Environment committee  Good afternoon, and thank you for this opportunity to share with the committee our recommendations for a national conservation plan. My name is Alison Woodley. I'm the national conservation director at CPAWS. My presentation today will focus primarily on the fundamental element

Environment committee  CPAWS shares the challenges we're all facing in terms of the nature deficit disorder, as it's often called, and people being less connected with nature. CPAWS has a number of programs to try to deal with the challenge. We have education programs. For example, in our southern Albe

Environment committee  Thank you. I think the goal of the national conservation plan should be about protecting wildlife or biodiversity and healthy ecosystems to sustain the values we all share and our human communities.

Environment committee  There is growing scientific evidence that there is a great deal of biological carbon that's actually stored in intact ecosystems. For example, the boreal forest is one of the largest storehouses of biological carbon in the world. The wonderful thing is that when you conserve th

Environment committee  I think there's fairly clear evidence, both internationally and in Canada, that in order to conserve those important ecological processes, and the parts.... In order to protect healthy ecosystems we have to keep all the parts and the processes intact. In order to do that, I think

Environment committee  Are changed landscapes always degraded landscapes? If they have lost species, they are degraded. If they have lost integrity, then they are degraded at some level. Obviously there's a full spectrum of degradation. Depending on what you mean by changed, if they have lost integri

Environment committee  I can explain some of them. I'm sure I won't get the full suite, and I'm sure Mr. Wareham will be able to fill in the details, because he's our marine expert at the table today. There was an original commitment to complete networks of protected areas by 2012. We're obviously no

Environment committee  So far we are at 1%.

Environment committee  I think there are some interesting examples. Again, Mr. Wareham can fill in more details, I'm sure. Australia has done some interesting things. One of the challenges we face is that we tend to establish protected areas on land and in the oceans one at a time, and it takes a ver

Environment committee  Yes, thank you. CPAWS has an ongoing campaign to protect 12 marine protected area by 2012. We are making some progress on a number of those sites, which is great. We're continuing to work to encourage that to happen.

Environment committee  Reiterating what I said earlier, I think we need to make sure that it addresses large land and seascape scale approaches. It would take us from one-off projects to a larger landscape, more integrated approach. We need to make sure that we complete a network of core protected ha

Environment committee  We have to work on both private lands and public lands. About 90% of Canada is public lands, so if we work only on private land, we're missing a huge chunk of the country. However, there are significant numbers of species at risk, and there is lots of work to do on the private la

Environment committee  I agree with Mr. Wareham. Strong environmental laws are very important and the habitat provisions are part of that. A suite of acts are specifically designed to create marine protected areas, so those are in place. Absolutely, it's important.

Environment committee  Thank you very much. Good morning, and thank you for the opportunity to share our recommendations on terrestrial habitat conservation in Canada with the committee. My name is Alison Woodley. I’m the national conservation director at CPAWS. CPAWS is Canada's voice for public

Environment committee  At CPAWS, and in Canada generally, we endorse the international definition for a protected area that's put forward under the convention on biodiversity and the IUCN, which has various elements. It's an area that is managed to protect biodiversity as a first priority. It recogni