Fisheries Committee on April 13th, 2017

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Robert Sopuck]

Welcome to meeting number 57 of the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans as we continue our study of marine protected areas.

We have four witnesses today. We'll have one round with two of them, then we'll suspend for a few minutes and then go to our other two.

With us for the first round we have Dr. Dan Laffoley, marine vice-chair, World Commission on Protected Areas, who is with the International Union for Conservation of Nature; and Dr. Daniel Pauly, principal investigator for Sea Around Us at the University of British Columbia.

Welcome to our witnesses. You will each be allowed 10 minutes to speak. I will try to keep to that schedule, because we always have a lot to cover and it's very important that we maintain the flow of the meeting so we can cover as much ground as possible. After your testimony there will be questions from the committee.

Without further ado, since I see Dr. Laffoley's name on top, we'll ask him to start for 10 minutes.

[Dan Laffoley, Marine Vice-Chair, World Commission on Protected Areas, International Union for Conservation of Nature]

Thank you very much indeed, Mr. Chairman, and good morning, everybody. It's a real pleasure to join you via video link from the U.K. I would like to thank the committee for the invitation and time to provide evidence today.

As has just been said, my name is Dan Laffoley. I'm marine vice-chair at IUCN's World Commission on Protected Areas. Just to offer a few words about IUCN and the World Commission, IUCN, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, is the world's largest and most diverse environmental network, composed of both governments and civil society organizations. We have about 1,300 member organizations, including many governments—Canada is a member—and we have input from some 16,000 leading scientific experts.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Robert Sopuck]

Dr. Laffoley, we're having some technical difficulties at this end. Could you just hold for a minute? Our interpreters are unable to hear you. We've stopped the clock, so you're not going to lose any time. In this business, every second counts.

[Technical difficulty--Editor]

I've just been informed that the sound is quite low. The translator will do her very best, but if it doesn't work out, she'll have to stop the translation service.

I assume that we have unanimous consent to continue.

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Robert Sopuck]

We'll start the clock.

Would you continue your presentation, Dr. Laffoley.

[Dan Laffoley]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I was just explaining the nature of the IUCN in the global conservation network.

The World Commission on Protected Areas is the premier global network of protected area professionals, creating and providing leadership and guidance on protected areas.

I lead on marine protected area or MPA issues at the commission and I am providing evidence today on MPAs on behalf of the commission. I've been in a leadership role on MPAs for more than 30 years in the U.K., Europe, and globally.

I think it's worth my starting my evidence by talking about what a marine protected area is. At IUCN we have defined a marine protected area. It is a clearly defined geographical space recognized, dedicated, and managed through legal or other effective means to achieve the long-term conservation of nature, with associated ecosystem services and cultural values. This is equivalent to the definition being used by the Convention on Biological Diversity. The IUCN definition is globally recognized and agreed to.

I want to emphasize that the definition of a protected area is the same on land as it is in the sea, and the conservation expectations are the same. Put simply, a marine protected area is an area of sea especially dedicated to the protection and maintenance of biodiversity and of natural and associated cultural resources, managed through legal and other effective means.

Marine protected areas come in a variety of shapes and sizes, and at IUCN, in our guidance we recognize five types, ranging from areas that are strictly protected through to areas that have multiple use and are based on the principles of sustainable use.

In terms of governance—the ways in which protected areas are managed—we recognize four types. They can be managed by governments, by indigenous or local communities, privately, or with mixed governance.

The commonality for all types of protected areas is that they're managed with the long-term conservation of nature at its heart, and where there is a conflict, nature is always the first priority.

What are the benefits of marine protected areas? The benefits are: the conservation of biodiversity and ecosystems; helping reverse global and local declines in fish populations and productivity by protecting critical breeding, nursery, and feeding habitats; raising the profile of an area for marine tourism and broadening local economic options; providing opportunities for education, training, heritage, and culture; and providing broad benefits as sites for reference concerning the status of the marine environment.

For conservation alone there are many things marine protected areas do, from maintaining and restoring the structure of ecosystems and their functionality; protecting and maintaining the abundance of key species in communities; protecting habitats from physical damage from fishing; maintaining genetic integrity, ecological functions, and resilience; to acting as an insurance to mitigate any detrimental effects, especially in adjacent areas.

In short, marine protected areas are a key, proven tool for the conservation of nature. They can act as reference ecosystems so that we understand the impact of activities, and they can form part of fisheries management to protect key sites and spawning areas. If we want to know the true potential of the marine environment and how impacted areas compare with what we might call “natural”, then marine protected areas lie at the core of that approach.

We need marine protected areas because current management systems are failing; they're failing to maintain productivity, biological biodiversity, and ecosystems. Global fish catches have been in consistent decline, and marine protected areas are recognized globally as one of the only tools that can help to protect important habitats and representative samples of marine life and to assist in restoring the productivity of oceans.

