Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee for the invitation to contribute to your study on the Oceans Act's marine protected areas. My name is Rodolphe Devillers and I am professor of geography at Memorial University. I have been a scientist for about 20 years, specializing in geographic methods that can help understand and manage our oceans. One part of my expertise is the design of marine protected area networks, making me one of very few academic experts in this field in Canada.
I have worked in collaboration with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans for over 10 years. I am involved in the MPA network design in the Newfoundland region, and I led the technical team that conducted the analyses for the design of the MPA network in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence.
Several Canadian marine scientists, including doctors Natalie Ban, Isabelle Côté, Daniel Pauly, and Boris Worm, have already made their statements to this committee and have clearly demonstrated that MPAs, when designed correctly, are known to be very effective tools to protect our oceans. The past 20 years of scientific research confirmed the benefits MPAs can provide to the protection of marine ecosystems, but also people and the economy.
Working for over a decade in a province that suffered dramatic economic and social crises largely due to overfishing, Newfoundland, I do strongly believe in the key contribution MPAs make to support healthy oceans and their sustainable use. When talking about MPAs, I use the definition provided by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, IUCN, the only internationally recognized definition for MPAs and the one that will be used by the United Nations to assess Canada's progress towards the Aichi target 11. I assume this is also the one supported by this committee, as it was adopted by vote by all IUCN members including Canada at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Barcelona in 2008 and has been used in many DFO documents.
I am thrilled by the energy this government is putting in to meet Aichi target 11. From the mandate letter of Prime Minister Trudeau to Minister LeBlanc, to the ENVI committee report released in March, to the position taken by Canada at the United Nations ocean conference last week, Canada is now moving in the right direction. As a scientist, however, I feel I have a duty to warn you that, if Oceans Act MPAs keep having low levels of protection, the upcoming Canadian MPA network is unlikely to bring the benefits the government and Canadians expect.
Many scientific studies have documented reasons why MPAs can fail to provide expected benefits. Those reasons include not placing them at the right locations to avoid sites of higher economic interest, making them too small, providing levels of protection that are too low, and also failing to review MPAs when new scientific evidence is made available.
All of those issues apply to Canada Oceans Act MPAs and greatly impact their ability to be effective. Bolder actions will be rapidly required to create an effective MPA network. For this reason, 15 of the most respected Canadian marine scientists, including me, sent a letter yesterday to ministers LeBlanc and McKenna summarizing our concerns and calling for action.
We made four key recommendations. The first one was that the Oceans Act be amended to include minimum protection levels for MPAs, similar to terrestrial parks, such that activities known to impact marine ecosystems are excluded from MPAs and from other effective area-based conservation measures. The second recommendation was that DFO restructure the way it integrates science advice to require a systematic scientific assessment of proposed areas and management plans before new MPAs are established.
The third recommendation was that the government be more open and transparent about the effectiveness of existing MPAs, the ongoing MPA network planning process, and how scientific data are being incorporated to evaluate different conservation options. The last recommendation was that DFO acknowledge that the 10% Aichi target is an interim measure and set broader and more effective conservation targets beyond 2020, including a mechanism to allow for adaptive management of existing Oceans Act MPAs.
I have in the past decade been involved in a number of processes related to MPA designation, and I would like to focus the rest of my testimony on the role science plays in the Oceans Act MPA decision process. DFO science has some of the most brilliant marine scientists, I know. While this government does not muzzle its scientists anymore, I would argue that it too often fails to listen to their advice, or even worse, it does not request such advice.
I will focus on some key issues that I see.
First, DFO science has gaps in terms of expertise. While strong on fisheries science, there is to my knowledge no single research scientist at DFO with expertise in socio-economic questions or conservation planning, expertise that other similar international agencies, such as NOAA in the U.S., CEFAS in the U.K., and lfremer in France, have developed in the past decade. Such science is critically important to support policy in marine conservation, but also for sustainable fisheries management. I recommend DFO science diversify its current expertise by hiring research scientists specialized in those fields. One of the negative outcomes of this gap in expertise for the MPA design process is a lack of peer review of socio-economic data that would be similar to the one done with biological data.
Second, the role of science is currently compartmentalized to specific stages of the MPA network planning, resulting in MPAs that have been at some point informed by science but may not be scientifically sound at the end of the process. Let me take as an example the Laurentian Channel MPA that is to be announced in the next few weeks, or actually it’s going to be next week. My research group has studied the past 10 years that led to this MPA and discovered that science played little role beyond the initial identification of the area. Changes to the AOI, the area of interest, boundary that resulted from stakeholder consultations have been characterized by a complete absence of any scientific confirmation that those changes would not compromise the ability of the MPA to meet its conservation objectives.
We found that changes made to boundaries in response to fisheries industry requests resulted in up to 43% of species identified as conservation priorities being now left outside of the MPA. I hence strongly recommend that the role science plays in the MPA planning process be reviewed and that a scientific assessment of all proposed MPAs be required before those MPAs are designated. Such an assessment should be made publicly available in a DFO science report, and acknowledge explicitly the trade-offs made during stakeholder consultations.
My third point is that the characteristics of the MPAs being created, including their conservation objectives, boundaries, and levels of protection, tend to currently reflect what can be negotiated with stakeholders and not what is required to effectively protect those ecosystems. In addition, some of those negotiations are often done outside existing committees, sometimes in private meetings with regional directors, and are not documented. I hence recommend that all changes that can impact conservation objectives, MPA boundaries, and their level of protection be only discussed in meetings open to all stakeholders and be documented and made public.
Generally, Canada is aiming for quantity, while the quality of Canadian MPAs, including those to be announced, tends to be low and does not meeting peer-reviewed science recommendations. I clearly understand the complexity involved in those processes. Studying those trade-offs has been the focus of some of my work, but to be effective, the MPA network will clearly require much stronger levels of protection. Failing to do so is likely to provide marginal benefits in terms of conservation, but also in socio-economic terms.
Protecting our oceans has a price, but the benefits can greatly outweigh that by ensuring a sustainable use of our oceans. Much like climate change, the price of not acting now will keep increasing in the future, both economically and socially. I believe this government has an opportunity to really be a world leader in marine conservation and oceans management.
Thank you for the opportunity to present my view on the key challenges I see for the MPA network planning process. I look forward to your questions.