That's great. I can start.
As mentioned, my name is Elena Bennett. I am an associate professor at McGill University, based here in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue.
I have been studying agriculture, especially soil and water quality with respect to fertilizer use, for 20 years. For the last 10 years my research has increasingly focused on land management in agricultural areas and understanding the multiple benefits that communities receive from agricultural lands, which include not only food production and its concomitant economic benefits, but other benefits as well: places to recreate, flood control, water quality, climate regulation through carbon storage, and more.
We call those benefits “ecosystem services”, a term that has become of great interest to the research and management communities for the past 10 years. I'll be talking about that today.
I want to start by thanking you very much for the invitation to speak. I'm really pleased to see that the government is taking climate change seriously and is considering how that's going to affect important Canadian sectors.
I want to share one overarching idea today that leads to two recommendations you might consider. The overarching idea is this: that we have to think beyond food production when we think about agricultural landscapes. While it's undoubtedly true that Canada's agricultural landscapes are important for food production and for Canada's economy, it's also true that these landscapes provide many other benefits to Canadians that are undervalued, if they're even considered at all.
If you think about your favourite Canadian agricultural landscape, it might be potato fields of P.E.I. or canola in the Prairies; it might be corn soy here in Quebec, or maybe fruit orchards in British Columbia. If you picture that landscape in your mind and try to list the benefits we get from those landscapes, the ecosystem services, probably the first ones you think about are things like food and water, or maybe fuel wood and maple syrup around here. If I push you to think about it a little longer, you might also consider aesthetic beauty, opportunities for hiking and recreation, or maybe the inspiration they deliver for people to make art or other things of cultural significance.
If I really push you further than that, then you might finally recognize that these landscapes are providing flood control, that they're regulating climate, that they're storing carbon in their trees and soil, and that they're providing high-quality water for drinking and fishing and swimming.
The problem is that thus far our fairly single-minded focus on increasing efficiency of food production in these landscapes creates dramatic declines in these other ecosystem services that are provided in agricultural landscapes. To explain that a little bit, there are trade-offs between ecosystem services. For example, if I want to produce more food or produce more food more efficiently, I might increase the rate of fertilizer use, but that's probably going to lead to declines in water quality, and those sorts of trade-off interactions are the case across a great many agricultural landscapes.
A few years ago the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, which was a UN-sponsored, five-year, 1,000-plus-person effort to assess the state of the planet in terms of its ecosystem services, found that services of food and fibre production are increasing, but other services, especially those that have trade-offs with agriculture, such as flood control or water quality or recreation, are declining. At the same time, this Millennium Ecosystem Assessment found that demand for all types of services is increasing.
We're facing a very intense pressure right now to expand agriculture, to intensify agriculture, to increase production for economic reasons, for reasons of food security. Because we can very easily quantify the economic value of food production, I think we sometimes get caught up in policies and decision-making that focus only on that food aspect of agricultural landscapes, but it's incredibly important to Canadians that we remember all of these other things of value, all of these other ecosystem services that are provided in these landscapes, before it's too late.
How can we do this? This question leads to my first recommendation to you, which is to think about enacting policies and creating funding for and generally taking steps that encourage the following four things: measuring the biophysical production of these other non-food delivery services; measuring demand for those, measuring how much are people wanting from their landscapes; estimating the benefits that are delivered to people in agricultural landscapes from more than just food; and then finally, ensuring that farmers and farm communities have a way to benefit from the fact that they are providing these services to other Canadians.
Any efforts to measure this or to ensure that farmers are benefiting will help to make sure that we remember that those benefits also come from agricultural landscapes and that these agricultural communities continue to take the kinds of actions they're taking now that ensure we can keep benefiting from these things that our agricultural landscapes do.
Let me move on to my second recommendation, which touches on the issue of resilience more directly, and it's in many ways related.
A lot of our efforts go toward sustainably optimizing crop production while taking sustainability into account. However, that's not enough. When I talk about this, it's strategies like more crop per drop, which aims to get more crop growth per water irrigation, or increased yield per unit input of fertilizers, or reduced greenhouse gas emissions per unit of product produced. Those are important and necessary, but it's not going to be sufficient, and it is probably going to reduce the resilience of these communities to climate change in the long run.
In other words, we've been very good at increasing agricultural productivity in areas with access to fertilizers and with access to technology, but there's a lot of evidence that these steps we're taking, which increase this narrow-sense efficiency of agricultural production without thinking about resilience, are leading to highly damaging fluctuations in food production and food costs and environmental outcomes.
For example, native pollinators of crops are declining around the world, including in Canada, because of land-use change, because of pesticide use and other changes that are happening, but managed honey bees aren't adequately compensating for that loss.
What I would encourage instead is that we think about aiming for resilient agriculture. How can we meet demand for agricultural products and economic growth over the short and long term without undermining—