In terms of progress with marine protected areas, Canada along with most other countries made a clear commitment to meeting international targets for the environment back in 2010. This was under the Convention on Biological Diversity. One of those targets is specifically about marine protected areas. It's called target 11. It says that by 2020 at least 10% of coastal and marine areas, especially areas important for biodiversity and ecosystem services, are to be conserved using protected areas and other effective area-based measures.

When we look at how well countries have done in protecting the environment in this way, around 5.3% of the global ocean is protected. If you look at the jurisdictional area of countries, it rises to 13.2%, and probably by the end of the year about 21 million square kilometres will be under marine protected areas and, for the first time, the area of ocean protected will be larger than the area of land protected.

There are 21 countries that have protected more than 100,000 square kilometres. These include the U.S.A., Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, South Africa, Chile, and Indonesia. In this respect it is fantastic to see the renewed commitment of Canada to meet the 10% MPA goal by 2020. Canada currently has protected 50,000 square kilometres in MPAs and ranks at the moment 33rd in the world in terms of area.

In terms of how MPAs relate to fisheries, I've just talked about the target under the Convention on Biological Diversity for MPAs, but there are another 19 targets of equal importance, and there is one target that particularly relates to fisheries, which is target 6. This is the target that countries have signed on to so as to ensure that species are managed and harvested sustainably and that fisheries have no adverse impact on threatened species and vulnerable ecosystems.

There is a very clear international framework in place, and there is clearly a crossover between very strong, comprehensive fisheries measures under target 6 and the protected area measures that are under target 11 of the convention. The problem is that target 11, which is the marine protected area target, is very well reported on and focused on, while target 6 on fisheries is not so well reported.

We have a good body of evidence on the way we make marine protected areas successful. Strictly protected and fully protected marine protected areas have been shown in hundreds of papers in the scientific literature to increase the abundance, biomass, and diversity of fish invertebrate populations. We also know that the benefits accrued relate to a series of different factors and that full protection, alongside good enforcement and management, older marine protected areas, and larger and isolated ones, give the greatest benefits.

So—

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Robert Sopuck]

Your time is almost up, Dr. Laffoley.

[Dan Laffoley]

Yes, I'm just about to conclude.

I think the final point I would make is that we need to view MPAs and fisheries management in the context of ocean change and the significant challenges now upon us from ocean warming, acidification, and deoxygenation.

My final three points are that MPAs have many socio-economic benefits and are critical in sustaining fisheries. Other countries have demonstrated that MPAs, when correctly managed, can provide those benefits, and Canada through its commitment has a great opportunity to show the world how it can achieve these things by 2020.

Thank you very much.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Robert Sopuck]

You're right on time. What we find, Dr. Laffoley, is that if there are any further points you would like to bring out, you'll be able to do so during the question and answer period.

Dr. Pauly is next, for 10 minutes.

[Daniel Pauly, Principal Investigator, Sea Around Us, University of British Columbia, As an Individual]

Good morning.

What I would present is the illustrated version of the same thing.

The first thing I would like to show is that the world catch is declining. It's declining, as you see in my first graph—you can also see it in French—because we fish too much. It is especially declining when you take account of everything that is not in official statistics.

The reported catch is the catch officially reported by agencies such as the DFO to the FAO. The actual catch of the world is higher, because lots of things are not counted by official agencies: the discarded fish, the fish taken by aboriginal communities—for example, in Canada that is not reported to the FAO—and lots of illegal catch that is made, which an agency such as FAO or DFO could not acknowledge exists. As a university, we can take account of it. The real catch of the world is much higher—about 50% higher—and is declining.

Why is it declining? It's because we fish too much. There are different ways you can say that, but the cumulative power of engines in the world's fleet is increasing at a rate that we can qualify as crazy. You can see it. It's particularly the case in Asia; subsidized fleets are increasing very rapidly.

The result of this is that the footprint of fisheries, which was already substantial in the fifties when the effects of the war were beginning to be repaired, has enormously increased. Compare the slide showing what happened in the fifties with the slide showing what happens now. The footprint of fisheries is immense. It's worldwide.

Why? What has happened? What has happened is that fisheries have expanded. Fisheries always expand; they cannot stay in place. Why can't they stay in place? It's because they are too powerful for the natural productivity of the resource. They have to expand because they essentially deplete what they have.

Canada's fleet offers a good example of this. I was a student in Germany at the time and came with a German research vessel, a converted factory vessel that was fishing between 500 metres and one kilometre deep. Canada had 500 years to maintain a successful fishery to about a 100-metre depth when fishing for fish cod in the Atlantic provinces. The trawlers that I was in and that were operating in the seventies went to one and a half kilometres of depth to dig the fish out.

