Just after 3 a.m. on a recent Friday morning, a 4.5-foot-long leatherback sea turtle covered her freshly dug nest with sand, sweeping and packing it into place with steady strokes of her flippers just above the high tide along a remote, rugged stretch of Ecuador’s Pacific coast.

Nearby, a team of scientists watched the turtle’s every movement, using brief pauses between her motions to carry out their own work: attaching an electronic tracking device, known as a satellite tag, to the animal’s leathery carapace.

“We just satellite-tagged the first leatherback sea turtle in all of Ecuador,” said Callie Veelenturf, a marine biologist from Massachusetts and co-founder of The Leatherback Project, a global sea turtle conservation non-profit. Veelenturf co-led the tagging effort alongside Kerly Briones Cedeño, president and director general of Fundación Reina Laúd, a volunteer-run conservation group in Ecuador that monitors sea turtle nesting habitat.

The milestone marks a new step toward better understanding one of the most endangered marine species in the world and the threats it faces. Eastern Pacific leatherbacks – a distinct population of the world’s largest sea turtle – have declined by more than 90% since the 1980s.

“There are likely less than 1,000 individuals left,” Veelenturf said.

Satellite tagging has long been used to study leatherbacks by tracking where they forage, mate and nest. But most of that work, Veelenturf said, has taken place in Mexico and Costa Rica, where the largest nesting populations have historically been concentrated. That’s left major gaps in understanding how the species uses waters farther south.

“We know very little about how they use coastal waters in the East Pacific and specifically in Ecuador,” Veelenturf said.

What is known, Veelenturf said, is that these endangered turtles face a gauntlet of threats off the Pacific coast, primarily posed by fishing activity.

Ecuador hosts one of the largest artisanal fishing fleets in the eastern tropical Pacific, with tens of thousands of small-scale boats – typically fibreglass or wooden vessels operated by individual fishers. Large-mesh gill nets, widely used by these fleets, pose the greatest risk to sea turtles, which can become entangled in the gear and drown. Sharks, rays, whales, dolphins and seabirds are at risk too.

A 2020 study published in Scientific Reports by the Eastern Pacific Leatherback Conservation Network – also known as Red Laúd OPO – found that Eastern Pacific leatherbacks could disappear by 2060 without concerted efforts to reduce their incidental capture in fishing gear.

In January, Briones Cedeño saw those impacts firsthand. While monitoring a known leatherback nesting beach, she encountered a dead female she recognized as one that had laid several nests earlier in the season.

“We were expecting her fifth nest,” she said. The turtle showed signs of asphyxiation from drowning, she said, likely caused by getting caught in fishing gear. “We presume that she died due to the issue of bycatch fisheries,” she said. “Perhaps if we had tagged her, we would have known she was passing nearby, or perhaps we could have rescued her.”

But preventing these types of deaths requires a clear picture of how leatherbacks move through Ecuador’s waters and the rest of the eastern tropical Pacific region, Veelenturf said. “Understanding the overlap between artisanal, semi-industrial and industrial fishing activities with the leatherback habitat use is just so important,” she said. “If we don’t understand where they’re going and what their diving behaviour is like, for example, we can’t really know how to best protect them.”

Satellite tagging offers one of the clearest ways to answer those questions.

By outfitting the turtle with a satellite tag that transmits its location each time it surfaces to breathe, researchers can now follow the animal in near real time through an online platform developed by Wildlife Computers, a company in Washington State that specializes in tracking marine life.

The tag Veelenturf’s team used, also created by that company, records detailed dive data, too, offering insight into not only how the turtle moves through coastal waters and the open ocean where leatherbacks spend most of their lives, but also how deep they swim.

Because leatherbacks can dive thousands of feet below the surface, protecting them requires not only knowing where they are, but also how their behaviour may overlap with fishing gear set at different depths.

Over the past seven years, Veelenturf has led a long-term leatherback tagging program along the Atlantic coasts of Panama and Colombia, where her team fitted 24 nesting females with satellite transmitters. The resulting data has helped identify critical habitats, show migratory pathways and inform conservation strategies, particularly in areas where proposed coastal development projects, such as ports, may threaten the species.

Now, in Ecuador, Veelenturf hopes similar data can be used to pinpoint where turtles face the most risks and collaborate with local communities to mitigate them by altering fishing gear or establishing marine protected areas where certain human activities would be limited or prohibited.

Satellite tracking can help researchers focus those conservation efforts by identifying specific stretches of coastline or offshore waters where turtles are most vulnerable, as well as the times of year when risk is highest based on migration, nesting or mating patterns, said Bryan Wallace, a wildlife ecologist and co-coordinator of the Eastern Pacific Leatherback Turtle Conservation Network. That kind of precision can make conservation efforts more targeted and effective, he said.

But getting that data is not easy.

