiding the region’s electric transition. The benefits include cheaper energy, less exposure to fossil fuel price fluctuations, fewer carbon emissions, less land disruption to build new generating and transmission capacity, and less thermal pollution into waterways. But getting there, they say, requires foundational shifts in understanding, attitudes and public policy. 

A new energy scenario

Electricity demand in the Great Lakes is growing, in some states for the first time in decades. If the projected buildout occurs, data centres will gobble electricity while the climate-friendly push to electrify everything boosts demand for electrons. 

Thermal networks, such as district heating systems that circulate hot water or steam to multiple buildings, garner less attention. Comparable to a home radiator at scale, they have been part of the urban energy landscape for more than a century, predating the invention of the gas-powered automobile. College campuses have them, as do hospital complexes. Cities like St. Paul, Chicago, Rochester and Lansing use district heating or cooling in their downtown cores. Toronto has a district cooling system that uses water drawn from deep in Lake Ontario to cool 80 buildings.

Waste heat — or, heat that is currently regarded as waste — could be a new reservoir of energy for district heating systems.

To find one source, building owners need only look beneath their basements. Promoting sewer thermal energy is a passion project for Paul Kohl, the board chair of the Sewer Thermal Energy Network, a trade association founded in 2023 to advocate for an unsung energy source. “We thought, let’s get people talking about it,” he said.

Kohl’s primary pitch is that sewer thermal energy goes hand-in-hand with reducing greenhouse gas emissions from buildings. Say an office complex wants to stop burning fuel oil for heat and instead wants to install a heat pump. An air-source heat pump, which extracts heat from ambient air, is a common option. But it can be problematic in an era of constrained electricity supply.

“What we’re finding is there are certain entities that are really excited about electrifying their building stock but they’re running into electrical demand problems,” Kohl said. “They can’t get enough electricity from the supplier.”

Enter sewer thermal. The building owner could instead tap into the sewer line running beneath the property and circulate the wastewater through a water-based heat pump that extracts the heat. The sewage is always contained and is not a health risk for those in the building. The water-based heat pump still uses electricity, but because of water’s superior capacity to transfer heat, its electricity demand is about half that of an air-based unit. In short, the well-understood thermal dynamics of water translate into substantial energy savings.

The sewer is a heat resource that constantly renews itself — people take showers, do laundry and wash dishes every day, using hot water in the process. The heat that went into the water could be used again. So why aren’t there more such systems? Kohl cited two major obstacles. One is knee-jerk revulsion, typically from the general public. “The ‘ick’ factor,” he said. 

The second is an unwillingness from utilities to allow other organizations to access their pipe infrastructure when it is not the utility’s mandate to do so. The utilities, he said, are more concerned with regulatory compliance and ensuring the integrity of their pipes.

Asked if his organization operates like a matchmaker, uniting parties that otherwise might not have met, Kohl turned the analogy around. A matchmaker works only if there are willing participants, he said. “A lot of water and wastewater utilities are the consummate bachelors. So they’re like, ‘If I never have to do this, great.’”

What brings utilities into the market? Progressive leadership, Kohl said.

Leaders heating the way

That leadership is on display in pockets around the Great Lakes region, from both the public and private sectors. 

In St. Paul, Ever-Green Energy has drawn up plans to tap the heat in the roughly 650,000,000 litres of wastewater that flows daily out of the Metropolitan Council’s treatment plant and into the Mississippi River. The US $150 million project would use the wastewater heat to replace the natural gas that currently fuels half of the district energy system, which is the largest hot water system in the United States.

Project proponents, including the City of St. Paul and Ever-Green, applied for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s climate pollution reduction grant in 2024 but they were not selected. (Ever-Green’s wastewater heat project in Duluth also was not selected for the grant.) Though Clean Heat St. Paul, as the project is known, is currently unfunded, leaders continue to advocate for it.

“It presents an enormous opportunity for our community, for our state, to build a project that would generate global recognition around what’s possible with linking up wastewater and district heating,” Gaalswyk said.

Across the border, Toronto Western Hospital, part of the city’s leading hospital system, partnered with Noventa, an energy company, to install the world’s largest raw sewage thermal system. Completed in 2025, the project provides about 90 per cent of the hospital’s heating and cooling. 

Also in Toronto, Enwave, a district energy company, operates the Deep Lake Water Cooling system that uses cold water drawn from Lake Ontario to cool 115 buildings before the water is sent to taps as drinking water. Enwave, which operates systems across eastern Canada, is now adapting that system to utilize waste heat from the cooling operations so that heating and cooling work in tandem. At the same time, the company is considering sewer heat recovery from a wastewater treatment plant in Mississauga, Ont.

“The idea is you’re trying to capture waste heat in whatever form you can find it in,” said Carson Gemmill, vice president for solutions and innovations at Enwave.

More trade associations are embracing that logic. The Boltzmann Institute, a group of engineers focused on obstacles to electrification, persuaded the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers to start a campaign in September 2025 to advocate for thermal energy systems. Since the province is considering new nuclear power plants and building small modular reactors, including four 300-megawatt units at Darlington Nuclear Generating Station, the institute would like to see their designs incorporate waste heat reuse.

“In Ontario, the heat rejected from nuclear power plants is quite a bit greater than the heat required for heating with natural gas in the whole province,” said Michael Wiggin, a Boltzmann Institute director who is also leading the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers’ thermal energy advocacy. “So there’s an enormous possibility to use the heat from these power plants to heat cities.”

Waste heat can flip conventional narratives on their head. Data centres today are maligned for their energy needs. Yet what if their waste heat was put to beneficial use? 

That’s the objective in Lansing, Michigan, where Deep Green, a London-based company, has proposed a 24-megawatt, US $120-million data centre project that would transfer its waste heat into a district heating system run by the Lansing Board of Water and Light, a water and power provider. The Lansing City Council is set to vote on the project on April 6.

“Previously, we didn’t consider heat as an asset because we didn’t need to,” Mark Lee, CEO of Deep Green, wrote in a January 2026 blog post. “There was an abundance of power, cheap energy and less awareness of environmental impact. That’s changing: electricity prices are high, grids are congested and there’s pressure to meet net-zero and [environmental, social and governance] targets.”

Barriers to entry

Even with these first steps, energy experts agree that North America, as a whole, is playing catch-up. Scandinavian countries have been reusing waste heat for decades. Stockholm has a 3,000-kilometre district energy pipe network that serves 800,000 residents and more than 90 per cent of the city’s buildings. More than 30 data centres feed waste heat into the system. In Oslo, sewer thermal provided nearly 7 per cent of the energy for the city’s district heating system in 2025. As a whole, the system provides 30 per cent of Oslo’s heating and hot water demand. China, a more recent entrant in the market, has developed world-champion projects in Qingdao and elsewhere.

Committed cities and governments can reach scale quickly. “The Chinese had nothing hardly in the early ’90s, now they’ve got perhaps the most district heating installed capacity in the world,” Wiggin said.

Rapid growth in waste-heat recovery will not happen in the Great Lakes region on its own. Without policy signals, electric companies, data centre operators and water utilities don’t have the incentives to innovate and co-operate, Kohl said. And for waste heat, collaboration is the key to success.

What are those policy signals? Gaalswyk focused on carrots: tax breaks for companies that install heat recovery systems and a quicker permitting process for those that incorporate efficiency measures.

Wiggin, by contrast, outlined the sticks. A tax on waste heat. State or provincial efficiency standards.

Kohl mentioned both measures. Massachusetts, he noted, set aside state funds for waste-heat recovery feasibility studies. New York, meanwhile, passed a law in 2022 to develop a regulatory framework for thermal energy networks. The law requires the largest investor-owned utilities to submit pilot projects for development.

Those in the district energy industry see waste heat as a massive opportunity, one that begins in the early stages of project development, whether it’s a data centre or a nuclear power station. Incorporating waste-heat recovery into a project’s initial design is easier than retrofitting the facility in the future.

“Our thesis is data centre projects that are bringing additional layers of community benefit to communities will find more success in building trust and gaining the necessary social licence to operate,” Gaalswyk said. “A really important aspect of that is heat recovery, free heat. Again, it’s not a technology issue. We have the heat pumps, we have the industry that can design heat offtake. It’s a matter of figuring out how to get a diverse stakeholder group to work together to realize these benefits in tandem.”

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Last summer, the world’s attention turned to the famed Seine River to watch as a parade of ferries, tourist boats and yachts carried Olympic athletes through the heart of Paris for the opening ceremony of the Summer Games.

The pageantry of the floating, four-hour saga was punctuated by persistent rain that drenched athletes and spectators alike as the parade cruised past landmarks like the Notre-Dame cathedral and the Eiffel Tower.

Then, at the sound of the starter pistol a few days later, triathletes dove into the water — right at the foot of the Champs-Élysées — for the first leg of their event, a 1.5-kilometre swim.

Years, months — even days — before the starting gun, it didn’t seem possible for the Seine to play such a starring role in the world’s biggest sporting spectacle. For one thing, it was the first time an urban river had been used for an Olympic swim since 1896. For another, swimming had been banned in the Seine since 1923.

That’s because Paris, like Winnipeg, has historically used its in-city waterway as the backstop for its sewage system. Like Winnipeg, the French capital designed its underground maze of sewers to overflow into the river on rainy days, when the pipes that carry runoff and wastewater to the sewage treatment plants are over capacity.

In Winnipeg, these overflows dump, on average, 10 billion litres of effluent into the rivers each year — enough to fill 4,000 Olympic pools.

And like Winnipeg’s Red, Assiniboine and Seine rivers (yes, there’s a Seine in Winnipeg too), those overflows left the Parisian river polluted with E. coli, excess nutrients, garbage and other unsafe and unsightly contaminants — right up until the gun sounded.

The opening ceremony rainstorms had caused an E. coli spike that delayed the start of the swim, but eventually tests came back clean enough to allow the city’s leaders to celebrate a moment nearly a decade in the making.

“Paris has shown that it is possible to bring even the most polluted rivers back to life,” Dianna Kopansky, head of the freshwater and wetlands unit of the United Nations Environment Programme, said in a release a month after the Games ended. “But if we’re to ward off a looming freshwater crisis, the world is going to need a lot more success stories like this.”

Sewer issues like these afflict more than 1,000 North American communities. Many have been working toward solutions for decades and their efforts have laid a roadmap Winnipeg’s policy makers and community groups can turn to as the city charts its own path to cleaning up the rivers. From giant cisterns to rain gardens, storage tunnels and parks, cities across Canada — and the rest of the world — have shown there are plenty of options to stop the overflow of sewage into freshwater.

A revival in Paris — fuelled by the international spotlight

It might not have happened without the Olympics.

As Winnipeg city councillor and former chair of the city’s water and waste committee, Brian Mayes, will tell just about anyone: convincing a municipal council to spend its limited budget on expensive upgrades to largely out-of-sight, out-of-mind sewer infrastructure isn’t easy.

“It gets frustrating,” he said in a late April interview, referring to his decade-plus of efforts to make progress on the city’s overflow problem. “It’s awareness, it’s political will, it’s costly.”

Winnipeg devised a master plan to reduce overflow volumes in 2019, nearly two decades after the provincial Clean Environment Commission urged the city to start taking quick and meaningful measures to protect its rivers. The plan aims to reduce sewer overflows by about half over the next 70 years, and comes with an estimated price tag of more than $1.15 billion (if you don’t count the contingency that doubles the projected cost).

Progress has been slow; the city budgets between $30 – $45 million each year for upgrades and has spent just under $200 million on everything from new sewer construction to improved data-collection technologies over the last decade, but overflow volumes are just six per cent lower than they were in 1992.