The depth was a refuge; it was a marine protected area at the time. The fish were protected by distance, they were protected by the cold, they were protected by ice. The fish were protected from us by nature itself. Progress in fisheries is, then, overcoming these protections.

The fisheries expanded; that is, the percentage of the natural production of the ocean that is used by fisheries. If you use a 30%, 20%, or 10% threshold, you can see that it expanded in the seventies by about one million kilometres per year. That's about half the expanse of the Amazon every year. Fisheries expand.

Marine protected areas are therefore not really something foreign that comes from outer space, from aliens. This is the flip side of this expansion. We expand areas that before had protected the fish because we couldn't get at them. They now become available, and we have to re-establish marine protected areas.

The concept of marine protected areas had already been discovered about a hundred years ago, but these areas grew very slowly because we have difficulty conceiving of fish as wildlife that needs protection. We view the ocean essentially as a larder, a place where we just get food.

The idea grew very slowly, and these areas' growth became a bit more rapid, by 5% per year. But at 5% per year, given the low baseline, we were not going to reach any of the goals that Dan Laffoley mentioned. We were in a situation like the one shown in my brief.

In the North Atlantic, you can see in green the areas that were protected. Yes, it's a joke. There is nothing that can be seen with the pixel size we used. There are marine protected areas here and there, including in Canada, but they're minuscule. The ocean was essentially not protected anymore.

This has changed since President Bush, of all people, created a large marine protected area around the northwestern Hawaiian island, and this was the first big marine reserve. It was made bigger by President Obama, and heads of state being who they are said, “I want one, too.”

Then New Zealand came into the picture. France came into the picture, then Russia, and there is now a trend towards large marine protected areas. However, they are only within the exclusive economic zone of countries. Because they are inside the EZ of countries and because there is no legal framework for creating marine reserves in the open ocean—no country has the right to do so in the area beyond their EZ—this creation of marine reserves is essentially limited.

There will be a point at which the uninhabited islands are all marine reserves, and then we will have protected a good part of the Pacific but none of the Atlantic, none of the fishing grounds in the northern hemisphere that need to be protected.

You can see that lots of these marine protected areas, the dark blue things, the big ones, are being created in the southern hemisphere.

In Canada, though Dan Laffoley said that we are 33rd in the world, we actually don't have any significant marine reserves that we can brag about. Canada has been a laggard. I have been in Canada for 22 years and have heard talk and more talk. Marine reserves are not being created in Canada, and we are becoming a laggard compared with other countries.

They are very cheap to make, actually, the big ones. However, you get the same push-back from people who don't want them, either small or big ones, so you might as well create a big one. It's much cheaper. We have shown that in our paper.

The take-home message is that marine reserves effectively protect marine biodiversity for the simple reason that these reserves are the equivalent of a world in which we don't fish, and a world in which we don't fish is a world that has created the diversity that we see. That's the flip side of it.

At present, at the rate that Canada is creating marine reserves right now, it will not meet its commitment. It will not meet the 10% commitment by 2020.

The time has come to go from talk to some action.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Robert Sopuck]

Thank you very much.

It's always a pleasure to have disciplined witnesses who use their time efficiently and allow for more time for questions.

First, we have Mr. Hardie for seven minutes.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to our guests for being here.

I wish I had more than seven minutes. I'm sure my colleagues will definitely use their time as well.

Dr. Laffoley, you mentioned genetic integrity as one of the goals of marine protected areas. How do we square that, though, with the impact of climate change?

We see an incursion of species that used to be located in one part of the ocean, and now we're finding them in places where they didn't used to belong.

I guess I have two questions.

Is there an aspect of a marine protected areas that could do something about that, or conversely, are there some beneficial impacts of climate change and the spread of some species into other parts of the ocean?

[Dan Laffoley]

Thank you very much.

Basically, the issue is that there is an interaction, and if we strictly protect areas, allow the ecosystems to recover, and allow higher-level predatory species to recover, those areas are going to be able to counter some of the invasive species better. There is a kind of relationship in that sense.

I think there is also a broader relationship, which is that the changes that we see from climate change are going to affect the whole of the ocean, but areas that are more natural have a higher level of resilience are going to recover faster and are going to enable us to replenish the surrounding areas more effectively.

That's why we see marine protected areas in that context as a particularly valuable part of the toolkit.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

When we look at the growth in fishing and the amount of ocean area that's basically being mined for this fisheries resource, a couple of questions arise out of that.

First, the fact that we're fishing deeper and more broadly indicates that there's a demand for those products commercially. Is this a matter of world demand simply growing that quickly?

