I was emphasizing the fact that the impacts of climate change on our land and water are extremely sobering. We have truly reached a point where the biological underpinnings of our natural capital, our natural heritage, which sustains Earth's life support systems are truly at risk. This includes threats to our clean water, food, ecosystem services—such as air and water purification, and waste treatment—and life-sustaining services, such as recreational opportunities.
Canadian communities are already grappling with water shortages, forest fires, and here in B.C. certainly the mountain pine beetle epidemic, underlining the need to evolve the way we manage our land and water to take climate change into account. This needs to be a central consideration in a national conservation plan.
This includes the imperative to complete our protected area system, particularly our representative system of national parks, and to design these in a way that takes into account the best available scientific information about climate change. This means augmenting the elevational and latitudinal breadth of protected areas, essentially allowing species the space to move north. It means simply protecting more and doing it smarter.
I recommend to you a recent editorial in the journal, Conservation Biology. It emphasized that scientific reviews and studies based on empirical evidence and rigorous analysis consistently indicate that somewhere in the range of 25% to 75% of a typical region must be managed with conservation of nature as a primary objective, if we wish to reach conservation goals and biodiversity protection goals. The realities of climate change militate towards being at the more conservative end of that spectrum.
There may be an additional economic silver lining for doing so. Massive amounts of greenhouse gas pollution are emitted when we degrade natural ecosystems, for example, through logging. Where areas are set aside from logging or from other ecosystem degradation, those avoided greenhouse gas emissions may have a new economic value in emerging carbon markets, as that avoided living carbon is not released into the atmosphere.
Second, I wish to speak to the need for sustainable land and water management outside of protected areas.
Clearly, large, interconnected, representative protected areas must be the cornerstone of any national conservation plan, yet any conservation plan that stops at the borders of protected areas will fail.
In many areas of Canada, habitats that once existed in large blocks have become fragmented by human activity. Outside of protected areas, small patches of older forests may be left, surrounded by clear-cuts, and seismic lines and roads may bisect the landscape. Perhaps most critically in an era of climate change and warming climate, fragmentation can limit the ability of organisms to move in response to changing climate conditions. And I'm quoting here from one of the articles cited in the notes you have: “Even with completely unfragmented landscapes, some species will not be able to move with the rapidity necessary” to avoid extirpation or extinction.
For the past two decades, maintaining or improving connectivity across landscapes has been the action most frequently recommended by scientists for enabling biodiversity adaptation to climate change, and again needs to be a central and forming principle of a national conservation plan.
I need to be clear that I'm not just talking about wildlife corridors. We need to be actively managing the matrix, the area outside of legally protected areas, to maintain functioning natural ecosystems. We need to be thinking about what needs to be left behind on the land to maintain habitat and ecosystem services to give species, and ultimately ourselves, a fighting chance in the face of climate change. Strong environmental laws and conservation-focused land and marine planning are key tools to improve the sustainability of natural resource management.
In particular, as was flagged previously in our submissions on the seven-year review of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, a more proactive spatial regional approach to cumulative effects management could go a long way to addressing existing gaps.
I wish also to speak to the honourable treatment of constitutionally protected aboriginal and treaty rights. For the past decade I've had the privilege of working with a number of first nations as they developed land-use plans within their territories and engaged in government-to-government negotiations to reconcile these plans with the plans and regulations of the crown.
I wish to point out that many of the most innovative recent land-use outcomes and conservation gains in British Columbia have emerged from such reconciliation negotiations. A national conservation plan needs to fully embrace the role of first nations governments in shaping land-use outcomes and the constitutional imperative of maintaining and restoring the ecological basis of first nations cultures.
Finally, I want to emphasize that a framework of strong federal and provincial environmental laws must provide the backbone of an effective national conservation plan. For decades, Canadians have depended on our federal government to safeguard our families and nature from pollution, toxic contamination, and other environmental problems through strong environmental law. Canadians hold dear our natural heritage and our ability to have a say about resource decisions that will affect our lives. A national conservation plan cannot hope to effectively achieve its vision and give effect to the principles and elements articulated by the many witnesses you have heard from without a backbone of strong environmental laws, many of which will be dramatically altered by Bill C-38, the 2012 budget implementation bill currently before Parliament.
We are particularly concerned about changes to fish habitat protection and the new approach that limits which projects will be assessed under the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act and the narrowing of environmental effects to be considered. We urge the standing committee to consider in its recommendations the central role that must be played by strong environmental laws in any national conservation plan.
Thank you.