There is no better snapshot of biodiversity woes than the landmark 2019 Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, known as IPBES. The work of hundreds of scientists who reviewed data from more than 15,000 sources, the report highlights humanity’s crucial reliance on nature for food, water, medicines, energy, livelihoods, and cultural and spiritual fulfilment. It also shows this same dependence eroding nature, with species rapidly declining in both range and number. (An example: despite the loss of a quarter of North American bird fauna since 1970 — an estimated three billion animals — industry continues to kill hundreds of millions of birds annually.) And essential services provided by ecosystems — water filtration, carbon storage, seed dispersal, pollination — are also breaking down. Having “severely altered” three-quarters of the planet’s land surface, humanity has put one million species at risk of extinction.

This eye-opening number corroborates that we’re in the midst of a planetary sixth mass extinction. The previous five, spread over a half-billion years of geological time, accrued from combined natural causes — cataclysmic meteor strikes, volcanism and atmospheric shifts. The present episode has only one root cause: Homo sapiens.

The study reported a normal extinction rate for vertebrates as two species lost per 10,000 per 100 years — or 0.1 per cent over 500 years. A conservative estimate of recent extinction rates during a similar time span, beginning in the year 1500, shows mammals at two per cent, and birds, reptiles, amphibians and fishes at about 1.5 per cent.

Focusing on species extinctions, however, distracts from equally worrisome trends in population declines and extirpations (local disappearance). The World Wildlife Fund’s living planet index shows a staggering 60 per cent decline in wildlife populations in just 40 years. Freshwater fish had the highest extinction rate worldwide among vertebrates in the 20th century, but a 2017 study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found a third of 27,600 terrestrial vertebrate species are undergoing worrisome population loss — even common species of supposed “low concern.” The authors suggested as many as half of the animals we once shared the planet with have vanished, a “biological annihilation” in need of urgent redress. Three years later, in June 2020, these same authors’ cri de coeur rang louder after finding the extinction rate to be accelerating: some 543 terrestrial vertebrate species had disappeared during the past century and 500 more could follow in the next two decades — a combined loss equivalent to what would naturally occur in a 16,000-year period.

The ocean is also under siege. IPBES reported overfishing and bycatch severely affected biodiversity in two-thirds of marine environments. Since the early 1970s, five large shark species found along the eastern U.S. have declined by 97 to 99 per cent each, and a quarter of the world’s sharks and rays are now threatened. A 2020 University of British Columbia study found climate-driven ocean warming and acidification were affecting glass sponge reefs unique to the Pacific northwest that had also seen damage by bottom trawlers and salmon farms. And the complex ecosystems of tropical coral reefs are suffering huge biodiversity losses.

Despite its large size, vast spaces and relatively low population, Canada hasn’t been immune to such impacts. According to the 2017 WWF Living Planet Report Canada, 451 of 903 vertebrate species monitored in this country declined by an average 83 per cent between 1970 and 2014. Since Canada passed its Species at Risk Act in 2002, 154 threatened populations have continued to decline by an average 2.7 per cent annually (compared to declines of 1.7 per cent annually in the 30 years prior). Habitat degradation is responsible for about half of losses in birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish. Only in mammals is habitat eclipsed by the second largest threat — invasive species and disease. Pollution, climate change and exploitation affect all groups to similar extents.

In its 2019 report, IPBES noted how conservation goals for 2030 and beyond will be possible only through transformative changes across all sectors of society. One of those transformations is money.

Unsurprisingly, we’re already paying for biodiversity loss — a US $10-trillion hit to the world economy by 2050 under a “business-as-usual” scenario according to a January 2020 WWF report. It follows that spending far less to reverse this trend would be a sound investment; indeed, the study calculates a US $490 billion annual net gain in GDP under a “global conservat­ion” scenario.

Money is the critical determinant in achieving biodiversity goals, yet govern­ments remain reticent to fund things with uncertain outcomes — despite data suggesting success. A model pub­lished in the journal Nature in 2017 shows how conservation spending dur­ing 12 years reduced biodiversity loss by almost a third in 100 signatory countries to the Convention on Biological Diversity. Indeed, back in 2013 at the Thinking Extinction symposium, Bridget Stutchbury, a biology prof at Toronto’s York University, noted the average cost of improving the status of a single endangered bird species was about $1 million per year. “If open heart surgery costs $75 billion a year, the U.S. defence budget is $1.8 billion per day, and the world sees $470 billion in annual soft­ drink sales, there’s plenty of money in the system,” she said. “If every taxpayer in North America gave $10 each year, we could probably save everything [in North America].”

Stutchbury wasn’t far off. Though the costs for meeting the 2010 Aichi targets are largely unknown, reducing extinction risk for all globally threatened bird species was priced at US $875 million to $1.23 billion annually over the next decade in a study published in the journal Science; when other threatened species groups were added, the cost tripled. Estimates for protecting and managing all terrestrial sites of global conservation significance ranged from US $65.1 billion to $76.1 billion annually. So, meeting Aichi targets — or the more ambitious ones likely to replace them — will require worldwide conservation funding to increase by at least an order of magnitude.

Recognition of this need is reflected in a recent European Union pledge to raise 20 billion euros a year to boost biodiversity. Can the rest of the global community afford to do this? Can it afford not to?

