Thank you, Madam Chair.
My name is Sigrid Kuehnemund. I'm the lead specialist for oceans at WWF-Canada. With me today is Kimberley Dunn, our manager for national oceans governance. We're very excited to be here today to contribute to your study on protected areas.
For half a century the World Wildlife Fund has worked to protect the future of nature. WWF is Canada's largest international conservation organization, with the active support of more than 150,000 Canadians. We connect the power of a strong global network to on-the-ground conservation efforts, with offices in Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Halifax, St. John's, Iqaluit, and Inuvik.
Our mission is to stop the degradation of the planet's natural environment and to build a future in which humans can live in harmony with nature by ensuring the sustainable use of renewable natural resources, promoting the reduction of pollution and wasteful consumption, and conserving the world's biodiversity.
With our mission in mind, we'd like to talk to you about the role of marine protected areas as they relate to your study on federal protected areas and conservation objectives.
You've heard already about the Aichi target: 10% marine protection by 2020. WWF-Canada supports the government's commitment to reach this goal.
In terms of quantity, you know that only 1% of Canada's oceans are protected. In terms of quality, not all sites are highly protected or offer the level of protection needed to benefit habitats, species, and coastal communities.
Science shows that in order to be effective, MPAs should be “no take”, large—greater than 100 square kilometres—and well enforced. This isn't the case for MPAs in Canada right now. Less than 7% of the area covered by our existing MPAs qualifies as fully protected, meaning that no fishing or other extractive industries, such as mining or oil and gas development, are allowed. Many of our protected areas are small and are not actively managed.
We're pleased to hear testimony from DFO and Parks Canada about doing things differently moving forward: that MPAs will be bigger and will be established faster, with a renewed focus on creating networks of protected areas and integrating that protection in order to manage our oceans effectively.
We believe the government is now on the right track when it comes to MPAs, but we have some recommendations to help Canada do things right in reaching our marine conservation targets: ensuring minimum standards for marine protection, protecting what counts, respecting indigenous peoples, and providing better coordination and streamlining within government departments.
The first theme is developing minimum standards.
WWF-Canada believes that protected areas must be more than just lines on a map. Protecting biodiversity needs to be the main consideration when selecting sites. Minimum standards for protection must be set in advance for all protected areas, rather than separately for each area.
We recommend that offshore mining and oil and gas activities should not be permitted within MPA boundaries.
We also recommend that commercial fishing should be excluded from at least 50% of each MPA.
Canadians don't expect to see oil rigs in protected areas. The Laurentian Channel, for example, is a proposed marine protected area that would allow oil and gas activities within more than 80% of its borders, if it were designated today.
While we do want to reach protection targets, we need to ensure that protection is meaningful. If our MPAs do not have high standards, it's doubtful that we'll succeed in protecting biodiversity and in helping to sustain the fisheries that Canadians depend upon now and into the future.
Minimum standards are also key to developing co-operative and co-management frameworks with indigenous communities. Setting standards before sites are selected can provide certainty to stakeholders, including indigenous communities, and speed up the consultation process.
To ensure that our MPAs have high standards, they also need to have management plans and to be properly funded to allow for active management, monitoring, and enforcement.
To protect what counts, the goal should not only be to get 10% but also to choose the right 10%, through strong protection and proper siting. We should not lose sight of the need for networks in the race to get to 10% by 2020. Networks are systems of areas that can accomplish much more for species and habitats than each site can do alone. The Aichi target is much more than just a number. It also dictates that areas be conserved through effectively and equitably managed, ecologically representative, and well-connected systems.
While large MPAs are important, we must not simply designate vast expanses of the ocean that are not at risk from human use or that provide unproven or questionable ecological benefits at the expense of developing proper MPA networks. Canada's progress on MPA networks has to go further than developing a collection of sites without meaningful consideration of how they connect and complement each other, and without including representative coastal and offshore sites within all three oceans.
Government must not yield to political pressures. It must take those tough decisions and take a strong stance to protect areas offering the best biodiversity benefits.
Considerable effort must be made to respect indigenous rights while creating MPAs. We not only recognize the government's duty to consult, but also know that when nature thrives, people thrive. Victories for nature are also victories for people.
There is a particular need for caution for B.C.'s first nations and Canada's north. There is a great potential in the Arctic to assist Canada in achieving its objectives; however, we need an equitable and transparent financing formula for impact benefit agreements across all four Inuit land claim regions. These should be negotiated well in advance with Inuit representative organizations. Long-term financing must be secured to ensure progressive investments in community infrastructure to allow communities to manage and profit from marine conservation.
Streamlining government processes and working better together means streamlining regulatory processes for MPA designation and includes the need to speed up the development of mineral and energy resource assessments by NRCan and the preparation of MPA regulations, including work with the Department of Justice and the Treasury Board.
The federal family must work together on targets to support progress by DFO, Parks Canada, and Environment Canada to move the bar on MPAs and MPA networks. A coordinated approach will help with economic discussions with provincial governments and offshore petroleum boards and will possibly help with the designation of multiple sites at the same time.
I respect that time is limited and that there's much to talk about. I'd like to close by thanking the committee for the opportunity to present on this topic. WWF-Canada is pleased that our government is committed to protecting 10% of our oceans by 2020 within national and regional systems of marine protected areas. We recognize that a lot of work has been done, but a lot yet remains to be done to reach this goal.
We also recognize that the 10% by 2020 target is not an end point but rather a waypoint to something much greater, an opportunity to provide what science is telling us is needed to protect some of the richest and most unique and biodiverse underwater environments on our planet.
I'd be happy to take questions on the points I've raised or on other important issues, such as high standards for other effective measures and finding the balance between ecological value and socio-economic interests when selecting and designating MPAs.
Thank you.