For decades, Paris was in much the same situation: the first pitch to clean up the Seine came from Mayor Jacques Chirac in 1988, the same year Manitoba’s Environment Act came into law and negated the long-standing water pollution exemptions that allowed Winnipeg to dump sewage in its rivers unabated. Like Winnipeg, Paris delayed serious work on river cleanup until the 2010s, starting in earnest to clean the Seine in 2016.

Knowing it had eight years to prepare for the 2024 Games, Parisian leaders seized the moment and came up with a US$1.5 billion strategy, dubbed “the swimming plan,” to reduce the frequency and volume of wastewater that overflows into the river from its network of combined sewers.

The star of the swimming plan was a massive underground cistern capable of holding 50 million litres — 20 Olympic swimming pools worth — of runoff.

It’s a simple, if inelegant, solution: combined sewers overflow when heavy rainfalls overwhelm the capacity of the sewage system, so the cistern captures excess runoff and holds onto it until there’s enough room to pipe the wastewater to a treatment plant.

Occasionally — like the day of the opening ceremony — there are still overflows, but they’re less severe, meaning fewer contaminants flow into the river.

In the 1970s, about 60 per cent of city sewage flushed directly into the Seine, choking off most aquatic life. Studies at the time found just three fish species surviving in the sludge. By 2023, that number had jumped to more than 30 species — a remarkable biodiversity rebound.

In 2023, Paris dumped 1.9 billion litres of diluted raw sewage (a mix of stormwater runoff and wastewater from homes, businesses and industry) into the Seine. At the same time Winnipeg, with a population just two-fifths that of Paris, dumped more than 5.3 billion litres into its trio of iconic rivers.

This summer, Paris expects to open at least three locations of the Seine for public swimming. In Winnipeg, most residents will still try to avoid touching the water.

A big tunnel saved the Ottawa River — could it work here too?

Today, Ottawa is often cited as a Canadian example of a city taking sewer overflows seriously and developing solutions with a bit of urgency. In fact, it’s one of the cities Mayes has looked to for inspiration on his quest to quell the overflows at home.

“I wanted to do the big tunnel like Ottawa,” he said. “Other cities have done that.”

Mayes is referring to the combined sewer storage tunnel, the six-kilomentre long, three-metre wide, $232-million cornerstone of Ottawa’s sewage overflow reduction strategy. It works much like the cistern in Paris: during heavy rains, it collects and stores about 43 million litres (18 Olympic pools) worth of effluent, which can be gradually pumped back to the sewage treatment plant after rains subside. Funding for the infrastructure came from all three levels of government, allowing the tunnel to be completed within four years.

Between 2006 and 2020 — the year the tunnel was operational — Ottawa saw an average of 622 million litres of effluent spill into the river every year. From 2021 to 2024 there has been an annual average of 210 million litres.

But it wasn’t always that way.

In 2001, a group of Ottawans fed up with the city’s practice of allowing excess effluent to run into the Ottawa River went looking for accountability from political leaders. Because the river serves as the boundary between Ottawa and Gatineau, Que., there were several jurisdictional authorities to appeal to, and the residents decided to form their own non-profit entity to co-ordinate their advocacy efforts.

Ottawa Riverkeeper is a member of the international Waterkeeper Alliance — a global network of community advocacy groups with a mandate to hold politicians accountable to protecting local water bodies.

“Without any clear, single entity to hold accountable for these overflows, Ottawa Riverkeeper was formed,” Laura Reinsborough, current Riverkeeper and CEO, said in an interview. “This organization was formed around the issue of combined sewer overflows and responded to the need for an independent entity that could look out for the health of the river.”

The group’s advocacy originated out of a desire to stem the combined sewer overflows that made the river unsafe for recreational activities. Nearly 25 years later, Reinsborough said, “it’s been one of our biggest successes.”

Reinsborough says the Riverkeeper group worked closely with city officials, advocating for publicly available overflow data (including an email notification system and real-time overflow map not unlike Winnipeg’s), they trained community members to conduct water-quality monitoring, and eventually helped the city develop overflow-reduction targets and decide on a solution that would work within the tight constraints of the municipal budget.

“We assumed that the city of Ottawa did not want to be polluting the river and that they wanted to find solutions, and we — as a community group — could be a strong partner with them to bring that to the public and to other levels of government,” Reinsborough said.

What worked in Ottawa may not work in Winnipeg

But Winnipeg isn’t likely to get its own big tunnel anytime soon.

“Our staff wanted no part of that — too costly, I think,” Mayes explained.

Costs aside, there are logistical complications. A single tunnel works in Ottawa because the city has just over 100 kilometres of combined sewers (compared to just over 1,000 kilometres in Winnipeg) and most are clustered within a relatively small radius. Winnipeg’s overflows stretch from the western extent of the Assiniboine River to the northern city limit on the Red River and south on the smaller, shallower Seine River (not to be confused with the Parisian Seine).

Winnipeg’s ultimate overflow solutions will be doled out on a neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood basis; the 1,300-page master plan includes detailed engineering plans for each of the 43 combined sewer districts.

In some regions, Winnipeg will take the most extreme and expensive approach by building new pipes to completely separate the sanitary sewage (a term for all the gunk flushed down toilets, sink drains, showers and other indoor plumbing) from the stormwater runoff. Sewer separation makes combined sewer overflows moot, and allows all the sanitary sludge to be processed at treatment plants. Sewer separation projects are currently underway in the St. James, Seven Oaks and Fort Garry neighbourhoods.

But it’s not feasible everywhere. As Ontario’s Environmental Commissioner, Gord Miller, wrote in a 2009 report on sewage issues in the Ottawa River: “The construction of sewers requires the destruction of existing infrastructure, especially roads. In older built neighbourhoods, the extent of destruction required may simply be beyond all reasonable limits with respect to the functioning of the city.”

Instead, Winnipeg plans to combat its woes with a combination of sewer separation, in-line storage (building control gates to hold overflows in the combined pipes during light rainfalls and pumping the effluent back to a treatment plant after the rain subsides), offline storage (like cisterns and tunnels) and screens that limit garbage from entering the rivers during an overflow.

All of these concrete, steel and heavy machinery solutions are called “grey infrastructure.” While they are an important — and proven — piece of solving complex problems like combined sewer overflows, they aren’t enough on their own.

‘Sponge cities’ are the future — and a faster way to stem overflows

According to the most recent Canada Infrastructure Report Card, the state of municipal infrastructure nationwide is at risk. A majority of this infrastructure is more than 20 years old and “concerning amount” — including 10 per cent of sewer infrastructure — is in poor or very poor condition. Many sewer pipes are now more than 50 years old and approaching end of life at a time when climate change threatens to add additional strain.

“We see these big shifts in temperature or big shifts in precipitation, bigger storm events, bigger rainfalls,” Dimple Roy, water management director at the International Institute for Sustainable Development, said in an interview.

“And these shifts in temperatures mean that we’ll see cracks in pipes, and the aging infrastructure will fail us on occasion.”

Replacing this infrastructure often falls on municipalities, which own about half of sewage assets, but the costs are often out of reach for their budgets. To Roy, a city’s best course of action is to invest in “infrastructure refreshes” in critical areas — where the pipes are most at risk of failure, or release the most overflows — and balance those grey infrastructure investments with green, or natural, infrastructure solutions.

“Essentially, we want to see more spongy areas created in the city,” she explained, noting the “sponge city” concept has come into vogue in cities like Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto.

It’s a simple theory: sewer overflows happen when there’s too much runoff entering the storm drains for the pipes to handle, but if a city can limit the amount of water running over concrete and asphalt into the drains, it can take pressure off the pipes and reduce the frequency of overflows.

The easiest way to do that is to encourage nature to take its course. Where urban environments were traditionally designed to wick water off the concrete and into the drains as fast as possible, natural ecosystems tend to absorb and store that same water like a sponge and release it slowly back into the environment.

By swapping out impermeable surfaces like concrete and asphalt for permeable ones — be it parks, green roofs, rain gardens or even more permeable types of pavement — cities can allow nature to share some of the load, and save money in the process.

Vancouver has implemented “tree trenches” on medians that filter rainwater through soil around a roadside tree and collect the excess into a holding tank below, releasing it slowly back into the environment. Toronto mandates all buildings of a certain floor space install green roofs, which reduce noise pollution while capturing up to 60 per cent of the rain that falls on them. Montreal has policies to build “sponge sidewalks” and “sponge parks,” which it expects will retain three Olympic swimming pools worth of water at half the cost of a grey infrastructure equivalent.

Winnipeg’s master plan does account for green infrastructure. Of the total $1.1 billion capital cost estimate, $104.6 million (about 10 per cent) was designated as “green infrastructure allowance,” and each district is required to have a green infrastructure element. But there’s a caveat: the city recommends 10 years of pilot projects and testing to evaluate the sustainability of green infrastructure before committing wholeheartedly.

While Mayes gives the city credit for ensuring green infrastructure will be part of the broader sewage solution package, he’d like to see Winnipeg pick up the pace on implementing it.

“My job is to be the nag to keep saying: ‘How much have you done? What are your plans? Stop doing zero,’ ” he said.

Roy notes some of the newer developments in and around Winnipeg have already proven the case for these spongy solutions. Communities like Sage Creek and Meadowlands have retention ponds with native wetland plants that absorb and filter runoff.

In 2015, Save Our Seine, a community group dedicated to maintaining the wellbeing of Winnipeg’s Seine River, installed a rain garden near a riverside trail and a large grocery store. The garden collects runoff from the roof and parking lot of the grocery store and filters it through a 450-square-metre patch of native plants and trees, cleaning and absorbing runoff before it drains into the Seine. The garden cost about $100,000, and was planted by a group of about 75 volunteers. The city references the garden as an example of green infrastructure in its sewer overflow plan.

“Those are the kinds of solutions that we would propose as much as possible,” Roy said. “There are some opportunities to … think strategically about where we can invest a bit of money and get quick wins.”

Creating ‘political will’ to find solutions is key: advocate

Ultimately, a combination of tight budgets and a lack of political will remain the biggest barriers to making progress on reducing sewer overflows.

In Paris, the spotlight of the Olympic Games created the conditions for municipal leaders to invest in sewer system upgrades.

In Ottawa, a mid-2000s sewage scandal — wherein an equipment failure caused more than 764 million litres of raw effluent to pour into the Ottawa River and city officials kept the incident under wraps for two years — created outrage and public awareness of the overflow problem.

But according to Reinsborough, with Ottawa Riverkeeper, it was the two decades of education, collaboration and consultation between citizens and the municipal government that eventually led to success.

“Together, our voices were stronger, their argument became stronger, and I think that helped them find the political will … to ensure that they could find solutions,” she said.

Marianne Cerilli, a former provincial MLA, and a long-time environmental advocate, was inspired by the Ottawa Riverkeeper approach when she tried to organize her Wolseley neighbourhood to raise a stink about sewer overflows to their councillor. It was part of a broader effort — ultimately interrupted by COVID-19 lockdowns — to create a network of well-supported community groups, able to advocate on an almost block-by-block level.

As Winnipeg grapples with its own legacy of sewage spills, she believes neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood organizing will be key to convincing leaders to invest in changes.

“When elected representatives hear from people from their local ward … when they’re being lobbied and there’s research presented to them and policy advocacy from their constituents, then they pay more attention,” Cerilli said in an interview.

“There is power and strength in numbers. That’s the kind of community development that’s needed in our city — on issues like the combined sewers, and many others as well.”

Julia-Simone Rutgers is a reporter covering environmental issues in Manitoba. Her position is part of a partnership between The Narwhal and the Winnipeg Free Press.

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Every fall, Jocelyn Velestuk grabs a shovel, goes out to the same field on her farm and digs up a sample from the top four inches of land.

