Thank you, Committee Chair Mark Warawa and members of the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development.
My name is Dr. Faisal Moola. I am director general for the David Suzuki Foundation. I'm also an adjunct professor of forestry at the University of Toronto.
Through science and education, the David Suzuki Foundation's vision is that, within a generation, Canadians will act on the understanding that we are all interconnected and interdependent on nature.
I welcome the opportunity to address the committee on conserving and providing access to nature in urbanized regions and the positive role that the federal government can play, as in the establishment of new federally protected areas like the proposed Rouge national park in Ontario's “Golden Horseshoe”, one of the fastest-growing urban regions in all of North American.
Despite being a vast nation of forest, mountains, and ice, Canada has quickly become an urbanized country. According to statistics published in 2011 by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 81% of Canadians now live in urbanized communities. We rank 41st out of 231 nations in the relative proportion of our population now residing in cities. We are ahead of the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, and many other western European countries in the dominance of our urban communities. As a result, opportunities to experience nature are becoming increasingly limited for tens of millions of Canadians, as the growth and spread of our urban communities continues to consume some of the best of the natural world closest to home.
For example, recent analyses by Ducks Unlimited Canada have found that over 72% of the original wetlands of southern Ontario have now been developed and, as a result, the region is now home to approximately one third of all Ontario's species at risk. The same holds true for other urbanized regions of the country, such as British Columbia's Lower Mainland and the greater Montreal area.
For example, according to the British Columbia Conservation Data Centre, over 100 plants and animals that are at risk in the province are now found within the borders of the metro Vancouver region. Protecting remaining natural areas in urbanized regions of Canada is vitally important. Remnant wetlands, forests, grasslands, and other ecosystems provide critical habitat for Canadian wildlife, such as threatened songbirds and rare plants, while helping to sustain the health and well-being of Canadian families and communities.
We often take for granted the astonishing array of natural benefits that green space and farmland provide for all of us.
Trees produce oxygen and improve urban air quality, absorbing pollution and airborne particles like nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide, and carbon monoxide. Wetlands act as green living infrastructure by filtering and regulating our drinking water. Forests and rich agricultural soils remove and store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, thereby acting as a hedge against rising greenhouse gas emissions. Green urban spaces cool our communities and protect us from dangerous storms by providing protection against flooding and erosion and ensuring the stability of steep slopes.
This doesn't even account for the physical, psychological, and social benefits that Canadians enjoy from proximity to and time spent in nature. Think of the stress relief from a walk in a local park over lunch break, going for a family hike, or going camping on the weekend.
The ecosystems that provide these benefits are often referred to by scientists as natural capital. This includes the fields, forests, farms, wetlands, estuaries, and other natural and managed ecosystems within and surrounding our communities.
Natural capital and ecosystem benefits are typically undervalued in our market economies, despite being worth trillions of dollars annually and contributing tens of millions in non-market benefits to communities. Unfortunately, the economic and societal benefits we receive from nature are often taken for granted by policy-makers. This is partly due to a lack of knowledge regarding what they are and what they're truly worth.
Published science by the David Suzuki Foundation, university researchers such as Dr. Nancy Olewiler at Simon Fraser University, Dr. Ray Tomalty at McGill University, and others has shown that the ecological benefits we get from urban nature are extremely valuable in monetary terms and in some cases truly priceless. For example, the David Suzuki Foundation recently released a study that for the first time estimates the non-market benefits provided by farmland and green space within the proposed Rouge national park and the surrounding watersheds in Scarborough, Markham, and Pickering.
You have been provided with copies of the study's executive summary and you can access the full version online. The report documents that the Rouge region provides essential ecosystem benefits that, conservatively, benefit residents of the greater Toronto area to the tune of more than $115 million each year in direct benefits that clean our air, filter our water, and provide important habitat for agricultural pollinators and other wildlife. The proposed Rouge national park is the ecological engine of the region, providing, conservatively, more than $12 million annually in critical ecological benefits to communities in the region.
By establishing Rouge national park, the Government of Canada will protect a critical bank of natural capital that will provide benefits for generations to come. While protecting, restoring, and managing this wild gem will not come cheaply, these costs should be weighed against the huge dividends that this investment in creating Canada’s first urban national park will reap for millions of Canadians. Furthermore, this innovative step will create a model for connecting Canadians with nature in their own backyards for other urban regions of the country.
We welcome the fact that the federal government has committed $144 million in funding the creation of Rouge national park over the next 10 years and has launched a planning process for the creation of the park. We hope that the planning process will result in well-defined stand-alone legislation and management plans for the park that ensure the protection of its ecological health in the face of growing urbanization and other pressures, such as infrastructure, that put the park’s sensitive biodiversity at risk—such as expanding energy transport through the park.
The David Suzuki Foundation would like to make the following recommendations to the committee to consider in the creation and management of Rouge national park, as well as future candidate near-urban federal protected areas, such as the proposed Bowen Island national park, close to the city of Vancouver.
Given the significant economic and ecological values of the Rouge and its surrounding watersheds, we urge the Government of Canada to quickly establish Rouge national park under stand-alone legislation.
The legislation and management plans governing Rouge national park must give priority to the protection and restoration of ecological health and water quality. They must ensure that existing and new development activities that impact nature—such as infrastructure—are minimized and managed to the highest standards of sustainability and public safety. It must mandate the achievement of a net gain in nature as a result of any activities that degrade the ecological health of the park, and it must ensure that resource extraction in the park is prohibited.
Given the close interrelationships between Canada's first peoples and the lands and waters of Rouge national park, they must be recognized and first nations engaged as keepers of traditional ecological knowledge, including in public education and interpretive programming. First nations must be fully involved in the establishment and management of the new national park.
Parks Canada should work collaboratively with the Government of Ontario, first nations, local municipalities, and regional conservation authorities to protect nature outside of the proposed national park boundaries with the establishment of special management zones such as protected buffers and connected corridors that are contiguous to the park, expanding and surrounding the protection of nature and valuable farmland, and identifying and protecting sensitive hydrological and natural heritage features within the surrounding Rouge River, Petticoat and Duffins Creek watersheds.
Programs and incentives that support farm and land stewardship should be made available to farmers to support local food production and promote sustainable agricultural practices that restore and enhance the ecological benefits that nature and farmland provide in the Rouge national park, such as carbon storage and habitat for pollinators. Examples of innovative programs to engage the farming community and sustainability are throughout Canada.
The establishment of Canada’s first urban national park in the Rouge is precedent setting and we hope will be indicative of a new interest on the part of federal politicians and agencies, such as Parks Canada, of the critical need to help reconnect Canadians with our natural heritage and provide opportunities for “green time” over “screen time”.
The data suggest that individuals, particularly our children, who spend time in nature have improved memory, problem-solving, and creativity—and they're physically healthier, too. Yet research by the David Suzuki Foundation has shown that an astonishing 70% of Canadian children spend less than an hour outside each day. In comparison, a survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that young people spend an average of seven and a half hours each day on entertainment media.
Thus, we believe that the federal programs that support getting kids out in nature can complement the creation of Canada’s first urban national park as well as other urban efforts across the country.
To conclude, Canadians have always celebrated the spectacular natural beauty that makes ours one of the most bountiful and prosperous nations on earth, from oceans and coastlines to mountains and foothills and the proposed Rouge national park. Conserving our lands and waters is a gift to the planet. If we continue to work together, we can ensure that we and our children and grandchildren will have much to celebrate long into the future.
Thank you very much.