Canada has only four years left to reach its ambitious goals to protect 30 per cent of its lands and oceans by 2030. That’s about double what’s protected right now, which means the government is trying to speed up the work.
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s new nature strategy, released on Tuesday, leans heavily on two approaches that are raising some eyebrows: efforts to get businesses and investors to put private funding into conservation, and officially recognizing what are known as “other effective area-based conservation measures,” or OECM, which are areas that are protected by local communities and private groups.
The new approaches could provide an important boost to conservation in Canada and reduce the burden on Ottawa to do the work alone, but experts say if it’s not done correctly, these other-conserved areas may end up existing on paper but not providing the level of protection necessary for ecosystems to thrive.
Here’s how these approaches could play a role in Canada’s nature plan.
What are other-conserved areas?
OECMs are used mainly by smaller municipal governments or Indigenous communities to get recognition for projects that don’t fit neatly into the definition of, say, a provincial park or nature reserve.
Examples include projects to protect the water supply for cities or efforts to conserve hunting and fishing grounds for Indigenous communities, which may not have nature protection as a primary purpose, but achieve those protections anyway.
Michael Bissonnette, staff lawyer at West Coast Environmental Law, has worked on OECMs established in marine areas, and said they have been quite successful especially when paired with Indigenous-led conservation areas nearby.
“But there’s a wide gamut of what can be contemplated as OECMs. Some of them are fantastic and then there’s some that there’s been a lot of criticism about,” he said.
The federal government maintains a database of OECMs, also known as other-conserved areas, but Carney’s announcement was the first time they’re being officially counted toward meeting Canada’s conservation targets. The nature strategy calls for at least eight per cent of lands to be protected under other-conserved measures.
Megan Lafferty, manager of land protection measures at the Nature Conservancy of Canada, works with municipalities and private groups on other-conserved areas. She says Canada has been on the forefront of developing tools to assess how effective OECMs are and to make sure they actually protect nature in a comparable way to parks or other conserved areas.
OECMs are not a “consolation prize” instead of establishing some kind of park, Lafferty said, but rather “what is fit-for-purpose on the landscape.”
They also allow local communities to skip the burdensome bureaucracy of establishing a park, she said, and still get recognition for the conservation work they are doing.
But critics of the approach say that OECMs have been shown to allow industrial activities, like logging, especially in B.C. where they are widely used. A 2022 report from two environmental groups said that other-conserved areas were falsely inflating B.C.’s progress to its nature protection goals, because most of these areas were still open to logging.
Lucero González, Wilderness Committee, says that OECMs were never meant to form such a large part of Canada’s target. She also raised concerns about how they are tracked, long-term, to ensure they continue giving the environmental benefits they’re supposed to.
“We do fear that they are going to be used to inflate a number and not to reach the goal of halting the biodiversity crisis,” González said.
“What we’ve seen right now is that, no, they have not been able to be used properly, both in having standards when they get designated and in the future for tracking their progress.”
In a statement, Environment and Climate Change Canada said, “Mining, logging, and other forms of resource extraction are not compatible with OECM and would not normally be included in the boundaries.”
A 23-year-old resident of Poplar River First Nation recently became the community’s lands guardian. Owen Bear is now tasked with protecting the land that’s known as Pimachiowin Aki, which in Anishinaabemowin translates to “the land that gives life.”
What’s the role of private money in the new strategy?
Carney also announced a new task force on natural capital accounting and nature financing to account for the economic value of nature and to mobilize private finance and investment into protected nature.
Details are scarce right now on how exactly the government will do this, but some models for increasing philanthropic contributions for nature have been used in Canada, for example to protect part of the Great Bear Sea off the coast of B.C.
“I think the government would like to see more of those kinds. Models of matching of private philanthropic funding with government funding,” Bissonnette said.
But he said with the 2030 deadline fast approaching, he is concerned that there isn’t a lot of detail available about how the government will raise that private funding.
González was critical about the overall message Carney’s emphasis on private money sends on nature.
Focusing on private capital, she said, means that “nature protection is not in the hands of the people that are being affected by extractivism and by industrial development, but in the hands of the people running those extractive industries.”
“It really shifts the focus on and and takes power away from those that are experiencing climate change and biodiversity loss on the ground and gives it all to those that have benefited from it,” González said.
She said that the government needs to refocus on the purpose of the nature goal — to combat the biodiversity crisis and mass extinction of species being seen in Canada and across the world — rather than to reach numerical goals.