“I like to feel the texture, see how it breaks apart in my hands. I just like to feel it myself,” Velestuk says. She farms with her husband, Jesse, and his parents on just over 50 quarters of land — more than 3,000 hectares or about 7,500 acres — in southeastern Saskatchewan, a scenic mixture of grain crops, pasture land, wetlands, rolling hills and natural habitat.

That rich four inches of dirt represents the “topsoil” and farmers, like Velestuk, have long had a deep connection with it. But today, more so than any generation before, farmers have data about their soils — seemingly endless supplies of it — made possible by modern technology.

Digital sensors measure soil quality. GPS systems guide tractors in fields. Drones can check the cows and sensors can monitor the fences. Artificial intelligence-powered weather forecasting has replaced The Farmers Almanac. High-tech options are increasingly present on the modern farm and advocates say they enable a level of precision not imaginable even 30 years ago. 

But Velestuk still likes to take her shovel to the soil. “Most of the magic happens in that top layer,” Velestuk says of topsoil and why she still likes to touch it with her own hands, despite the plethora of technologies available to check it for her. 

Indeed, that layer is home to microbes, concentrated soil organic carbon, and it’s where nutrient cycling happens — the exchange of nutrients from the soil to plants and living organisms and back again. It’s so busy in the topsoil, Velestuk likens its activity to Pacman, except instead of gobbling up power cookies, it’s nitrogen and carbon. 

That’s an analogy that was put in her head by one of her professors at the University of Saskatchewan in her first year of an undergraduate degree in agriculture — one that sparked something deep within Velestuk. 

“I was absolutely drawn in. It was just so cool. Since then, I haven’t been able to learn enough,” she says. 

She went on to finish a master’s degree in soil science and worked as an environmental consultant and agronomist before moving into a full-time farming and soil advocacy role.

It’s a good time to be advocating for soils. It has become clear in recent decades they have been underestimated and actually play an outsized role in storing carbon — and therefore mitigating climate change. Newer technology is also generating data about soil health that could allow for reductions in the amount of fertilizer used on crops, an important step as the federal government is developing a plan to reduce these emissions by 30 per cent in the next decade. 

In June, the federal government published a soil health study, recommending the development of a national strategy. This came a year after an industry-led national soil health strategy project, which aims to conserve soils within Canada’s 154 million acres of farmland, in conjunction with national climate change goals. 

But despite the optimism of these efforts, a few practical questions remain: namely, what impact, if any, will they have? How will this impact be measured? 

Increasingly, farmers like Velestuk are turning to technology such as sensors, drones and artificial intelligence to answer these questions. Soil monitoring systems and weather stations allow farmers to gather and analyze real-time, in-depth information about their soil nutrition, quality, moisture levels and more. Soil mapping technologies allow farmers to understand how the makeup of their soil varies throughout their farms. Velestuk believes tools like soil maps, which allow farmers to really understand the needs of their land, are the key to overall farm success. In a previous role as an agronomist (an advisor who helps farmers improve their efficiencies, sustainability and profitability), she helped clients adopt this technology on their farms. 

Mapping allows farmers to identify potential soil issues — such as compaction or salinity. Once farmers can identify the problem, they can adapt their management of it using precision agriculture tools such as variable-rate fertilizer applications — essentially, applying different types or amounts of fertilizer based on the needs of the soil in different parts of the field rather than just a blanket application. 

“Farms are getting bigger and with that, they’ll hire an agronomist and get more into the management of soil fertility,” Velestuk says, referring to the soil’s ability to grow healthy, high-yielding crops. “When it comes to farming, soil fertility is first and foremost in our minds, because that is how we get a healthy crop.”

In Saskatchewan, home to 40 per cent of Canada’s farmland, a growing community of soil-obsessed farmers like Velestuk and other industry members are invested in working toward these goals using increasingly high-tech solutions, which they argue are also in line with boosting farm productivity, efficiency and sustainability. 

On-farm weather stations: a deeper understanding of soil — and fun, to boot

Ten years ago, Jake Leguee thought buying a farm-specific weather station, with prices between a couple hundred dollars and upwards of $5,000, seemed like “a really good way to waste a bunch of money.”

But he did it anyway — and soon changed his mind. 

“I learned more about our soils in the first year of having that station than I have before, or since really,” Leguee says. He’s a partner in a 16,000-acre, third-generation family farm in Filmore, Sask., about an hour’s drive southeast of Regina. 

A tool of what’s known as precision agriculture — essentially, using data to be as efficient as possible with every product applied to a seed or crop — agricultural weather stations are designed to provide farmers with in-depth information about on-farm weather conditions like wind speed and direction, moisture, rainfall and humidity levels. This allows farmers to make informed decisions around what inputs — a term used for fertilizers, pesticides, water and more — to apply to their crops and when. 

For Leguee, who doesn’t have an irrigation system on his farm, a top input on his mind each year is water — and that’s where his weather station data has proven most valuable, showing him just how much moisture his soils will hold, and how deep their roots actually go. 

Data from one of his now-six weather stations, situated in a lentil field, suggested his lentil crops don’t draw water from deeper than 50 centimetres, while other crops will draw from 70 to 100 centimetres or more. 

“Now I know why it seems there’s always a little bit of extra moisture after a lentil year, because that water is still there. It’s just down a little bit deeper,” he says 

Weather stations are just one of a suite of new technologies that are facilitating a deeper understanding of soils for farmers. Leguee attributes his “early adopter” attitude in part to his dad, who is still active in the farm business and has always been “curious” about new practices and technologies. 

“This stuff is fun for me,” Leguee says, adding it’s also good business, as most farmers strive to use the minimum amount of inputs required for maximum efficiency. 

“I don’t want to put more stuff out there to enhance crop yield if I’m not going to get a return on that investment.” 

At the same time, there are a growing number of biological products on the market that use natural ingredients like bacteria and plant hormones to protect and nurture plant health. These aim to increase the efficiency of fertilizers in the soil, enhance nutrients and improve overall plant quality and yield while moving away from more conventional agro-chemical products, like synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. That includes glyphosate, the active ingredient in some of the most widely used herbicides around the world, including Roundup. 

Mike Palmier, an agronomist based in west-central Saskatchewan, believes biological products, combined with the right technology, could completely revolutionize farmers’ relationships with soil. 

“I honestly think we’re still at the starting stages of the revolution of soil health,” he says. 

Palmier leads a team of 15 agronomists gearing up to meet growing demand for technology to monitor soil health. They have a fleet of half-ton trucks with hydraulic probes, used to carefully extract samples from topsoil. Samples are then sent off for testing to better understand their biological composition. 

Palmier says there are only a minority of farmers and agronomists in the province exploring the potential of biological products at this level, but he believes that will change. He also believes this could represent a major shift for an industry that has been heavily reliant on chemical-based crop protection products for the last 50 years. 

“We’re still at the very beginning stages of understanding what’s possible with the biologicals.” 

Canadian farmers are already innovators — but there’s still room for improvement

There’s a lot of excitement around the potential for high-tech farming to drive environmental improvements in the global agriculture sector, with some estimates suggesting a potential 13-billion-tonne decrease in the industry’s greenhouse gas emissions. 

There have already been significant improvements in Saskatchewan soils in the last 30 years, largely due to the move to no-till soil management, which rejects the idea that soil must be churned up after one crop has been harvested to make way for the next season. Because it minimizes disruptions, no-till farming improves carbon storage and biodiversity.

Recent research has shown Canadian farmers already have some of the most sustainable farming practices in the world. Canadian farmers already tend to be more innovative than their global peers, but there are still barriers to farmers adopting new technologies — most prominently cost and lack of knowledge. 

Indeed, there remain challenges to increasing sustainability.

There’s also the consideration that nearly 40 per cent of Canada’s farmland these days is rented, versus owned (and that number is increasing). That means those farming this land are likely less concerned with long-term soil-health initiatives — as opposed to on a family farm, like Leguee’s, where the mission is literally to leave the land in better shape for the next generation. 

Currently, only about 65 per cent of Canadian farmers report they are following best practices for optimizing their fertilizer use.

Jeff Schoenau, a professor of soil fertility at the University of Saskatchewan and an expert in the area of climate-smart farming solutions, believes that optimizing the use of these products is a critical goal for the industry. In his mind, this means: “really making sure that that nitrogen gets into the plant, where it’s needed, rather than hanging around in the soil or going through some type of transformation where it ends up being lost into the air, as a greenhouse gas or lost to water as a contaminant.”

And technology has a big role to play in that.

Schoenau believes any initiatives in soil health need to recognize the concept itself is complex. Having taught the subject for 35 years now, Schoenau defines healthy soil as having the ability to sustain and promote growth of organisms not only within the soil — but also those above it: plants, animals and humans. 

“It’s fulfilling the important role of acting as a reservoir for water, for nutrients — and also acting as an environmental filter for contaminants. I mean, I could go on and on.”

‘We’ve completely revolutionized the way we farm’

One thing that Schoenau believes firmly is soil health is a matter of public interest. In light of this, he is happy to see it becoming a more mainstream topic. 

“A couple years ago, people said ‘it’s just dirt.’ ”

For this reason, he believes, if nothing else, the public awareness component of ongoing national soil health initiatives will be valuable.

“Any effort to bring it to the forefront is really important. It brings awareness,” he says, adding he hopes it will also generate awareness of the link between healthy soil and healthy animals, plants and humans.

“What you find in food, in a lot of cases, you can trace back to what’s going on in the soil.”

For Velestuk, any attention given to soil health — by government, the public or the agriculture industry — is a win. But she also believes the key to driving change will be orchestrating a cohesive, long-term approach. 

“We can’t say, ‘We have to create a whole new way of looking at soil,’ ” she says. “We need to build on what we have already.”

Velestuk points to the progress made with advancements in recent years. “We have come such a long way with mapping, learning about soil organic matter and soil fertility and adapting our different practices and how we look at soil as our cropping systems have evolved,” she says. “Soil health, to me, is bringing it all together.”

“The Prairies have a really cool story. We’ve completely revolutionized the way we farm. And it is amazing.”

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Discussions about a green economy usually centre on transforming the businesses we have to address the climate crisis without too much disruption. The phrase evokes images of solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles and maybe even new technology like carbon capture and storage. 

But right beneath our noses, there’s another sort of green economy already influencing where and how dollars flow: one based on conserving and restoring nature. Ecosystems left intact are worth money, even if we don’t always recognize it. And not addressing the climate crisis is also very expensive. 

For example, Ontario’s Greenbelt — a ring of protected farmland, forests and waterways encircling the Greater Toronto Area — generates $9.6 billion in economic activity per year, mostly from farming, recreation and tourism. It also supports 177,700 jobs, according to the charitable Greenbelt Foundation, and saves the province $224 million every year in natural flood protection. The money spent on restoration projects also ripple out into the local economy, providing both on-site jobs and a need for materials and supplies. 

As researchers and communities across Canada increasingly look to restoring landscapes as a way to tackle climate change, they’re also thinking about how to account for the value of natural assets. The issue is the subject of a new guide from the non-profit Natural Assets Initiative that came out this spring, outlining best practices for local governments looking to manage and protect the nature they have. 

Here’s a look at a few examples of how nature — kept as is, or being brought back to good health — is already making money move in southern Ontario. 

The billion-dollar restoration of the mouth of Toronto’s Don River 

At the mouth of the Don River, which flows into Lake Ontario on the east side of downtown Toronto, a massive push to correct a mistake that’s over a century old is nearly finished.

