Yes, it is early.
Mr. Chair and esteemed members of the committee, my name is Arne Mooers, and I am a professor of biodiversity at Simon Fraser University. I am also the chair of the Biodiversity and Conservation Committee at the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution , a learned society with approximately 1,000 members.
I am honoured to appear before you as an individual with a strong professional interest in the sound management of Canada's biodiversity. I've had this honour on one earlier occasion—in 2009, I believe—in the context of a report that we wrote for the six-year review of SARA, the relevant legislation with which I am most familiar.
Most of the questions directing your study of habitat conservation in Canada are not primarily scientific in nature and so I will be of little direct help. In particular, I have absolutely nothing to say regarding questions (a), (c), or (d), so please don't ask me about them.
Given that I am joined by Mr. Doug Chorney of Keystone Agricultural Producers, I thought I would give one recent example of why we are here this morning. I am referring to a paper that was published less than a month ago in one of the two top science journals in the world, Science, by a group of 50 international scientists, including some from Canada. This paper presents very surprising evidence, to me at least, that crop pollination the world over goes better the more species of wild pollinators there are doing the work, and that it is better when wild pollinators are the only pollinators around. Critically, it is better even when honey bee pollinators are brought in to augment the work.
This implies very strongly that the habitat surrounding agricultural lands and the diverse pollinators they support have direct economic benefits to humans on fiscal time scales and that there are no easy substitutes.
I would add that this same issue of the journal has information about the misuse of science and conservation decision-making, something we may want to discuss further, and a letter about the general trajectory of selectively logged forests. The data is piled up day in and day out on these important issues.
With regard to the questions at hand, my thesis is as follows: habitat protection is the sine qua non and absolutely critical to effective biodiversity resource management. However, the effectiveness of such management cannot be measured solely by the extent of habitat protection. What I mean there is that success cannot be measured in the number of acres of forest set aside for selective logging or the number of acres set aside for national parks.
Ideally, biodiversity resource management could be monitored with high-level integrators of what biodiversity does on the landscape, i.e., productivity, instability of the soil, the sequestration of carbon, and the net and stable production of things we like and things we need such as wildlife to enjoy, wildlife to hunt and fish, etc. We could then see how different management regimes would affect these metrics, including those that were based on habitat.
There is theory as to how much habitat one needs to keep intact in order to keep the requisite biodiversity components intact on the landscape and what happens when too much is lost, but this theory is exactly the sort of thing that could be misused by policy-makers. While I myself and many of my colleagues see the theoretical point of an ecosystem-based approach to biodiversity management, we cannot advocate for it at the present time.
A recent major report by Environment Canada, written to meet our obligations under the Convention on Biological Diversity and called “Canadian Biodiversity Ecosystem Status and Trend 2010”, highlights how poor our knowledge base is at this high level of integration, that of looking at ecosystems. One of its 22 key findings was that the ecosystem research for policy-level assessments was lacking and that this lack hindered the development of the actual report. They say quite a bit more on that. Indeed, data were lacking for things as simple and important to Canada as changes in the extent of coastal habitats and changes to wetlands. This major report could not even offer anything on important aspects of ecosystem function such as pollination. There simply wasn't data there. So we—and when I say we, I mean Canadians, Canada—simply cannot yet measure the status and prospects of ecosystems.
My first recommendation is that the monitoring of ecosystem functions across all landscapes should be a major policy thrust of this and future Canadian governments. As your 2012 report from this committee stated, “Nature is part of Canada's brand”. So we'd better find out what's going on.
However, what we can do now is measure clear indicators of sound biodiversity resource management. These indicators include the current status and trajectory of its constituent species. In the majority of cases on land, habitat deterioration is the main cause of threats to species. In fact, about 80% of species are considered at risk in Canada. I expect other witnesses, perhaps Ms. Barrett from Halton, will make this point eloquently.
If we see there are threatened species on the landscape, then most of the time that means that habitat is threatened. If we can manage the habitat so that species are not at risk of being lost, then we are likely managing that habitat responsibly. It is this connection between the integrity of an ecosystem and the services it renders and the fate of the species that produce this ecosystem that constitutes the main reason that I and a great many of my colleagues support the complete implementation of SARA and complementary endangered species legislation at the provincial and territorial levels.
We—that is, many of my colleagues and I—simply do not see any substitute at this time.
Though it may not be what you want to hear, many of us in the academic conservation community feel that implementing strong endangered species legislation may, in fact, be the best medium-term way that the federal government can improve habitat conservation efforts in Canada presently.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and the committee.