Ten bridges on the road to recovering Canada’s endangered species

Wildlife is declining around the world. Many developed nations have enacted legislation on endangered species protection and provide funding for wildlife recovery. Protecting endangered species is also supported by the public and judiciary. Yet, despite what appear as enabling conditions, wild species continue to decline. Our paper explores pathways to endangered species recovery by analyzing the barriers that have been identified in Canada, the United States, and Australia. We summarize these findings based on Canada’s Species at Risk Conservation Cycle (assessment, protection, recovery planning, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation) and then identify 10 “bridges” that could help overcome these barriers and bend our current trajectory of wildlife loss to recovery. These bridges include ecosystem approaches to recovery, building capacity for community co-governance, linking wildlife recovery to ecosystem services, and improving our storytelling about the loss and recovery of wildlife. The focus of our conclusions is the Canadian setting, but our findings can be applied in other national and subnational settings to reverse the decline of wildlife and halt extinction.

The biodiversity crisis in Canada: failures and challenges of federal and sub-national strategic and legal frameworks

Negative biodiversity trends are evident in Canada, in spite of its ecological and economic wealth and high governance capacity. We examined the current implementation of Canada’s national biodiversity strategy—the planning instrument to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity—through its existing legal framework. We did this by evaluating biodiversity-related strategies and plans and 201 federal, provincial, and territorial laws. We found that while most jurisdictions claim dedicated attention to biodiversity, there is little evidence of an integrated approach within provinces and territories and across the federation. Biodiversity conservation led by governments underscores the need for considerations of species and ecosystem services to be mainstreamed into economic and development decision-making. Key challenges to this include Canada’s unusual degree of decentralized constitutionally ascribed authority over natural assets and its historical and continued economic emphasis on extraction of natural resources—a conflict of interest for jurisdictions. Transitioning to scale-appropriate planning and integrated decision-making that can address the pressures and causes of biodiversity conservation in Canada will require transformative change. Law reform, while necessary, will not succeed unless accompanied by a whole-of-government approach, a shift to a bio-centric mindset, innovative governance (particularly Indigenous-led conservation), and federal leadership with strong levels of financial investment.

Recent amendments to the Endangered Species Act and an uncertain future for species at risk: a case study of Ontario’s Niagara Region

The biodiversity crisis is a pressing global issue. In Ontario, Canada, species at risk are protected under the Endangered Species Act (2007) . The current government amended that legislation through the More Homes, More Choice Act (2019), leaving species at risk with an uncertain future. This paper uses the Niagara Region as a case study and relies on interviews and data collection about listed species to illuminate the possible implications for the new amendments. The results indicate a total of 71 species at risk that exist in the Region, with as many as 37 species that could be delisted and stripped of protection under the recent changes. There is also concern around the prioritization of the economics over science in the amendments. While uncertainty surrounding the implementation of the amendments to the Ontario Endangered Species Act exists, there is agreement that species at risk should be protected.