Hundreds of years ago, the place where the Don reached the lake was a great marsh, teeming with fish and migratory birds, absorbing water to mitigate floods and filtering whatever flowed through. As settlers urbanized what is now called Toronto in the 1800s, displacing Indigenous communities, they also dumped massive amounts of manure — at one point, 80,000 gallons (nearly 303,000 litres) per day — and sewage into the wetland. Before long, the rich biodiversity was gone and the marsh was a stinky public health risk, raising fears of cholera.

In the 1890s, the city dredged the northern edge of the marsh to create the Keating Channel, which would eventually re-route the Don River into an unnatural 90-degree turn into Toronto’s inner harbour. In the 1910s, the newly-created Toronto Harbour Commission decided to drain the marsh and fill it — with a mix of sand, gravel, clay and construction debris like glass, brick, concrete, wood and charcoal —  to create new land. It would be used for an industrial district in the Port Lands, leaving a legacy of contamination.

These decisions came with steep consequences not just for wildlife and biodiversity, but also for floods and people. With the flood-mitigation properties of the marsh lost and the river taking an unnatural path, heavy rains and snowmelt began running over into roads and neighbourhoods near the river. The costliest was July 2013, when an intense storm made rivers spill into basements and onto roadways, leaving drivers to wade through waist-high water. In the Don Valley, 1,400 passengers were stranded on a water-filled train for hours — a video of the incident showed a snake sliding between the seats, and they eventually had to be rescued in inflatable boats. The disaster cost $1 billion in insured damage. Similar events are set to happen more often and more intensely as the effects of climate change worsen. 

Governments started working on a plan to re-naturalize the mouth of the Don in 2005, a process that inched along until construction began in 2017. It includes a more natural opening for the river, which means the Don will now have two paths to drain into Lake Ontario. It also includes a new 1.3-kilometre river valley to act as a floodplain, and new wetlands, both of which will absorb more water and naturally filter it. The green space will include over two million plants. In the end, the hope is that the area will be a hub for outdoor recreation and the site of a future neighbourhood. 

It’s an enormous construction project with a price tag to match: $1.354 billion, just over both its original budget of $1.25 billion and the cost of cleaning up the 2013 floods. All three levels of government — the City of Toronto, the province and the federal government — pitched in. 

Waterfront Toronto estimates the project will contribute $4 billion to the Canadian economy and create jobs for up to 30,000 people. It also says the work will save even more money by preventing or lessening future flood events.

Earlier this year, water began flowing into the new river valley. It’s set to be connected to Lake Ontario later in 2024, as long as a leak in one of the plugs separating the bodies of water doesn’t derail the process. Work is ongoing in the Port Lands, which still look like a barren construction zone. It’s set to open in spring 2025, about a year later than its original target.

How much is a creek in southern Ontario worth? Turns out, a lot 

Nature has inherent value, but how does that translate into actual money? Hamilton, Burlington and the Conservation Halton aimed to answer that question in 2022 by settling on a dollar figure for the worth of Grindstone Creek, a watershed that winds through those municipalities, west of Toronto. The creek flows through the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington and a bit of the Greenbelt, before emptying into Hamilton Harbour. 

The local governments teamed up with the non-profit Natural Assets Initiative on the project, along with the Royal Botanical Gardens, Conservation Halton and the Greenbelt Foundation. In the end, the groups concluded Grindstone Creek provides $2 billion of value every year just by lowering local flood risk. If the watershed were to vanish, it would cost that much to replace its absorption and filtering functions with human-made infrastructure. The report used a body of existing research to pin down the rough value per square metre of various habitat types for stormwater management: $65 for forests, $200 for swamps, $203 for marshes and $324 for open water.  

The $2 billion figure doesn’t include all of the creek’s costs or value. Maintaining natural ecosystems isn’t free, the report notes, though it generally costs more to maintain constructed infrastructure. Ontario municipalities pay an average of $3 billion per year to maintain stormwater pipes, ditches and culverts, according to a 2022 report from Ontario’s arms-length Financial Accountability Office, and climate change is expected to magnify that number over time. 

Plus, the group found, Grindstone Creek delivers another $34 million in benefits every year thanks to the role it plays in recreation, habitat biodiversity, lessening air pollution, controlling heat waves, mitigating the effects of climate change and erosion control — Burlington is budgeting $300,000 to create a new, vegetated bank on another creek to prevent erosion there.

The figures aren’t a perfect or complete picture, but they can help governments make decisions about how to use and conserve nature, the groups said. 

“Although we can’t reduce nature to a simple dollar figure, this shows the enormous financial value of services communities are getting from nature,” Roy Brooke, the executive director of the Natural Assets Initiative, said in a press release announcing the findings.

“Protecting these assets avoids taxpayers getting stuck with a far higher bill to replace services that nature gives us already.”

The cost-benefit ratio of restoring Great Lakes ecosystems

The Ontario government pours millions of dollars, year after year into conserving and restoring Great Lakes ecosystems. Back in 2010, the province’s Environment Ministry commissioned a study looking at the economic benefits of those investments, and whether they were panning out. 

The report focused on three groups of watersheds around Lake Ontario: the Credit River and 16 Mile Creek west of Toronto, the area around the city itself and Prince Edward Bay to the east. The benefits of securing and restoring land far outweighed the costs, the researchers found. The extent of that varied by area — the benefits of restoring wetlands, for example, were significantly higher in Toronto, where there are few natural wetlands left and a high population, than in less-developed Prince Edward Bay. 

The most significant finding, the report said, was that “there are positive economic returns on restoration and protection” of all the habitat types studied. 

South of the border, the United States Environmental Protection Agency just published the results of an audit examining whether the US$3.7 billion it has put towards restoring habitats around the Great Lakes was money well spent. It was mostly a success, the audit found: the funds went to groups whose efforts helped protect habitats, cut pollution and tackle invasive species. The main downside was the work didn’t benefit everyone — very few of those groups prioritized environmental justice, or making sure their efforts helped marginalized communities who disproportionately suffer the effects of pollution and climate change. 

The 2010 provincial report warned its findings should be taken with a grain of salt given its scope was limited to a few areas and ways of measuring monetary benefit. The body of research used to assign value to nature has grown in the years since — the new guide from the Natural Assets Initiative for assessing the value of ecosystems includes more, and more complex factors, such as how connected animals’ habitats are to other natural areas, or the diversity of species living there. Both things can be used as an indicator of how well an ecosystem is functioning, and therefore, how much monetary value it holds. 

What hasn’t changed is an observation made in the 2010 report — the Great Lakes hold another kind of inherent value, one that comes from the knowledge that their ecosystems will be protected for future generations. 

“People have demonstrated willingness-to-pay to protect or improve areas that are of no direct use to them, simply for the benefit derived from knowing these areas exist in their natural ecological state,” the report said.

Updated June 28, 2024 at 4:05 p.m. ET: This article was updated to correct the name of the Natural Assets Initiative.

Updated July 25, 2024 at 2:20 p.m. ET: This article was updated to correct that Conservation Halton, not the Regional Municipality of Halton, was involved in the effort to assess the value of Grindstone Creek.

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Many old farm fields in southern Ontario look a lot like this one, which last November was a vast expanse of waist-high grasses the colour of washed-out gold, rippling in the breeze. 

On a sunny, mild late fall day, a few green leaves persisted close to the not-yet frozen ground. Dried-out stems crunched underfoot. Birds called out from the trees surrounding the field while grazing horses looked on from the property next door. Over the fence and down the road were more fields, rolling on and on in the distance. But something made this particular meadow different from the others — the line of people walking through it with bright orange buckets in hand, lifting out handfuls of seeds and allowing the wind to waft them away. 

The people scattering seeds were part of a push to transform this former farm field into a tallgrass prairie, a type of habitat that has all but disappeared from southern Ontario. When most people imagine what this region looked like before European settlers cleared land for farming and development, they tend to think of thick forest. Many don’t know grasslands were also part of the mosaic of the landscape — meadows, prairies and savannas, maintained by different Indigenous communities and teeming with life.

Resurrecting grasslands is good for the increasingly imperiled species who rely on them, like meadowlarks and the rare Karner blue butterfly. Bringing back native plants is even better: they’re naturally well-adapted to survive here without human help, and also provide the best food and shelter for native animal species who evolved to rely on them. Prairies and meadows also absorb carbon, storing most of it underground, and soak up floodwater. Plus, when frost melts and wildflowers start popping up in a giant bouquet of leaves and petals, the whole thing looks pretty spectacular. 

“Right now everything’s brown and going dormant, but if you come here in July and August, that’s when the prairies are blooming and just humming with bees and butterflies,” said Shannon Stephens of the Nottawasaga Valley Conservation Authority, which is leading the effort.

“In the spring, you’ve got the grassland birds singing.” 

The three-hectare property is in Shelburne, about an hour and a half’s drive from Toronto in an area of Ontario’s Greenbelt dotted with provincial parks, nature reserves, rolling hills and farms. A lot of the Greenbelt lies on rich agricultural land, but not this site: a tenant farmer tried to grow crops here for years, but found the soil too acidic, sandy and compacted. So, the landowner asked the conservation authority — an agency overseeing conservation and development in the lands surrounding the nearby Nottawasaga River — for help to do some kind of habitat restoration. Together, they settled on grassland and got to work in 2021. 

Although the Shelburne project is young, it’s already changed the land. The soil is looser and able to absorb more water, nurturing more native grasses and flowering plants. But the site is still not as lush as Stephens hoped it would be by now — even weeds weren’t as big as she’d expected, held back by the acidic soil. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, even the weeds are having trouble here,’ ” she said with a chuckle.

So the conservation authority, with support from World Wildlife Fund Canada’s nature and climate grant program and a gaggle of volunteers, went back in November to plant some more. 

One hectare at a time, grassland restoration adds up 

For millennia before European colonization, Indigenous Peoples in what’s now known as North America managed grasslands to keep them healthy, harvesting food and medicines there. Often, communities used fire to renew the ecosystem and encourage new growth. Fire is a part of nature — so are people. 

As settlers dispossessed Indigenous nations of the land and started farming and building, however, they often began by clearing meadows and savannas, which are less valued than forests and easier to plough. Many thought of grasslands as an intermediate type of landscape — something that springs up when a forest is cut down or farmland is abandoned, instead of a distinct landscape with its own ecological importance. Somewhere between 75 to 90 per cent of the grasslands that once existed in Canada are now gone, lost to agriculture and development. 

Even today, not everyone sees the point of grassland. Just last April, Ontario Premier Doug Ford famously described one piece of the Greenbelt as an “empty field with weeds in it,” arguing it should be used for housing instead. But in recent years, Western scientists have started to clue in to something Indigenous Knowledge held true all along: grasslands are vital and humans can be a force for good in keeping them healthy. 

More and more, international consensus is pointing to restoring nature, not just conserving what’s left, as a vital way to sequester carbon and counteract climate change. And although planting trees tends to be the popular choice for habitat restoration, grasslands have advantages that shouldn’t be overlooked. Over the course of many years, they store an enormous amount of carbon in their roots, which extend metres underground. They’re hubs of biodiversity, too. Every hectare matters.

“It all adds up,” Ryan Godfrey, a botanist with World Wildlife Fund Canada who helped sow seeds at the Shelburne site in November, said. “It has to add up.” 

The idea of grassland restoration can spread. Stephens has seen landowners become interested after watching a neighbour have their land planted, which is what happened with the Shelburne site. Beyond property lines, this field is connected to the land that surrounds it and the waters flowing through it. Wind and birds carry seeds in all directions. Various conservation organizations, First Nations and environmental groups across Ontario, Canada and even the continent are doing grassland restoration too. 

Maybe, with enough work and time, a patchwork of restored places can reconnect to form a healthier landscape. A day of sprinkling seeds can seem small, but the ripple effects can grow. “How big? A great question,” Godfrey said. “But definitely, definitely way bigger than this. It cascades out.”

