Australia has recognized that parks and protected areas are not just the venue of governments. In many countries, the protected areas are considered government protected areas, federal state and provincial government protected areas. What Australia has done is they've built a framework that brings all of the efforts to protect lands together under one common framework, with clear goals and targets. Then they've set up a funding mechanism at the national level, so that if you meet the requirements under the plan, basically you can apply for resources. There's a kind of round table mechanism where all the interests are brought together and guide this work.
They have included in their protected area system, for example, private lands that are under long-term protection measures, which could be land trusts, those kinds of mechanisms. They've also brought in indigenous conservation areas under the same framework. That I think has a great deal of potential in Canada. I've heard presentations by several first nations who are entrusted to protect lands, to have that as part of this network of protected lands, and to be counted as such.
I think if we can start to explore what that might look like and how we might incorporate it into our accounting mechanisms.... Right now we count how much protected area and land we have under the IUCN categories through a mechanism called CARTS, which is the conservation areas reporting and tracking system. It's run by Environment Canada and the Canadian Council on Ecological Areas. There's been some work done. That's quite new.
We've done better at that accounting, but we could do better. We could broaden the scope of what we bring in under that umbrella. I think it would help to encourage more land conservation in ways that work for those who want to conserve their lands and also help us get to our targets.