Thank you very much.
Good morning. Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you about federal protected areas.
I'm Alison Woodley, the national director of the CPAWS parks program. I'm here with Sabine, the national director of our oceans program. I'll spend a few minutes introducing CPAWS and speaking about terrestrial protected areas in my very short five minutes, and then Sabine will address marine protected area issues.
Since 1963 CPAWS, which is a nationwide charitable conservation organization, has been working hard to create parks and protected areas and make sure they're managed to conserve nature. This has been the core of our work. Over that time we've led in the creation of over two thirds of Canada's protected areas.
The vision of CPAWS is to protect at least half of Canada's public land, fresh water, and ocean. We adopted this vision a decade ago in light of the growing scientific consensus that we need to protect at least half of ecosystems in an interconnected way to effectively conserve them, both to sustain people and to sustain nature.
This is well articulated in the Nature Needs Half vision, an event that a number of you were able to attend on Monday night at the National Library, and we appreciated that.
It's also articulated in a recent E.O. Wilson book. E.O. Wilson is an eminent American scientist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author who actually coined the term “biodiversity”. He's in his 80s, and at the end of his long career he has concluded that at least half of the earth needs to be managed to conserve nature. He has just released a book called Half -Earth, and I'd recommend that you read it.
As the environment commissioner pointed out earlier this week, we have a unique opportunity in Canada to create large connected protected areas, but at this point we haven't grasped that opportunity. Canada has only protected 10% of our land and inland waters at this point. We're lagging way behind the rest of the world. We were a shocking 32nd out of 34 OECD countries in the percentage of land protected in 2014.
We've made little progress since 2010 when we signed onto the biodiversity targets, and we have no plan in place yet to deliver on the 2020 targets, or to deliver on the end goal of conserving nature. I think it's always important to focus on what we're actually trying to achieve—that my colleagues have also shared—which is that we're trying to conserve nature. We know we need to do much more, and those targets are a step toward that goal of what we need to do to conserve nature.
I'm going to highlight three points that I think are opportunities to move forward and that the federal government can help with.
We need federal leadership. As we know, jurisdiction over land management in Canada is shared among federal, provincial, territorial, and indigenous governments. Similar to what we're now seeing on climate change, where there is strong federal leadership, we need that federal leadership to bring together governments and to bring together other interested parties to collaborate and create a plan to achieve the goal of conserving nature, with targets as a step along the way. This leadership would make a big difference.
Another key opportunity in Canada is to work in partnership with indigenous communities. CPAWS works with indigenous communities across the country who are working hard to protect large areas of land to safeguard natural and cultural values. Thaidene Nëné in the Northwest Territories is one example you'll hear more about later today. Supporting and embracing these efforts in a way that respects indigenous rights and interests offers a huge opportunity to advance both conservation and reconciliation efforts in Canada.
A third area of opportunity is to better link protected areas and climate change strategies. We have a climate change crisis. We also have a biodiversity crisis, and these are closely interrelated. The Paris climate agreement recognizes the important role ecosystems play in climate change mitigation and adaptation. Protected areas store and sequester biological carbon and help nature and people adapt to climate change. We need to make sure that the pan-Canadian climate strategy that is being developed right now includes protected areas and reflects the important role of other ecosystem-based approaches as part of the climate change solution. This could help to drive and advance protected areas creation and better management.
Across Canada there are large-scale protection initiatives to build on. We're not starting from scratch here. Some of them have already been mentioned—for example, Ontario and Quebec's commitments to protect half their northern regions, the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, which is an NGO large landscape scale initiative in western Canada and the U.S., and the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement, which you'll hear more about next week.
Bringing together and supporting these initiatives would offer some really exciting opportunities for collaboration and help identify potential synergies that can help us move forward. I might note that there are examples from around the world of countries that are already doing this.
There's also important work to be done to get the federal protected areas house in order. We do have detailed recommendations about this in our reports. You will all have received a copy of this report, en français ou en anglais, and we do have detailed recommendations in there. I don't have time to go through them, but I do have one point I'd like to make.
I spend a lot of time working on national park management. Our special report on commercial development threats, which you will also have received—