At the centre, Godfrey said, is the need for many people to fundamentally change the way they see nature and their place in it. Generations of settlers have been taught that nature is something to be fenced off in parks because humans ruin natural places. 

“Actually, what we needed to learn was how to touch things in a nicer way,” Godfrey said.

In grasslands and beyond, people and landscapes are ‘intertwined with each other’

Last fall in Shelburne, the renaturalization team used a technique called overseeding, where people scatter grass and wildflower seeds by hand on top of existing plants, filling in gaps without disturbing what’s already in the ground. 

Seeds for native plants are often miniscule and, especially for wildflowers, expensive. In the palm of your hand, some look like tiny grains of sand. To make it easier to spread them evenly and maximize their odds of survival, Stephens mixed them with heaps of smooth, oblong oat seeds, which will die off over winter and leave room for the native plants to grow. Row by row and handful by handful, the team emptied their buckets, the sun beaming down.

Many people think of spring as the time for sowing seeds, but Stephens said there’s also a window in late fall. Some native species, including plenty of wildflowers, don’t just sprout as soon as they’re planted: they need to go through a cold, moist period to germinate. Humans can replicate it artificially, but it’s easier to let winter do the work. 

As the months go by, snow will press the seeds into the ground, getting them ready to sprout in spring. It takes a little while, but once they mature, flowers will start to bloom and the grasses could be nearly two metres tall. 

“The first couple of years, you don’t see much,” Stephens said. “It looks pretty weedy to be honest. But then the second year, you start to see some of the wildflowers bloom. Third year, you’re usually seeing grasses.” Eventually, the team hopes grassland birds — like meadowlarks and bobolinks, both threatened species in Ontario — will take up residence, along with butterflies and native bees. 

Meanwhile, magic is happening below the surface. As more plants grow, they add more organic material to the soil, making it looser and better able to support life. Less compact soil also means the ground can absorb more water — a handy quality when rain pours down or snow starts melting — helping to control floodwater and making not just the site but the area around it more resilient to extreme weather events, which are increasing with climate change. Native grasses also have far deeper root systems than crops, making the ground more stable and less susceptible to erosion. 

Just like the native grasslands that existed in the region hundreds of years ago, this one will still need care and stewardship in the future. It might need to be burned, mowed or have animals graze on it to replicate the natural processes that would prevent it from becoming overgrown. But if they can do it right, people can sustain the land and the land can help sustain them, too. 

“In southern Ontario, there’s really not a lot of ecosystem that hasn’t had incredible human influence,” Stephens said. 

“We’re so intertwined with each other.” 

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From the marshes and swamps that dot the land surrounding the Great Lakes to the bogs and fens scattered farther north, Ontario is a province of many, many wetlands.

If you’ve spent time in the rocky stretches of the Canadian Shield — where water often pools in stony hollows and wetlands can seem a dime a dozen — it can be hard to believe that the soggy landscapes left are just a fraction of what was here 150 years ago, before European settlers began filling them in. In southern Ontario in particular, about three-quarters of the wetlands that once existed are gone.

Of the ones that remain, a vanishing few are protected from development. An even smaller number have been assessed to see if they’re worth preserving: just 30 in the past decade. Fewer still are bestowed with protective status at the end of the expensive, time-consuming assessment process, a title known as “provincially significant.” Only one site achieved the title from May 2021 to May 2022 — which is why it’s so remarkable that a group of citizens managed to secure it this year for a soggy site in Bracebridge, Ont., a stone’s throw from Lake Muskoka.

Though the newly minted South Bracebridge Provincially Significant Wetland Complex shows the height of what a group of people who care can accomplish, the lengths they had to go to also show why the existing wetland protection system can seem impossible to navigate. The process required thousands of hours of volunteer work, a small army of hired experts and ultimately, half a million dollars.

“How does the average person cough up the dough to fight something like this?” Michael Appleby, a director of the non-profit South Bracebridge Environmental Protection Group, said.

“They don’t. The whole thing is stacked against them.”

It’s a process that matters more than ever. Wetlands are a natural climate solution — they absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They provide a home for species at risk and soak up rain and melting snow that could otherwise cause floods. Even small or degraded ones have an outsized impact on their ecosystems.

They’re also disappearing. Last year, Ontario’s auditor general concluded the province’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry — which has made it harder to protect wetlands and abandoned a strategy aimed at conserving them — has done very little to prevent more from being filled in or paved over.

Another member of the south Bracebridge group, Lisa Cumber, said advocates don’t exactly see an ally in the politician charged with overseeing Ontario’s wetland policy, Natural Resources Minister Graydon Smith. Before entering provincial politics, Smith was the mayor of Bracebridge, and voted in favour of allowing development near the wetland in 2021 without doing an assessment first. After the group appealed Bracebridge’s decision to a provincial tribunal, the project is going ahead but with stronger environmental protections.

Smith’s office didn’t respond to questions from The Narwhal, including whether any other wetlands have been designated as provincially significant this year. Back in 2021, however, Smith said he didn’t take the decision to approve the development lightly.

“It’s probably easy for people to say I’m being insincere when I say we’ve listened to the community and appreciated those comments but voted in a way that some people in the community don’t support, but such is the life of folks on council,” he told local media. 

So, what’s a would-be wetland protector to do?

“The system is broken,” Cumber said. “The public has to keep pushing and pushing.”

Bracebridge signed off on development without wetland evaluation

Before they were a development battleground, the south Bracebridge provincially significant wetlands were best known as a hiking spot for cottagers and locals alike, brimming with life. In most seasons, birdsong echoes through the air — over the years, people have reported seeing 177 different avian species there — while frogs and turtles poke their heads out of the water.

The Trans Canada Trail wraps around the public stretch of the wetland, known as Henry Marsh, which connects to other wetlands on the property that’s now set to be developed. It drains into the Muskoka River, which empties into Lake Muskoka, an iconic cottaging hotspot. 

The Town of Bracebridge, however, had decades ago earmarked the area around the wetland complex as part of its urban centre, meaning the properties around the trail could eventually be rezoned for development. A highway is set to be built there too, one day. Various people proposed various projects over the years, but nothing stuck — until 2018, when Toronto entrepreneur George Chen applied to the town to build a private boarding school there.

Plans for the school, which will be called Muskoka Royale College, show a campus of about 180 hectares. It includes five “precincts” — classrooms, residences and a fitness complex, connected by roads winding through open space. When finished, it will be home to 1,800 students. 

Quinto Annibale, a lawyer representing Muskoka Royale who is also known for his work with the right-wing group Vaughan Working Families, told The Narwhal the developer planned the project as if the wetlands were provincially significant even before the official designation. 

“Protection of the environment and the wetlands and all other natural heritage features on the property has been, and will continue to be, a paramount concern for my client,” Annibale wrote in an email.

Provincial urban planning rules can restrict development in and around significant wetlands, but they don’t require a wetland evaluation before building starts. And as a private project, Muskoka Royale isn’t subject to a provincial environmental assessment.

Chen has submitted some environmental studies to the town. According to Annibale, Muskoka Royale’s plans would increase the amount of protected land on the property. The site was previously zoned to allow a golf course, which would have disturbed more land than the school proposal, Annibale told The Narwhal. 

Still, the impact of Muskoka Royale on the South Bracebridge wetlands remains debated. Some mapping commissioned by the environmental group this fall indicates buildings could come close to the wetlands, infringing on the required buffer of space around them, and planned roads could cross them. 

Annibale called the group’s mapping “inaccurate” and said the building locations on the plans were “conceptual only,” and don’t show the “intended actual location of the buildings.” 

“The purpose of the plans was to demonstrate that the buildings could be accommodated within each precinct boundary while still protecting the wetlands as though they were [provincially significant wetlands],” Annibale said in an email.

As the development moved through the approval process in 2019 and 2020, locals worried the studies Chen had submitted voluntarily didn’t properly take the sensitivity of the wetlands into account. They suspected the wetlands might qualify as provincially significant, but without a formal assessment, how could anyone be sure? 

A wetland evaluation takes a while. It isn’t cheap, and depending on the details of a particular project, the results can make building more difficult. But the residents felt it was important.

“There is a mentality up here that says, ‘We’ve got so much of it, that we can afford to destroy a little bit,’ ” Appleby said. “Council elected to remain willfully ignorant.”

So a mix of cottagers and year-round residents formed the South Bracebridge Environmental Protection Group in 2019 and started pushing the town’s council to ask the province for more studies. 

“It was like a frickin’ high school study group,” Appleby said. “It was all of these 50- and 60-somethings hanging out together, going back to school …  learning about the process. It was brutal.” What astounded them, he added, was that there seemed to be no checks and balances — no way to ensure their elected officials took their arguments seriously.

The group spoke at council meetings and asked experts to weigh in, prompting conservation group Ontario Nature and wetland scientists to write Bracebridge council in support of a full evaluation. But it didn’t seem to make a difference: in 2021, the town approved Muskoka Royale without the assessment the group had asked for. “I believe I have the information to make a decision,” then-mayor Smith said. 

The group kept pushing. At one point, they even hired a public relations firm to help bring attention to the issue. They hired environmental lawyer David Donnelly to appeal the case to the Ontario Land Tribunal. They also hired ecologist Corey Stinson to do the wetland evaluation they thought was needed. 

To determine the value of the interconnected wetlands in the complex, Stinson visited the site 13 times in 2022, devoting early mornings and late evenings to cataloguing the flora and fauna and how the water flowed — both on foot and using aerial photos. 

“It’s kind of a magical place to be,” Stinson said. The wetlands are unusually well connected to each other, he said, covering about 140 hectares — roughly 260 football fields — storing a ton of water and forming the right habitat for a wealth of plants and animals. He found species at risk, too, like western chorus frogs and a secretive, heron-like bird called a least bittern.

Stinson scored the wetland complex using a standard provincial manual, which awards points based on factors like the species living there, human activity in the area and how much carbon it might hold. Then, Stinson fired off the results to Smith’s Ministry of Natural Resources. The ministry used to review wetland evaluations before making them official, but after the province changed the rules last year, the process is considered complete once the results have been sent to a “local decision maker.”  

As of June, the wetlands officially qualify as provincially significant. All told, the South Bracebridge Environmental Protection Group’s efforts cost half a million dollars, Appleby told The Narwhal.

Muskoka, a vast area encompassing several towns and many lakes, hosts both year-round residents and cottagers. Not everyone in the region is affluent — about a tenth of its permanent population is considered low-income, according to data from the 2021 census, and the District of Muskoka says 60 per cent earn less than $40,000 per year. But many in the area, particularly the summer residents, have deep pockets. Cottage owners on Lake Muskoka include Victoria and David Beckham, Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg. 

The board members at the South Bracebridge Environmental Protection Group aren’t celebrities, and they’re a mix of seasonal and permanent residents. Cumber and Appleby, for example, both live there year-round. Some in the group do have experience dealing with governments and big businesses, though. If getting their local wetland protected was a stretch for them — despite their ability to fundraise, hire experts and spend time volunteering — it’s hard to see how most other small communities could do the same.

“I get the sense from networking with other community groups like ours that we’re clearly not alone,” Appleby said. “We just happen to be … one of the communities that had a donor community that could write a cheque and help fight back.”

In early November 2023, the tribunal issued its decision about Muskoka Royale: the project can go ahead, but more environmental impact studies must be done first and there must be a larger buffer between the areas that will be disturbed for building and landscaping and the wetlands. Originally, the town approved Muskoka Royale’s proposal of a 15-metre buffer, but reversed their support for that during the tribunal process. The buffer is now set to be 30 metres.

