Thank you, committee members, for having us here today. I wanted to focus on CPAWS's concerns with the quantity and quality of marine protected areas in Canada, and also make recommendations to you for how we could improve on the current situation.
You did hear earlier this week from government officials that there are a number of legal tools available to establish marine protected areas in Canada. You may have also come away with a feeling that to date it's been a rather ad hoc approach to MPA establishment.
One observation I do want to make from my decades of work on marine conservation in Canada, and it actually applies more broadly, is that there is generally a double standard when it comes to how we treat protection on land versus the ocean. On land, it's generally accepted that industrial uses like logging, mining, oil and gas, and hydroelectric development should be prohibited. However, in the ocean the tendency is to allow a variety of industrial uses to continue in our protected areas.
The downside to this approach is that not only is it very difficult to distinguish between MPAs and the ocean areas outside them, but in the long term we're not going to achieve either the benefits for both biodiversity conservation and for the ecosystem services that we rely on if we don't provide adequate and effective protection for our marine protected areas.
Many scientific studies, including a recent one, have looked globally and they have concluded that 30% of the marine environment should be fully protected if we're going to conserve biodiversity over the long term. What does it mean to fully protect marine areas? It means that fishing and industrial uses like offshore oil and gas, mining, dredging, and dumping shouldn't be allowed. But they are allowed right now in many of our protected areas.
The scientific evidence is definitive on the point that aside from climate change, fishing causes some of the largest changes to marine ecosystems, whether it's destruction of benthic habitat, changes in the trophic structure, or changes in marine food webs. Fully protected marine areas that prohibit industrial-scale fishing and other industrial uses have been shown to significantly increase the diversity of species and the overall numbers and size of individuals as well as increase the resilience of marine ecosystems to the impacts of climate change.
Over the past few years, CPAWS has conducted a number of studies focusing on marine protected areas in Canada, which I believe members have received. These are two of them. Our overall conclusion is that Canada lags behind many countries in the world in MPA coverage. Most of our marine protected areas are small, and current protection standards for existing MPAs are weak with less than 1% with any form of protection and only 0.1% that is fully protected. The current pace and approach to MPA establishment must change significantly if the rate of decline in marine biodiversity is to be halted.
We've made many recommendations in these reports. I'm just going to highlight a few key ones.
First, we absolutely need minimum protection standards for all marine protected areas. We need to prohibit industrial uses and we need to have large parts—at least 50%—of each marine protected area fully protected from fishing and all other uses. We need to provide—