Rigid adherence to procedural standards makes the committee effective but cumbersome, a proverbial large ship in a tight waterway steered carefully, to the benefit of species at risk, but slowly, with the opposite effect. Nevertheless, COSEWIC assessments move at lightning speed compared to the subsequent formal listing process, where the entire vessel can run aground — as Laurentian’s Jacqueline Litzgus, whose turtle subjects are among the world’s most at-risk group, knows all too well after a 12-year stint on the committee. “COSEWIC is doing all the things it needs to,” she says. “All these busy scientists gather at an amazing consensus-based roundtable, and reports are written by the most knowledgeable experts to get the best results. But then… sometimes nothing.”

As of April 2019, the committee had assessed 799 species, finding 356 endangered, 189 threatened, 232 of special concern and 22 extirpated. Only 580 of these, however, are actually listed, the seven-step process from COSEWIC designation to a ministerial order a bottleneck of capacity issues, socioeconomic pressure and political interference (some pending listing decisions date back 15 years). “The challenge is to get everyone else in the chain of protection to keep up with COSEWIC,” notes Reynolds, “because it’s ultimately cheaper and faster to assess the status of a species than to bring it back from the brink of extinction.”

The bureaucratic snaggle, in part, lies in the incrementalism of one-species-at-a-time recovery strategies and action plans. To cut the Gordian knot, a new kid appeared on the block in 2018 — a pan-Canadian approach to transforming species at risk conservation in Canada. According to its guiding architect Kaaren Lewis, the executive lead for the species at risk program and species transformation for Environment and Climate Change Canada’s Nature Conservation Agenda, the framework will “help shift conservation implementation from the current species-by-species approach to more multi-species and ecosystem-based initiatives. Working with provinces, territories, Indigenous groups and other partners on shared priority species, priority places and priority threats, we’re hoping to see better conservation outcomes for species at risk, increased co-benefits for biodiversity and ecosystems, and improved return on investment.”

To help that along, the pan-Canadian plan comes with $155 million through the species-at-risk stream of the federal Canada Nature Fund to encourage more collaboration and partnerships. “Federal funding helps bring others to the table,” notes Lewis. 

“It’s an almost revolutionary departure from business as usual, which makes it both interesting and worth supporting,” says Mooers. “Done right, it could really help with situations where you need buy-in from everyone to prioritize certain species, while recognizing that you can’t do everything equally well everywhere you try.”

Collaborative landscape-level approaches could certainly help in B.C., which lacks dedicated endangered species legislation to support its country-leading 1,807 species of animals and plants at risk of extinction and range of environmental issues: the systematic under-reporting of deep-sea fish trawled from provincial waters because of intimidation and harassment of government observers; the diseases, parasites and waste of non-native Atlantic salmon reared in crowded, open-ocean fish farming pens affecting wild Pacific salmon already hurt by overfishing and degradation of spawning habitat; the wine-soaked Okanagan desert, where virtually everything is endangered; the perennial crashes of woodland and mountain caribou; and poster boy for B.C.’s failure to protect old-growth forests, the spotted owl debacle.

A species listed as endangered since 2003, the spotted owl is now functionally extinct in the province. Not only is a plan for spotted owl recovery 14 years overdue, but the B.C. government approved 312 new clearcuts in the dwindling, highly fragmented old-growth habitat required to reintroduce owls from a captive-breeding program it has funded for years. “It’s disappointing,” wildlife biologist Jared Hobbs told The Narwhal in May. “It’s counterintuitive to the government’s other purported mandate, which is to conserve species at risk and to recover spotted owls.”

As a one-time scientific advisor to the spotted owl recovery team, Hobbs may have been the last person to see this species in the wild in Canada. The current dysfunctional pas de deux results from B.C.’s continued promise to do something — more or less buying time — with the feds avoiding the alternative of forcing the province to protect economically valuable forest habitat using the federal Species at Risk Act.

Not that good things aren’t happening, too — they are, daily, right across the country. Like a successful $825,000 collaboration between universities, butterfly breeders and conservation groups to reintroduce the endangered mottled dusky-wing butterfly to its preferred oak savannah habitats in southwestern Ontario. Or the new Mark Bass Nature Reserve, comprising wetlands important to flood mitigation and at-risk Blanding’s turtles, that adds to a patchwork of set-asides in Ontario’s Prince Edward County totalling 1,000 hectares. There are successful reintroductions to the wild of kit foxes, black-footed ferrets, Vancouver Island marmots, whooping cranes and leopard frogs to shout about. And there’s the delisting of Pacific humpback whales and peregrine falcons — some of the earliest species officially identified as endangered in Canada.

Yet for every wound to nature for which we stanch the bleeding, a new cut — or three — appears. The reality on the ground is even more brutal. “Why isn’t species-at-risk legislation ever mobilized to actually stop something? Why does the economy always trump everything else?” wonders Laurentian’s Litzgus, while sharing stories of graduate students working on highway and energy project construction sites reduced to tears by the destruction of habitat containing literally all of Ontario’s most at-risk reptiles. Both practically and philosophically she’s right. The need to “balance the economy and the environment” we so often hear from politicians is a distracting abstraction, a zero-sum game in which an environmental “win” is really only a reduced degree of loss. With renewed government resolve, serious money and a new conservation framework in hand, things can only improve.