It’s not everything the South Bracebridge Environmental Protection Group wanted, but it’s a step in the right direction, Cumber said. 

Natural features “can’t be protected if they are not recorded anywhere,” Cumber said. “So now we have a record and that is key to me.”

Annibale said the new designation “has no impact on my client’s development plans for the site.” The tribunal hearing was about whether the land could be rezoned to accommodate the school, he said: specific site plans, including building locations, are the next step in the process. 

“Muskoka Royale is extremely happy with the decision and the outcome of the hearing,” he wrote in an email. “The merits of the proposal have now been confirmed by the Ontario Land Tribunal … in what is a thoroughly considered and carefully reasoned decision.”

The Town of Bracebridge didn’t respond to questions from The Narwhal.

Auditor recommended Ontario learn from wetland protection systems in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick

The auditor general’s review of the province’s wetland protection rules last year found a series of problems. Many marshes that are vital to urban flood control don’t qualify for protection. Swamps that do qualify face delays in getting the official mantle. Wetlands that have not been studied can be destroyed, even if they’re likely to meet the standard for protection. At times, Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives have also used a special land-zoning power to override wetland protections and allow development. 

A matter of weeks before those findings were released, Smith’s ministry rewrote the provincial manual used to evaluate whether a wetland is provincially significant, making it harder for sites to gain or keep protection. The Bracebridge wetland is one of the first to be evaluated under the new rules. It still made the cut, but nearly 50 hectares of vernal pools in the complex — or wetlands that contain water for only part of the year — were not protected, although they would have qualified under the old rules. 

Although the province has invested in some piecemeal wetland restoration projects, Smith’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry didn’t commit to a single one of the auditor’s recommendations to make the system better. For example, the auditor suggested Ontario look to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, where wetlands that haven’t been studied receive a default protection until they can be assessed. As of now, that’s not happening here.  

Cumber said she believes it’s worth fighting to fix Ontario’s flawed system for protecting wetlands, even if she doesn’t have a lot of faith in the decision-makers.

“I think the system is broken, but it’s also broken because nobody’s been held accountable,” she said. “Now, they’ve been challenged.” 

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Wetlands across the globe have long served as natural repositories for humanity’s toxic legacy, absorbing and retaining hundreds to thousands of years’ worth of pollution. 

These swampy vaults have quietly been trapping air and water pollution for thousands of years, protecting the world from some of the worst effects of lead, mercury, copper, nickel and other poisonous materials. 

Now, however, a combination of human disruptions and ever increasing wildfires threaten to open these vaults, unleashing their long dormant toxic contents upon the world. 

Peat has a tremendous ability to capture retain toxic metals

The soil in many wetlands is composed of dead and decaying vegetation known as peat. Peat accumulates because perpetually sopping wetland conditions prevent the complete decomposition of dead vegetation. As these deposits accumulate, they form peatlands.

For centuries, peat has been drained, dried and extracted for heating fuel where wood is scarce. Though humans have long burned bricks of peat in their homes, climate change and wetland draining are drying entire wetlands, transforming them into perfect fuel for huge smoky wildfires.

Centuries of fallout from industrial processes such as smelting has deposited toxic metals in wetlands hundreds or even thousands of kilometres away from their point of origin. Human and industrial wastewater has, in places, added to this burden. 

Wetlands have absorbed and stored these contaminants, holding them back from vulnerable aquatic ecosystems and saving humans from ingesting them. 

Peat has a tremendous ability to capture and retain toxic metals by binding the metals to the peat itself through a process called adsorption. Once bound, the toxic metals are immobilized and pose little threat to the surrounding environment unless the peatland is disturbed, like from a wildfire.

Climate change and human activity degrade wetlands, with frightening results

Human activities such as road building and resource extraction have seriously disrupted wetland ecosystems, leaving drained wetlands vulnerable to fire, as Canadians saw in the catastrophic Fort McMurray, Alta., wildfire of 2016.

As climate change and human actions further degrade wetlands, the resulting wildfires threaten to return humanity’s toxic legacy. This cycle carries frightening implications for the health of people and the environment.

In 2015, Indonesia recorded about 35,000 excess deaths after a major peatland fire. Meanwhile, Canada and the United States are far from immune from exposure to peat fire smoke. In early June 2023, cities as far away as Washington, D.C., and New York were blanketed in thick smoke from peat fires in northern Canada, which is home to many of the world’s peatlands.

At the same time, climate change is accelerating the drying of peatlands everywhere, turning their huge stores of carbon into a carbon burden. Furthermore, as concentrated pollutants build up in wetlands, the accumulation of toxic metals is killing plants that act as their natural lid, allowing moisture to escape and speeding the conversion of more wetlands to tinderboxes. 

Once ignited, peatland fires are difficult to contain as they can smoulder for weeks, months or even years. They produce copious amounts of smoke and ash, filling the air with microscopic particles.

Even without metal pollution, these airborne particles can cause severe illness and death. Making a bad situation worse, toxic metals once safely stored in wetlands bind to these airborne particles and spread everywhere.

Nature-based solutions can offer hope for degraded wetlands

As with many global environmental issues, it is easy to feel helpless to control such a huge and complex problem. Fortunately, nature-based solutions can have a substantial positive impact on keeping this toxic legacy from being released. 

We can restore drying or dried-out wetlands back to their original state as functional ecosystems through, at the most basic level, preventing them from draining down canals and other human infrastructure. Indeed, even without further intervention, re-wetting wetlands can reduce their risk of wildfire ignition. However, restoration must be managed carefully, to avoid flushing toxic metals from wetlands into neighbouring streams, rivers and lakes.

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Dustin McKenzie-Hubbard was busy managing life with a new baby and starting his appliance repair business. Then he heard the call on the radio for Indigenous youth to write a climate action plan for Yukon First Nations.

“I’d never really been very concerned with climate change,” he says.

“But now — this is my entire life,” McKenzie-Hubbard, who is from the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations, says. “I’ve got two young girls, and I firmly believe in leaving the world a better place for them. Because we don’t own this land, we’re just here to take care of it.”

McKenzie-Hubbard is one of 13 fellows who answered the call to write a climate vision and action plan. Over months of Zoom calls, in-person meetings and sessions on the land, they worked together to come up with an urgently needed vision for how to face climate change locally.

Temperatures are increasing at a faster rate in Yukon than Canada as a whole. Thawing permafrost is causing damage to infrastructure and has created the conditions for a spruce bark beetle outbreak that is killing trees. Habitat, access to food, and migration patterns for animals like caribou, moose and muskrat are being affected, and the dramatic swings from forest fires to deeper snows are making feeding more difficult for some species, according to a 2022 report from Yukon University.

The Assembly of First Nations Yukon Region and the Council of Yukon First Nations — who advocate for all 14 First Nations in the territory — co-developed the fellowship at the direction of the 14 Yukon First Nations chiefs. They handed the reins to people under 30 years old to decide how the nations will take climate action in coming decades.

After about two years of work, their plan, Reconnection Vision, was ratified by Yukon First Nations leadership on March 17, 2023 and released publicly on June 30. 

The fellows say, despite all having very different lives, they realized they had a lot in common, and the idea of reconnection emerged quickly. The plan is centred on the idea that climate action means being in a good relationship with oneself, each other and the land. It lays out a vision to shift approaches to health, housing, food, energy and extraction, as well as economics, governance structures and education.

To the fellows, it is significant their work will guide individual First Nations’ climate adaptation plans.

“It just means that we’re being heard … having them follow our direction, and really taking what we say into consideration and truly believing us and hearing our experiences, and not invalidating those experiences,” one of the fellows, Mats’ä̀säna Mą Primozic of the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations, says.

“We’re working alongside our leadership to help change and shape the future for our next generation so we still have land and a place to go to heal.”

Electric vehicles and solar panels ‘don’t go deep enough’

The fellows call themselves the Children of Tomorrow, a reference to the work of Yukon First Nations leaders who, decades ago, demanded modern-day treaties with the federal government. In 1973, a delegation went to Ottawa to meet with then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau, holding a document called Together Today For Our Children Tomorrow, which outlined their grievances and demands for a settlement. They launched a negotiation process, setting the foundation for First Nations in the territory to begin reaching self-government agreements.

The fellows see their role as a continuation of that work — creating a climate plan to protect land for the children of tomorrow, as past leaders did for them.

The plan gets into specific climate actions, such as integrating traditional medicine and land-based healing into the health care system; building homes from local materials; growing trades training in all communities; bringing in incentives to do away with lawns and promote natural ecosystems; growing community and backyard greenhouses; and decommodifying food. But the central message of the plan is much broader and deeper. 

The current approach to climate action addresses the symptoms of climate change, not the cause, the fellows write. Reducing carbon emissions alone is not enough, they argue, calling it “carbon tunnel vision.” 

“We believe quick fixes that respond to these symptoms that are rooted in consumption, such as electric vehicles and solar panels, don’t go deep enough. We want to treat the root cause of climate change: disconnection,” the plan reads.

“If we continue to focus on climate actions built from the same worldview that created the climate crisis, we cannot expect society to change.”

They say this comes from being connected to the four parts of the medicine wheel — spiritual, emotional, mental and physical — in relation to ourselves, each other and the land.

“It’s meant for everybody, every Yukoner and even beyond Yukon,” Yekhunashîn Khatuku (Jewel Davies) of Carcross/Tagish First Nation, says. “We’re all supposed to share healthy connections with the world, we’re all supposed to share healthy connections with each other, with the land and with all four parts of ourselves. Everybody as a human, not just First Nations people. As First Nations people, it’s our job to lead the way in that.”

The plan identifies barriers and teachings, and outlines steps to bigger visions, like decolonizing education — all based on the concept of reconnection. 

‘How are people supposed to care about the land they’re living on, about the world, if everyone’s hurting?’

Many of the fellows emphasized the importance of recognizing the hardships they confronted in their lives, and how that is tied to their reconnection to the land and their cultures — and eventually writing this plan. McKenzie-Hubbard says a point made by educator Lee Brown in a session really stuck with him: healthy people create a healthy community, which creates a healthier world.

“That struck home with me. Here, in the Yukon, there’s a lot of hurt. There’s a lot of loss, there’s a lot of drinking, drugs, everything like that. We all seem to be losing people without any real break. Like by the time we’re done grieving, if we even get that far, it’s on to the next one,” he says.

“How are people supposed to care about the land they’re living on, about the world, if everyone’s hurting?”

McKenzie-Hubbard says he internalized racism he experienced growing up, to the point he did not want to be seen as First Nations. He had a traditional childhood, but as he got older, he distanced himself from his community. He said all that changed when he had his daughter.

“It pushed me back to accepting myself and wanting to come back and be a part of the community, and be chosen for this fellowship. It’s changed my entire life. My values are entirely different now that I’m part of the community,” he says. “And being able to share that with my children especially, teaching them to be prideful and never be ashamed of who we are or what we’ve gone through.”

Nagodigá (Robby Dick) grew up in Ross River, in a tight-knit community. He agrees a major challenge in his experience as a fellow is the constant grief of losing community members.

“You can’t even grieve because we lose so many people. Right now, we have a missing person here in Ross [River]. We have no idea what happened,” he says. “Her name’s Ramona Peter, and she’s been gone for two months now … That’s one of the main barriers in small communities. It’s hard to focus on things going on outside of life, like the fellowship, when you think about that in terms of grieving.”

Dick grew up learning to harvest moose, caribou and sheep. He experienced his own disconnection when he struggled with drinking, he says. His grandma told him “it was no good to drink,” two months before she passed. 

“I really took that to heart … I always remembered what she said,” he says. But it took a couple more years of struggle until one day, he decided to quit and asked his dad to go into the bush.