Are there some things that we need to do? In terms of the efficiency of these operations, are we wasting, for instance, a lot of what we catch? Could there be better management of what we are catching right now that could reduce the pressure a little bit on the growth that you've seen?

[Daniel Pauly]

Much of the fishing that we expend, much of the growth that you have seen, is not needed for our harvest. Most of it is the result of competition between different countries that want to fish, to bring the fish to their country, rather than see it going to another country.

We could make do with about one-quarter of the fishing capacity that we have. Each boat is actually losing money. Internationally, lots of the international fleets that are operating are kept afloat only by government subsidies.

We are wasting a huge amount of fish for two reasons. About 10 to 15 tonnes per million tonnes of fish are discarded every year as part of the regular fisheries operations, including in Canada. That is the standard operating procedure, including for cod in a shrimp fishery.

Another enormous source of waste is the use of food fish for making fishmeal. Every time you eat salmon, you are actually eating mackerel and sardines that have been turned into fishmeal for salmon, a food that sells at a higher price. We waste an enormous amount of food that way—about one-third of the world catch is turned into fishmeal and wasted that way.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

To both of you gentlemen, could you comment on necessity, practices, and implications of aquaculture for protecting the ecological integrity of the ocean?

I'll start with you, Dr. Laffoley.

[Dan Laffoley]

We've been taking a close look at this and the relationship between aquaculture and marine protected areas. We believe there are better choices that can be made by the industry in relation to some of the points that Daniel Pauly has already made.

Farming higher level species and feeding fish to fish doesn't make much sense, but smaller-scale aquaculture involving bivalves and other things may have some compatibility with some categories of marine protected areas.

We need to get a better understanding and a better application of that relationship.

[Daniel Pauly]

Basically, aquaculture as we understand it in the west or in Canada, is feeding fish to fish, and that does not produce fish; it consumes fish.

Aquaculture, as conceived here, consumes fish. The aquaculture that produces millions of tons of fish is actually of bivalves and animals very low in the food world, such as carp. These are fish that are not very popular in Canada, but they make up the bulk of what China and other countries, especially in Asia, contribute to aquaculture.

When we talk about aquaculture being a very dynamic sector that will feed the world, we actually have a little bit of salmon floating on top of an immense production of animals low in the food world.

We think that salmon is aquaculture, but it's not. Aquaculture is a way to improve the quality and the price of what you sell, but it is not a solution to the food crisis—if you want to describe it like this—any more than Maseratis are for the transport of people.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

I hope I have time for one more question.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Robert Sopuck]

No, that's it.

Just to slightly correct the record here—and I represent the largest canola-producing constituency in Canada—the percentage of plant meal in fish food is increasing all the time and canola, as we know, has been an increasing part of that. There's been great success, and I think that up to half of the fish meal that's now fed to salmon is canola.

The point about the seriousness of feeding fish to fish, I think, is very well taken, but the use of canola meal is starting to reduce the use of fish in fish meal.

Anyway, that's a little plug for my constituency and my canola farmers. I am still a politician after all.

Anyway, it's Mr. Arnold for seven minutes.

[Mel Arnold, Conservative, North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you both Mr. Laffoley and Mr. Pauly for being here.

First of all, Mr. Laffoley, does the IUCN have a mission statement or goal statement, and if so what is it?

[Dan Laffoley]

I can't immediately put it up, but yes we have a clear mission statement. It is effectively about the engagement of civil society in the protection, management, and sustainable use of ecosystems, and about ensuring that a fair proportion of those ecosystems are effectively managed and protected for future generations.

[Mel Arnold, Conservative, North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

Okay, thank you.

Can marine conservation be done without upsetting the balance between the protection of the environment and local economies that depend on fishing and aquaculture?

[Dan Laffoley]

Yes.

I think there's a really interesting relationship here. The use of the environment is also dependent on the protection of the environment, and we're actually well out of balance.

Dr. Pauly has also described the expansion of fisheries, but as I touched on towards the end of my evidence, the existing problems that we've been dealing with in the relationship of the fisheries to the health of the environment and pollution are now being met by more wholesale changes resulting from climate change. The oceans are tending towards more acidic conditions, are holding less oxygen, and getting warmer. That pushes us still further out of balance. If we want to maintain the benefits that we see from fishing, we also need to protect a reasonable proportion.

As I've explained in my evidence, and as Dr. Pauly explained as well, we are out of balance with that and we need to play catch-up. A number of countries, as I've described, are already doing this, and Canada has made commitments to be on the way to doing this as well.

[Mel Arnold, Conservative, North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

I believe you stated that current management systems are failing. Can you say why that is? Why are the current systems failing?

If we were able to correct the failings in those current systems, would we require marine protected areas, or would better management systems basically cover the need for protection and conservation without the need for preservation?