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Safeguarding the future of Canada’s environment
Environmental scientist Dr. Ciara Raudsepp-Hearne explains how Canada can expand protected areas to maximize biodiversity protection
- Feb 26, 2025
- 1,051 words
- 5 minutes
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Dr. Ciara Raudsepp-Hearne leads the Canadian Key Biodiversity Areas (KBA) Coalition on behalf of the Wildlife Conservation Society Canada with the goal of identifying and mapping KBAs in Canada. She has written this piece to illustrate how a strategic approach to expanding Canada’s protected areas system, guided in part by knowledge gained through the KBA program, can improve the ability of these areas to stop and reverse biodiversity loss.
The trouble with international agreements, whether for action on climate like the Paris Agreement or action on biodiversity like the Convention on Biological Diversity, is that they require follow-through. And this is where governments lose the thread.
So, it is good news that in response to signing the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) in 2022, the Canadian federal government has worked quickly to introduce a “2030 Nature Strategy” outlining how it intends to address the four objectives and 23 targets in the ambitious and complex agreement.
The one target that many people may know is the goal of protecting 30 per cent of lands and waters in each signatory country by 2030. This is an enormous challenge, but there is also the question of which 30 per cent to protect. If the goal is to stop and reverse biodiversity loss, then the 30 per cent needs to be in places where biodiversity is concentrated or threatened to make a difference. The GBF specifically calls on governments to focus on “areas of high biodiversity importance” in Target 1.
Having quantifiable protection targets (e.g. 30X30) forces a focus on quantity. Therefore, it is important to have agreed-upon and easily understood approaches for bringing ‘quality’ back into the picture.
The international Key Biodiversity Area (KBA) program works to identify areas that meet specific, quantitative criteria tied to different biodiversity elements. For example, KBAs can be identified for places home to concentrations of threatened or rare species or ecosystems, for places that are important for biological processes like migration or hibernation, or for the last remaining places in the world with large, intact ecosystems. These things can, of course, overlap but can also in and of themselves qualify an area as a KBA, if there is solid evidence that they meet globally-agreed upon thresholds. This multidimensional perspective is part of what makes the KBA program such a versatile and comprehensive conservation tool. And the outputs of this program are trusted because of the standardized and transparent approach used to identify the sites.
The KBA program draws together multiple partners, from conservation organizations and governments to Indigenous Nations and local community members, in a collaborative process to identify biological gems. A collaborative approach to identifying biodiversity-rich areas is essential because when KBAs are used as a sort of measuring stick for how well our existing protected areas protect biodiversity, we can see that recent additions to Canada’s protected area network are not capturing the most important places for avoiding biodiversity loss. Less than four per cent of the land that was added to Canada’s protected area network between 2010 and 2020 (when we attempted to meet the Aichi targets) was land within a KBA. Key Biodiversity Areas can shift our focus to quality by mapping out biodiversity-rich areas.
Of course, KBAs are just one building block for designing effective conservation systems that match Canadians’ diverse values and priorities. Still, they are currently the only broadly accessible tool for representing a set of crucial values we want to conserve in Canada. So, while KBAs are a great starting point, we still need a bigger toolbox.
For example, the next thing for decision-makers to consider is ensuring that KBAs (and existing protected areas) do not become isolated islands in a sea of human development. We must consider creating connectivity between KBAs with things like wildlife corridors, greenbelts, and linear parks. Stringing these gems together to ensure species can move and genes can mix is especially important when climate change is rapidly reshaping landscapes and habitats.
It is also essential to think about the human relationship to nature. Places important for maintaining the culture and practices of Indigenous communities that have evolved with ecosystems should be prioritized. We also need to consider areas that provide important services to all Canadians, like protecting headwaters or ecosystems that can help prevent flooding. What’s upstream comes downstream, and the fact that human health is deeply connected to the health of the natural world is too often overlooked in our decision-making. We need to put a lot more value on the services natural areas provide and understand that areas with high biodiversity often play a central role in supporting these vital tasks.
And then there is climate change. We must factor in natural carbon storage and climate resiliency in protected area planning. Given our halting progress in reducing climate-destabilizing emissions, we must protect massive carbon storage areas like Canada’s vast peatlands and forests. We need to do that at scale to ensure vast quantities of carbon are not released into the atmosphere from these areas and provide the means for natural systems to keep sequestering carbon on a large scale, especially given offsetting effects like increasingly large wildfires.
Building a robust protected areas system complemented by robust stewardship and regulation in non-protected lands and waters will be like assembling a complex layer cake. We can’t just focus on 30X30 because large-scale planning for the survival of species and ecosystems in Canada will also require stewardship actions outside any protected area network.
Key Biodiversity Areas are relevant to all the targets in the GBF, including addressing species at risk recovery, restoration of habitat and land use planning, among others. For 30X30 and all of these other targets, we need to look at multiple aspects to determine gaps in current systems and where we can get the most bang for our efforts by protecting places that represent multiple values: species and ecosystem diversity and vulnerability, ecosystem services, climate resilience, carbon storage and cultural values. That’s a complex process, but as our work around identifying KBAs has shown, a collaborative process can make it much more achievable, as can proper resourcing and buy-in from governments at all levels.
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