“We got the truck ready, we hit the road, and went into the mountains,” he says. “That was my beginning to reconnect again. Just the fact that my dad listened to me … the fact that I was in the mountains with my dad and brothers … was really, really great.”

Now, Dick has served on the Ross River Dena Council, and has become an advocate for Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas and land guardians. 

Other youth shared similar stories of struggles overcome. Ryan Kyikavichik of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation says he has been on a journey of reconnection and healing. He is from Old Crow, Yukon’s northernmost and only fly-in community. When he left Old Crow as a teen, things started “going downhill.” He wanted different things from life.

“It starts off with a very human story. And, you know, it’s unfortunate that it’s not a very happy one,” he says.

“I kind of forced myself to change, but I didn’t know how. I didn’t have the right tools … Then, I ended up in the fellowship. I got asked to [join]. I said, I don’t know if this group is going to actually help me. How is [addressing] climate change going to help me make real effects to my life and the things around me?”

“But as I went along, I slowly started shifting. … I started getting introduced to these new spaces that I really never experienced before. It really did give me the time and space to practice healing, to practice my sobriety. I really became a student of life after that. And I became passionate about climate.”

Other fellows told similar stories of being disconnected in some way, and finding their way home.

Yekhunashîn Khatuku says it’s important “to mention all the loss and hard times that each of us have gone through throughout the whole fellowship.” She says it kept her driven in creating a climate action plan to address the “broken, colonial systems that are imposing all of this hurt on us.”

“It’s definitely extremely encouraging to have this work that feels really deeply meaningful, and can actually spur transformation.”

Climate change is changing Yukon

Kadrienne Hummel from the First Nation of Na-Cho Nyäk Dun says small northern communities are highly impacted by climate change, facing the risks of “forest fires, and having food transported through one highway and the heavy, really cold winters.” 

“Snow is not coming when it’s supposed to, or coming earlier than it’s supposed to, and that’s messing up our patterns with harvesting,” Primozic says.

Kyikavichik said salmon returns in Old Crow have plummeted. By June of this year, Vuntut Gwitchin reported river beds drying up and killing thousands of salmon fry and unhatched eggs.

“I’m afraid that our Mother Earth just can’t rejuvenate itself fast enough to keep up to certain demands,” he says.

Pauline Frost, Chief of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation, told the CBC that only 349 Chinook returned up the Porcupine River last year, and this year’s forecasts look bleak.

“Things are really bad for salmon right now … We could be looking at extinction within, you know, 20 years — it’s bad,” she told the CBC.

Yukon First Nations building a community of empowered leaders

Däk’älämą (Jocelyn Joe-Strack) Indigenous Knowledge research chair at Yukon University, was part of the steering committee that supported the fellows. The fellowship informed her own reconnection journey — she sang in public for the first time when she sang for the fellows.

“I was super nervous to do it in front of people,” she says. “I have sung in public now a few more times and feel more confident with it. That’s part of the story — a real sacred story.”

Joe-Strack, a citizen of the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations, says they are planning a reconnection program based on the vision document. 

“The vision is to bring in more youth every year, and just build this community of people that are working on transformation and their healing and able to go into our nations and bring that,” she says.

Elder Mark Wedge from Carcross/Tagish First Nation was one of the four guiding Elders to the fellows. He wants to see the climate plan taught in schools, to educate young people on how to become leaders. 

“Look at all the sacred teachings and religions of the world, what’s the common theme? Reinforce the virtues to be honest, to be gracious, generous, sharing — all of these things are sacred teachings. And that’s as basic as they are,” he says.

Wedge hopes to see the document impact how land tenureship and resource extraction are done, and how ownership is perceived.

“When the salmon are running, they own that river, leave it alone. When the sheep are lambing, they own that mountain, leave it alone. Ownership in that context looks different,” he says. 

Kluane Adamek, Yukon Regional Chief to the Assembly of First Nations, says northerners and young people need to be leading these changes because of the climate change risks they face.

“This is a plan that needs to be showcased to the world,” Adamek says. She compared it to experiencing burnout from work and not investigating the root cause, but the plan invites you to look at the cause.

“It’s like taking a minute to pause to say, am I in balance, so that everything else in my life is in balance?” she says. “I know that might seem super fluffy, but when we break down the cause of climate change, how do we get people to lower their emissions and use? How do we look at breaking all these really huge international issues down if people aren’t actually changing the way they see the world?”

An ‘exciting’ and ‘heavy’ time

The fellows hope the document will guide policy-making, be used in education and provoke discussion. 

“The more we make room for these conversations, these discussions, these nuances, the further we’re gonna get,” Geehaadastee (Shauna Yeomans-Lindstrom) of the Taku River Tlingit Council, says.

“It’s so easy to get bogged down in all of the stuff that still needs to be done, but it’s a really, really exciting time to be an Indigenous youth. It’s also a really, really heavy time,” she says. “We’re trying to figure out how to deal with that and navigate and push through these challenging times. But also celebrate that we’re finally being represented.”

For all of them, a fire has been lit.

“My biggest motivations are my children,” McKenzie-Hubbard says. “The school system I grew up in and everything that I’ve lived through, I don’t want that for them. I want to — I am going to — make it better.”

“We are going to make it better.”

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.

Downtown Winnipeg is a concrete jungle. In the maze of office towers and asphalt, surface parking lots are more common than parks. The city’s harsh weather and abundance of pavement have choked out downtown trees; on summer days heat sticks to the pavement and lingers in the air. The city’s own data shows the downtown is home to fewer trees, fewer parks and hotter average summer temperatures than other parts of the city.

With a warming climate that promises to bring more frequent and powerful storms, heat waves and extreme weather events, the urban desert leaves downtown Winnipeg residents — many of whom live in higher levels of poverty than their suburban neighbours — increasingly vulnerable to illness and death.

It’s a slow-growing crisis — but Winnipeg isn’t alone.

In the sprawling prairie city of Edmonton, which is facing a slate of downtown crises similar to Winnipeg’s, the downtown “can look like a barren wasteland,” Alex Hryciw, who chairs Edmonton’s downtown recovery coalition, says.

A wasteland is bad for business and not likely to help protect the city from the impacts of a warming climate. So Edmonton has decided to turn parking lots into paradise, repurposing seven paved lots into more than two football fields worth of lush, green, downtown park.

“I think cities are starting to understand that there’s not going to be another major build, there’s not going to be a hotel or an arena or something else that’s going to save our downtown,” Hryciw says.

“If we want our downtowns to be sustainable, we have to bring that sense of calmness back into the core.”

The unofficially named “Warehouse Park” is part of a broad new vision in Edmonton that aims to make natural spaces — and natural infrastructure — the new norm. It’s a vision echoed across the country as the idea of living cities, where greenspace is widespread and sustainable, begins to take hold. If applied in Winnipeg, widespread natural infrastructure could breathe new life, health and climate resilience into the city’s downtown core.

What are Living Cities?

Over the last two decades, Canada on the whole has gotten less green. According to Statistics Canada, the average amount of urban land covered by healthy vegetation dropped eight percentage points nationwide between 2000 and 2022. Winnipeg saw the second highest loss of green in that time period — after Milton, Ont. — losing 37 per cent of its lush urban lands.

Such a significant loss of greenery isn’t just an eyesore; it’s bad for health. Combining more intense weather with a tendency toward concrete gridlocks makes a downtown more susceptible to climate-related crises such as floods and heat islands — the phenomenon that causes urban centres to experience warmer temperatures than rural areas. In downtown Winnipeg, home to many of the city’s newcomers, Indigenous peoples and people living in poverty, it is the most vulnerable residents who bear the most grievous impacts of a changing climate.

By contrast, more nature and greenery is thought to encourage walking, cycling, community cohesion and environmental education. Studies have shown greenspace reduces the risks of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, strokes, dementia and respiratory illness. Greenery is also shown to reduce anxiety and depression, while lowering mortality risks.

That’s why policy experts have started emphasizing the need for natural, or green, infrastructure — things like wetlands, woodlands, parks, street trees, green roofs, community gardens and permeable pavements.

“It’s all the sorts of things that help our cities to function like a natural system, and use the power of nature to address some of the challenges related to climate change,” Brianna Salmon, executive director of climate action nonprofit Green Communities Canada, says.

“We know that nature-based solutions are effective at managing floods, helping rainwater to drain where it falls, that city centres are cooler when there’s green infrastructure, that they reduce urban heat-island effect.”

Beyond the environmental benefits, green infrastructure is a boon to social, mental and physical wellbeing, can help provide food security for residents who need it and, in the long term, it’s less costly than traditional infrastructure, Salmon explains.

The three pillars that define a living city are “equitable, abundant and thriving” green infrastructure, Salmon says.

That means parks, trees, community gardens and other greenery are adequately funded, well-maintained and prioritized in places with the greatest need — places where people are most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Those communities, Salmon says, should not only benefit from green infrastructure, but also help plan, design and “bring it to life with their hands and their hearts.”

Above all, living cities are places where green infrastructure is “the new normal,” she adds.Rather than a series of small demonstration projects, living cities integrate green infrastructure into policy decisions, design considerations and long-term municipal planning.

“It’s really thinking about it as being a primary solution to creating more sustainable, climate-resilient and nature-rich cities,” Salmon says. “Green infrastructure can meet communities where they’re at; it’s such a hopeful and positive way to be thinking about developing our cities.”

The beginnings of green infrastructure in downtown Winnipeg

The idea of green infrastructure isn’t new to Winnipeg. The city’s climate action plan, active transportation strategies and urban forest strategy all recognize the importance of green infrastructure, citing benefits to the environment, mental and physical wellbeing and the city budgets. Winnipeg attractions like the winter river trails, The Forks and the Assiniboine Forest all incorporate elements of green infrastructure by encouraging residents to preserve and engage with the natural world.

And in the downtown, where 150 surface parking lots cover 20 per cent of the core according to 2018 figures, a group of landscape architects are working to introduce more natural infrastructure by adding parks, trees and other simple environmental solutions to the maze of concrete.

“The first thing we think about when we’re doing any kind of urban design is how is this going to function from a social standpoint. It has to be usable, it has to be liveable and attractive and make people comfortable,” Glen Manning, principal architect at HTFC Planning and Design, says.

“Providing overhead canopy and the pleasure of being in a space with lots of plants, those contribute to liveability.”

Manning has been involved in a series of downtown green infrastructure projects. He helped design a tangle of trees and shrubbery at Manitoba Hydro Place; he helped revitalize the courtyard at downtown’s Steinkopf Gardens; he contributed to the oasis of prairie grasslands, mini-wetlands and rainwater harvest systems at Millenium Library Park. He’s even been working with the city to come up with a better way to plant trees downtown. To Manning, green infrastructure isn’t just possible in Winnipeg, “it’s inevitable.”

“Green infrastructure is where we can do things like stormwater management, improving our water quality, energy consumption reduction, air quality — all sorts of benefits arise out of doing things that have this ability to serve the resiliency requirements,” Manning says.

But downtown Winnipeg presents a unique challenge for green urban design. The soil beneath the city is a dense clay, the weather can be harsh, pavement abounds and road salt and construction threaten the health of inner-city greenery.

“That means that a lot of the things that other places are doing as part of their spectrum of green infrastructure solutions don’t really work the same way here,” Manning says.

Winnipeg is working with a narrow selection of plants and trees able to withstand the difficult conditions, but the city has started to find ways to extend the life of its downtown greenery.

Street trees, for example, used to be planted in three-foot by three-foot pots nestled into holes in the sidewalk. Those trees lacked soil and nutrients, and often died within a decade. Now, Manning says, he’s helping the city incorporate soil cells — crates of soil that can be installed underneath sidewalk pavement — to help give the trees enough soil volume to grow. That soil also helps retain stormwater, reducing stress on the city’s aging sewage system.

