Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for inviting me here today.
I am a scientist and I work for the World Commission on Protected Areas of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, where I'm the vice-chair for science. Over the last four years I've been chairing an organization or a task force specifically looking at whether protected areas are effective, and if so, why? Why and when are they protected? The literature on protected areas had been, frankly, pretty messy. We tried to put some order to this and put together some global analysis based solely on data upon when and if these places are effective. It's in that context that I want to speak to you today.
I know my colleague Dan Laffoley spoke to you already. He has explained to you what the IUCN is, so I won't go over that other than to say it's a unique organization in that it has a government house and an NGO house. I don't know of an equivalent organization today. Canada is a very strong and active member of the IUCN.
In defining what a protected area is, the IUCN actually set the global definition. It was agreed to by Canada. It's equivalent to the definition used by the Convention on Biological Diversity, and it's the same on land and on sea. I don't think I need to repeat it for an audience such as this.
It's worth going over briefly the benefits of having a marine protected area, because I think that's germane to the discussion today. It is not to tie up areas that we can't have access to; it's really to allow that the management we do in the larger oceans be done correctly. MPAs provide benchmarks. How else will we know the impact of fishing and other activities if we don't have a benchmark? It's science 101. Establishing these areas as benchmarks is fundamental.
In terms of looking at protected areas as a tool, I've just done a global review on this for the Global Environment Facility. We looked at all the tools we use to protect nature: harvest management, protected areas, management of species at risk, and so on. If you look at all the literature on these things, protected areas come out as the most effective tool in terms of response ratio or bang for your buck. They are an essential part of fisheries management. In Canada, we have not taken advantage of that tool, as my colleague just pointed out. I don't need to reiterate it.
They can also raise the benefits for marine tourism, benefiting local communities globally. This has been shown all over the world. A recent study in Scotland showed, despite economic doom predictions to the contrary, that setting up MPAs actually benefited local communities economically.
There are a whole range of benefits for MPAs, the last ones being really the direct benefits of conservation in ecosystems, because there are some areas, either representative areas, areas for species at risk, or key biodiversity areas such as spawning sites, that are worthy of protection in the larger context.
Let's turn to the question of whether MPAs are effective in conserving nature. There's quite a growing amount of literature on this now. The task force I chaired has been able to contribute significantly to this literature. I'll start with a global synthesis that was done by Lester, and others, and here are the conclusions.
Overall, MPAs demonstrate statistically positive impacts on fish biomass, numerical density, species richness, and size of organisms within their boundaries. Those benefits, depending on which study you look at, are very significant. You can have 10 times more fish inside a protected area than you do outside.
Those benefits are also relevant to our ecosystems, the Canadian ecosystems. Much of the research was done in the tropics and sub-tropics, but this global review showed that the temperate ecosystems have the same kind of response. That has been a question in literature. Surprisingly to me, even small reserves can show positive impacts. Large reserves are better—the literature is clear on that—but even small reserves can show positive impacts.
There's variation all over the place. We tried to understand why there is so much variation in the literature.
Graham Edgar and his colleagues from Australia did another global study and they looked at what was driving protected area effectiveness. They concluded, a bit shockingly, that globally, many MPAs can't be ecologically distinguished from fished areas. There's simply no difference because they're MPAs in name only. We've had trouble translating the protected area model into the ocean because most of them are fished. Therefore, there's really no delta or difference between fished and unfished and this applies to Canada. Even if you look at some of our larger marine protected areas, like the Gwaii Haanas National Marine Conservation Area Reserve and Haida Heritage Site, since it was declared a protected area, there's been no change in fisheries management. It's the same. We haven't taken advantage of that because of the way the act is constructed and the way that it's been managed.
Edgar, et al., found that some areas are extremely effective. They boiled it down to five key features for what's driving effectiveness. There's no-take. There's good enforcement, and globally enforcement is really poor. It probably wouldn't be the case in Canada. Also older ones do better, larger ones do better, and ones that are isolated by some biophysical feature also do better. When you have all of these five features working together, you get nine times more fish biomass on average and 39 times more large predators, like sharks, in these areas because you don't need much fishing to take large predators out of the system.
Overall, fish biomass on reefs is reduced two-thirds compared with protected areas. We published a paper in the journal Nature just last month. I'll refer to it as the Gill, et al., paper and I'll provide that to the clerk. That was part of the work of the IUCN task force. We found that a sobering 79% of the global sample of protected areas weren't meeting thresholds for basic management. They didn't have enough staff in place. They didn't have funding. They didn't have monitoring in place, etc. Staffing and funding gaps were the biggest predictors of conservation outcomes. Even despite these shortcomings, three-quarters of these protected areas were showing positive biological impacts. If you compare with well-managed areas, we get three times the value, so you get three times the value in terms of fish biomass for having a well-managed marine protected area.
I could go on about the benefits and I'm happy to, but I'll provide a number of key papers to the clerk should you be interested. I just have three quick conclusions.
There's ample evidence that marine protected areas work. The evidence is quite strong and interestingly enough, and it's stronger in marine areas than on land.
Protected areas need to be put in the right places for conservation, so that they actually do protect nature, and not simply put it in places where they avoid a conflict with fishing.
This committee is justifiably focused on Aichi target 11, or Canada target one. I ask you to also consider Aichi target six, which is upgrading our fisheries management, because we can't lump everything into Aichi target 11 in terms of the things that should be done in the oceans. We need a whole oceans approach.
Finally, I agree with the notion that we need some legislative review. If I look at the National Marine Conservation Areas Act, it does not have meaningful ecological end points, like ecological integrity, and I think it could benefit from strengthening, as we move this agenda forward.
Thank you very much.