A new report commissioned by the Wilderness Committee and Sierra Club BC found that Federal and Provincial government policy gaps have rendered their protection of Species at Risk ineffective.
“Our study looked at terrestrial and freshwater vertebrate species in BC We needed to refine the scope a little bit just because there are so many Species at Risk in BC. In order to do this analysis, we had to narrow in on a few representative species. In total, we chose 64 species. Of the 64 species, only two of them have had their critical habitat mapped by the deadlines. The remaining 97% have experienced critical habitat mapping delays anywhere from 2 to 18 years. Then there’s 16 of the 64 species that still don’t even have their critical habitat mapped,” explained Charlotte Dawe of the Wilderness Committee.
“For example, the Spotted Owl: despite them requiring critical habitat maps over 18 years ago, they still don’t have those maps and, because of this delay, logging has continued in their habitat unabated. There’s now only one known Spotted Owl left in the wild. This is a very sad but obvious example of how delays in critical habitat mapping can drive extinction of a species.”
Dawe said that after the recovery strategy for an endangered species comes out, the government has one year to produce the critical habitat map. In the case of ‘threatened species,’ they have two years.
A spokesperson from BC’s new Ministry of Land, Water and Resource Stewardship emailed Cortes Currents that they have not had time to study the report and it would be premature to respond to specific questions.
He reaffirmed the government’s intention to implement the ‘Together for Wildlife Strategy‘ as well as all 14 recommendations of the independent panel’s Old Growth Strategic Review report, including Recommendation #2 to “declare the conservation and management of ecosystem health and biodiversity of British Columbia’s forests as an overarching priority and enact legislation that legally establishes this priority for all sectors.”
“We were hoping to do a deep dive into basically all of the laws in BC that can help protect Species at Risk. So this also included the Federal Species at Risk Act and how it is working to protect or not protect Species at Risk in BC, but then also, we know that the provincial government relies on saying that we have a number of different laws that add up to offer protection to Species at Risk under their jurisdiction of what they manage. What we found is that these laws leave huge gaps that allow Species at Risk to continue to plummet to extinction,” said Dawe.
“For example, the Forest & Range Practices Act is something that BC commonly says helps protect Species at Risk, but companies aren’t even required to survey for Species at Risk before they lay out a cut block boundary.”
She believes companies currently cut down Species at Risk habitat, where there are endangered species, without breaking the law.
I interviewed Dawe about this last year. A number of Species at Risk were seen at during the Fairy Creek logging blockade. There were, for example, 240 sightings of Marbled Murrelets, as well as sightings of the Western Screech Owl, Northern Goshawk and Olive-sided Flycatcher. The Ministry of Forests informed Cortes Currents that Species at Risk had been sighted. They hired a species expert to conduct surveys, but did not stop the logging.
In their press release, the Wilderness Committee and Sierra Club BC list four key findings in the report.
“The first one is that the federal government is failing Species at Risk by delaying critical habitat gathering and mapping. Critical habitat mapping is one of, if not the most important step in species recovery, because if we don’t know where they’re living, how can we protect them?” explained Dawe.
“What we’re finding is that the federal government consistently delays mapping claiming that there’s not enough available information. Sometimes they’ve delayed maps for 18 years and counting. That’s the case for the Spotted Owl right now. On average the government is 9.8 years behind schedule for publishing recovery strategies and critical habitat maps. That’s very shocking and one of the leading reasons why species are plummeting to extinction. They sit in this limbo while government is making critical habitat maps.”
“The next one is during the critical habitat mapping process, governments rely on underlining assumptions and incomplete consideration of available data to reduce accuracy of the maps. We dive into this fully in the report and give some really good examples of this. There have been situations where known den sites of endangered snakes have been reported to government, and government decides not to include that habitat in the critical habitat maps, but then has added critical habitat for this same snake species based on an observation of one person who claimed to have seen a snake. So it seems like the accuracy of the information that government chooses to use to create maps are not always taken into account. Stakeholders, specifically industry like logging companies and oil and gas, are able to lobby for more information during that critical habitat mapping phase so that protection measures would be delayed and therefore they would be able to have access to that habitat area that would normally be off limits.”
“The third one is that the BC government locks the legislative framework to address the threats facing Species at Risk on provincial land. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has listed 11 different threats that drive species into decline. (The list is summarized on pp 41 to 44 of the report.) We hired biologist Jared Hobbs to measure if all of the province’s laws effectively protect Species at Risk against those threats. What we found in majority of the cases is that the threats are not being mitigated or even addressed at all under our current legislative framework. So of course, this also allows species to be driven to extinction.”
“The last finding is that the BC park system falls short of protecting biodiversity because the highest biodiverse zones with the most species are proportionally underrepresented in the park system.”
Two stats from the report:
- Only 30% of BC’s parks are found in the parts of the province where 73% of the Species at Risk are reported.
- The Critical Habitat maps were delayed anywhere from 2 to 18 years for 97% of the species studied in the report. This ranged anywhere from two to 18 years.
“The report really drives a point home that our provincial and federal laws are just not enough to protect biodiversity and halt extinction in B.C,” said Dawe.
In the podcast, she talks about BC’s 16 Bioclimatic Zones.
“Zones are categorized based on similar patterns of energy flow, vegetation soils, and macro climate. BC is split into 16 different zones. For example, one would be the Coastal Western Hemlock, another would be the Ponderosa Pine Forests.”
Cortes Currents was especially interested in some of the findings for species that are in our area (Cortes, Quadram, Read and Sonora Islands) .
- 4% of the Coast Douglas Fir area is protected
- The percentage rises to 19.3% for Coastal Western Hemlock
- The Great Blue Heron has been a ‘Species of Concern’ since 2010, but mapping is not required until they are classified as ‘threatened.’ (“Once they become threatened, then we’ll start to do something to try to bring them back. If we took more action to protect concerned species, there would be a higher likelihood of getting them out of the emergency room,” said Dawe.)
- Barn Swallows, Marbled Murrelets and the Western Screech Owl are three of the 62 species whose critical habitat maps were delayed.
“This study, I hope will be used to combat the narrative that the provincial laws in BC are working to protect Species at Risk. It is really a one stop shop that explains as in depth as you can get, how our laws are not enough to save Species at Risk. We need an overarching law that takes into account cumulative effects and multiple project proposals over the same habitat to ensure that species needs are consistently being met,” said Dawe.
Delegates from around the world are heading to the UN Biodiversity Conference in Montreal, 7-19 December, 2022.
A recent Environment and Climate Change Canada press release states, “The Government of Canada has committed to conserving 25 percent of lands and inland waters in Canada by 2025, working toward 30 percent of each by 2030. Canada is also committed to working to halt and reverse nature loss by 2030 [in Canada] and to achieve a full recovery for nature by 2050.”
“For the federal government to have this as a goal and encourage other nations to commit to this goal without taking a look in the mirror and seeing how their laws are failing Species at Risk and how the provincial and territorial laws within the country are just completely lacking to protect Species at Risk shows that this COP might just be another one where governments just make showy speeches and don’t actually follow through on promises,” said Dawe.
“So we really want to use this report to highlight that if we’re serious about reaching the goals of COP, we need BC to enact a Species at Risk law because we are key to Canada achieving its biodiversity targets. We’re home to majority of the species in Canada and also have the most that are at risk of extinction.”
Table 3 from the report: SARA Schedule 1 listed species in BC (filtered to include only terrestrial vertebrates and freshwater fish)
Top image credit: An endangered Southern Mountain Caribou mother and calf – Photo by Alex Hsuan Tsui (Jun 20, 2022)
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