While the company’s design projects have so far been a success — Manning points to the vibrant hum of activity at the Manitoba Hydro Place park on summer days, for example — green infrastructure projects have been moving slowly in the city centre.

“A lot of these technologies are pretty much accepted, they’re almost standard and they’re required by bylaws in some cities,” Manning says. “In Winnipeg we’re not there yet, so we don’t have that same kind of urgency to address these things.”

In a city like Winnipeg, green infrastructure can feel risky for developers. The upfront costs can be steep and the city hasn’t yet studied, modelled and proven the benefits of green solutions.

“No one wants to be a pioneer,” Manning says. “It would be reassuring to developers and administrators of various stripes to know these things are tested and understood and functioning well.”

Big investments reap big rewards in downtown Edmonton

Like Winnipeg, Edmonton’s downtown is challenged by harsh weather, aging infrastructure and limited political attention.

“Our city, as an administration, has to prioritize every area of the city equitably, which means the downtown doesn’t always fall into a regular rhythm of neighborhood renewal,” Hyrciw explains.

“We really are trying to ready our bureaucracy within the city to understand that in order to achieve what we want to see, all of these incremental policies like natural infrastructure, tree canopies and plant life matter.”

But Warehouse Park, set to be completed in 2025, could be a catalyst for changing priorities.

“The concept is public investment in public infrastructure in order to realize private investment,” senior city planner Claire St. Aubin says.

Edmonton had been planning for a downtown park since 2010 in the hopes a new greenspace would lead to more foot traffic and economic development. The city spent $36 million buying and expropriating land (including seven paved parking lots), and budgeted another $42 million on designing and building the park.

Those major investments have brought major returns. Private developers are already planning to build more than 3,000 residential units within walking distance of the park and those buildings will include mixed use space for new businesses.

“Where there is high value land, where there is marketable land, is where people have access to and can see greenspace,” St. Aubin says.

“What we’re seeing in common Western culture these days is all this discussion about how healthy it is, how good it is for our psychological and physical well being to be in and around green.”

Warehouse Park is just one of a network of green infrastructure projects Edmonton is working to integrate in the coming years as part of an overarching “green and walkable” downtown strategy, St. Aubin says. In the eastern downtown neighbourhood of The Quarters, the city started piloting “green streets” lined with soil for healthy urban forest growth, and plans to develop green pathways that link the neighbourhood to the nearby river valley.

The city has found success getting private investors to buy into the green vision by emphasizing the role vibrancy plays in safe, comfortable and economically thriving downtowns. They’ve secured federal money from green infrastructure funds, and encouraged private developers to see a greener downtown as a stronger tourist attraction.

“National infrastructure is so critical to sustaining recovery throughout our central business district,” Hryciw says.

A greener downtown is possible for Winnipeg

In her role as sustainable transportation coordinator at the Green Action Centre, Mel Marginet has transformative dreams for Winnipeg’s downtown that would see a focus on sustainable, walkable neighbourhoods replace the existing web of car-centric and pedestrian-hostile infrastructure.

“If I could wave my magic wand, the downtown would be a super-exciting place to walk with lots of shade trees and no empty surface parking lots,” Marginet says.

“Natural infrastructure is really critical because we can tackle so many problems at once, from a climate perspective, to habitats for birds and bees … we will always be happier and healthier when we work in sync with nature.”

Simple changes like wider sidewalks, more shade trees, protected bike lanes and a return to two-way motorist traffic could all help improve the vibrancy in downtown Winnipeg, she says. Parks and greenspace are “vitally important,” too.

“Not only for making our cities more comfortable … but also for that public space,” Marginet says.

“Spontaneous interactions with your neighbours create that sense of safety, looking out for each other.”

These dreams aren’t “pie in the sky,” she says. Winnipeg’s existing policy documents and planning frameworks — including an award-winning walking and cycling strategy that would see more pathways and greenspace throughout the city — already emphasize the importance of green infrastructure in the city’s future. The only hurdle left to cross is securing political will.

“It hasn’t taken very long for us to get to this very terrible place,” Marginet says. “By putting our heads together and following best practices elsewhere, we can get out of it quite quickly.”

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After some tense moments, including a brief breakdown in talks, 196 countries reached a new global agreement at COP15 to stem the stunning loss of biodiversity worldwide.

Though not quite as ambitious as many hoped it would be, the new Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework lays out a series of 23 targets that — if met — could help prevent further extinctions.

Among the targets, countries agreed to ensure at least 30 per cent of the world’s land and waters are effectively conserved and managed by 2030, to significantly reduce the risk of extinction, to phase out or reform at least $500 billion in subsidies that harm biodiversity and to reduce the risks from pesticides and other harmful chemicals by at least half. 

“The health of our forests, oceans, animals and all biodiversity underpins the very strength and stability of our societies. We cannot take that for granted any longer,” Environment and Climate Change Canada Minister Steven Guilbeault said in a statement Dec. 19 from COP15, the United Nations biodiversity summit held in Montreal during the last two weeks.

“Here in Montreal, we have set a new course. Now it is time to deliver,” he said.

“This agreement is a critical achievement and if implemented fully could take great strides towards combatting extinction and conserving biodiversity,” Charlotte Dawe, a policy and conservation campaigner with Wilderness Committee, said in a statement Monday.

She warned, however, “there is much more work to be done and governments must use policy change to achieve the targets.” 

“Currently, businesses are trusted to ‘do the right thing’ when it comes to nature protection, and they fail every time,” Dawe said.

The question now is whether governments will take the necessary action to meet the targets they’ve adopted. Their track record so far is poor. 

Countries failed to fully achieve any of the targets adopted in 2010 under the previous agreement. 

And in the 30 years since the first countries signed onto the international biodiversity treaty, under which these 10-year agreements are negotiated, the state of nature has declined dramatically.

Today, biodiversity is shrinking faster than at any other point in human history. Numerous species have already been erased from the planet and one million more are at risk of extinction.

Canada made big conservation commitments at COP15, but big promises have been made before

In Canada, more than 5,000 wild species are at some risk of extinction, according to the most comprehensive assessment of biodiversity ever undertaken here.

Guilbeault and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau signalled a renewed commitment to the conservation of biodiversity with a flurry of announcements at COP15.

They committed $800 million over seven years to four Indigenous-led conservation initiatives, announced support for the First Nations Guardians Network, next steps towards the creation of two significant Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas and committed millions of dollars for ocean restoration projects. The first in a series of bilateral nature agreements between the federal and provincial and territorial governments was also announced between Canada and the Yukon. The long awaited agreement with B.C. is expected in the New Year. 

Throughout the conference, Canada pushed countries to formally adopt the 30 per cent protection by 2030 target (commonly referred to as 30 by 30) at COP15, positioning it as a sort of north star for biodiversity in the same way that limiting warming to 1.5 C is for climate change.

Trudeau told reporters during a roundtable discussion he was optimistic Canada had a clear path to conserving 25 per cent of lands and waters by 2025 on its way to meeting the 30 by 30 goal. (Canada had conserved 13.5 per cent of lands and freshwater as of the end of last year and 14.66 per cent of marine areas as of June.)

At the same time, the federal government committed to a major shift in the way conservation and land use decisions are made to one that ensures Indigenous nations are in the “driver’s seat.”

“They’re saying everything we want to hear, but there’s a little bit of a ‘well, let’s just see,’ because the track record — it’s not a great track record,” Clarissa Sampson, an ecological economist at the David Suzuki Foundation, told The Narwhal. 

In B.C. — the province with the highest number of species at risk — Premier David Eby recently directed his new minister of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship, Nathan Cullen, to work towards protecting 30 per cent of B.C.’s lands by 2030, which will be critical to meeting Canada’s international targets because the province has currently only protected about 15 per cent of land.

In a sit-down interview with The Narwhal at COP15, B.C. Energy, Mines and Low Carbon Innovation Minister Josie Osborne and Environment and Climate Change Strategy Minister George Heyman said the province is also changing the way land use decisions get made.

Heyman noted the province has committed to implementing the recommendations from a 2020 review of the way it manages old-growth forests. A key recommendation was to shift away from an industry-first approach to one that prioritizes ecosystem health and determines from there how economic activity fits in, he said.

“To me, it’s a matter of understanding that both environmental and ecosystem health and economic activity are interdependent,” Heyman said.

Osborne added that the creation of the Ministry of Water, Land and Stewardship was a significant step as it brought land-use planning and natural resource policy-making under one roof so to speak.

“That really is a recognition of the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act and the fact that we must do business differently in the province,” she said.

Osborne said B.C. is shifting its approach to conservation away from the “hard edges” of parks and other protected areas, echoing comments Trudeau made earlier this month about leaving a parks-style approach to conservation behind.

Instead, the province is looking at ways to preserve “the ecosystem services that we all rely on, but at the same time, allow for certain activities done in the right place in the right way by the right people,” Osborne said.

Conservation groups worry B.C. may rely on ‘fancy’ accounting to meet goals

Internal government documents obtained by The Narwhal suggest B.C. plans to rely on old-growth management areas, ungulate winter range designations and wildlife habitat areas — which do not ensure long term protection — to meet its conservation goals.

Dawe worries the approach is “a fancy way of basically hitting those 30 by 30 targets on paper.”

“In actuality there’s no way you can log a forest and call it protected,” she said.

“Anyone now that goes for a drive in a forested area or a mountainous area will see scars, cutblock scars across the land, so I think this green idea of B.C. is really starting to crack and break,” Dawe said.

Old-growth forests hold an immense amount of biodiversity. When they’re destroyed, so is their ability to support plants and animals, including endangered caribou and spotted owls. Their loss is also felt deeply by communities.

“Since I’ve been in Montreal at COP15 they’re going full bore deforesting my ancient lands. And I don’t know what to say, it’s disheartening,” Kwakiutl Hereditary Chief Walas Namugwis, whose English name is David Mungo Knox, told The Narwhal.

“We’re not us without our old-growth trees, we can’t make our totem poles, we can’t carve our big houses, we can’t carve canoes, without our medicines we can’t heal. So it’s another cultural genocide,” he said, at a hotel restaurant across the street from Montreal’s Palais des Congrès where negotiations were underway.

Back in his home territory on Vancouver Island, trees were being cut down near where coho salmon had recently spawned and in the habitat of the northern red-legged frog, a species of special concern under the federal Species at Risk Act.

“Governments need to grow a spine, push back against big corporate industrial market approaches and then let a more diverse economy flourish,” Mark Worthing, director of Awi’nakola Foundation, a new organization that combines Indigenous Kknowledge, scientific research and the arts to conserve and restore forests.

“We’ve lost the taste for announcements,” he said. “Stop talking about it, start doing it.”

“That’s pretty much been my take home from this too. We need radical change and that needs to come now,” Ma’amtagila Hereditary Chief Makwala, whose English name is Rande Cook, said. 

“We’re in a place right now where it literally is about the planet and we’re putting a timeline on the existence of humanity. For the health of all of us we need to make some real radical changes,” Cook, who is also part of the Awi’nakola Foundation, said.

Asked at what point the B.C. government would, for instance, issue a hard stop of logging in critical caribou habitat, Osborne noted the “importance of land use planning with Indigenous nations and really truly listening.”

“So incorporating those worldviews, those values and understanding what the solutions are we can provide together so that we know and we agree together enough is enough,” she said.

Osborne added that it’s also important to understand decisions around resource and land use impact communities.

“Simply stopping an activity overnight isn’t going to provide the kind of assistance or security or ability for a community to determine what its next steps are, how people are going to continue to support themselves and their communities and that has to be part of this conversation as well,” she said.

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.