Protecting Nature is the World’s Next Great Challenge

Thoughts from the COP15 biodiversity conference in Montreal.

Coal mines may be destined for the dustbin of history but the memory of the canaries once used to warn underground miners of deadly air lives on in our language. 

“Canary in the coal mine” has become a useful metaphor for many early warnings, from market corrections to cultural shifts.

But it is time we took the old canary canard a little more literally.

Canaries were used in mines because of their sensitivity to deadly carbon monoxide and other toxic gases. When the canary dropped, humans knew it was time to get out. They were a sentinel species.

Last week, the Government of Canada released Wild Species 2020: The General Status of Species in Canada – a five-year report that is the most complete understanding we have ever had on the status and distribution of wild species in Canada.

The Report’s results indicate that 80 percent of the assessed species are secure, while 20 percent are at some level of risk of extinction in Canada. Seven species – once found only in Canada – are believed to be extinct from the planet. Another report, the Living Planet Report 2022 from the World Wildlife Fund, catalogued this fall how world wildlife populations have declined 69 per cent since 1970, including 20 percent in North America. Up to one million species are currently at risk of extinction worldwide.

The lesson of canaries is that when we make this world uninhabitable for one species, we also endanger ourselves.

Our government is hard at work protecting sentinel species at risk, including caribou, monarch butterflies, sage grouse, right whales, southern resident killer whales, spotted owls and more. Since 2018, we’ve made the two largest budgetary funding commitments in Canada’s history toward protecting and conserving nature – totalling more than $3.6 billion. And we’ve been fully engaged with Indigenous peoples, the original stewards of the lands, waters and ice, through Indigenous-managed conservation areas and Indigenous Guardians programs.    

When the leaders of the G20 met last month in Bali, they called for a truly global agreement to protect and conserve the world’s biodiversity – one that matches the ambition of the breakthrough Paris Climate Accord.

That’s the ambition for COP15, the Nature COP, that got underway this week in Montreal. The Fifteenth Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity brings together 196 countries for the largest such gathering in a generation.

Canada will take a strong leadership role, along with international partners, in championing the development of an ambitious new Global Biodiversity Framework with clear targets and actions. We’re championing the important role Indigenous peoples and communities play in conservation and biodiversity, and have committed Canada to halting and reversing nature loss by 2030 and achieving a full recovery for nature by 2050. We’re pushing the world to adopt Canada’s domestic goal of conserving 30 percent of land and oceans by 2030.

When we protect nature, we also enable nature to care for us. Green, resilient, and healthy neighbourhoods, a clean, low-carbon economy, and thriving ecosystems are the keys to sustainable life on Earth.

You might say the success of COP15 is Canada and the world’s canary in the coal mine.