Satellite tags are expensive and not always accessible for local communities running entirely volunteer-led conservation operations like Fundación Reina Laúd, Briones Cedeño said. One satellite tag can cost up to $5,000, said Veelenturf, who received a grant from the National Geographic Society to tag 10 leatherbacks in the region in order to understand their habitat use.

The tagging process itself is also time- and labour-intensive.

First, conservationists must find a turtle. And unlike the well-known nesting beaches in Mexico and Costa Rica, leatherback nesting in Ecuador is sporadic.

It took 14 people four days of patrolling more than six miles of remote coastline – by foot, motorcycle and boat – before the team finally located a nesting turtle they could tag earlier this month. The encounter happened on Pajonal Beach, a rugged stretch of shoreline about 5.5 miles south of Bahia de Caraquez, bordered by steep jungle-covered cliffs and the Pacific Ocean.

Veelenturf had hoped to find the turtle while she was laying her eggs – a stage when sea turtles enter a trance-like state and are largely unresponsive. But by the time the team arrived, the leatherback was already covering her nest.

Working in near darkness, illuminated only by their red-light headlamps, the team moved carefully, timing each of their actions to coincide with the turtle’s natural pauses so as not to disrupt her.

“Every time she stopped and exhaled, I would do a next step,” Veelenturf said.

First, they sanitized a small area of the turtle’s shell where they planned to attach the satellite tag – a small, box-shaped electronic device fitted with an antenna designed to break through the water’s surface each time the turtle comes up to breathe over the next two years.

Then they anchored the tag to the raised ridge of the turtle’s soft carapace by drilling two small holes through it, threading small tubes that serve as fasteners for the device. A quick-setting epoxy was also moulded to serve as a secure base for the equipment, helping hold it in place.

Once the tag was attached, the team stepped back and watched as the turtle shuffled its way back toward the ocean.

They called her Lucero, a Spanish word that in English means “morning star.”

“Naming her Lucero is deeply meaningful to us,” said Briones Cedeño. “Just as the morning star guides those who navigate the ocean, this turtle will help guide our understanding of leatherback movements and the future of their conservation in Ecuador and across the East Pacific.”

Teresa Tomassoni is an environmental journalist covering the intersections between oceans, climate change, coastal communities and wildlife for Inside Climate News.

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Launched in 2019, the 2BT program set an ambitious goal: plant two billion saplings by 2031 as part of Canada’s plan to reach net-zero emissions and rehabilitate fire-damaged forests. But progress lagged from the start. According to the auditor general, only 2.3% of promised trees were planted in the program’s first two years. Annual targets were missed again in 2023, the program’s third planting season.

“The 2 Billion Trees program was riddled with challenges . . . its reputation became tarnished,” says Rachel Plotkin, boreal manager at the David Suzuki Foundation. “I don’t know how seriously it was treated.”

Critics called the initiative “broken” and a “failure.” At the same time, Plotkin says, the program represented a commitment, and despite bad press the abrupt end surprised many, especially since it was cut without a proposed replacement. “The 2 Billion Trees program was a kind of centrepiece of having a vision for restoration, and in its absence, there’s a huge void that needs to be filled,” she says.

The majority of our nursery members are privately owned, and they will need to make business decisions as to whether they’re going to start downsizing or not.

 – Rob Keen, executive director, The Canadian Tree Nursery Association

The federal government defends the cancellation as a necessary part of reducing expenses, and the new budget points to ongoing investments in “sustainable forest management.” One billion already-contracted trees will still be planted as the initiative concludes. “The 2BT program will honour and continue to administer funding for existing agreements until 2031,” Devin Baines, a spokesperson for Natural Resources Canada, wrote in an email. “Canada’s commitment to climate action, nature protection, and forest health remains unchanged.”

For Plotkin, the reassurance falls short. “The federal government continues to announce new major projects, many of which will have impacts on ecosystems. To [end the program] in the absence of putting our commitment to restoration front and centre, I think, is just a failure of our responsibility to nature,” she says, adding that the move also ignores the program’s economic value, including job creation associated with tree planting worldwide.

Other countries have led the way in this regard, seeing promising results and proving that socioeconomic improvements and tree planting can go hand in hand. Ethiopia’s ambitious and successful effort to plant 50 billion trees generated 767,000 jobs for nursery managers, forestry agents and seasonal workers. Malawi, the first African country to develop a national forest-restoration strategy, in 2017, has linked restoration targets directly to improved food security and reduced poverty.

Economic impacts

On the flip side, cancellation lands hard on Canadian companies. The Canadian Tree Nursery Association, representing more than 95% of the country’s forest-restoration seedling suppliers, expressed “profound disappointment” in the decision, arguing that the reversal jeopardizes livelihoods of workers and undermines a forestry industry that has built up to meet federal demand.

Rob Keen, a professional forester and the association’s executive director, says the cut will reverberate through the entire supply chain into communities. “There’s no long-term commitments made by the government to restore these forests,” he says. “The majority of our nursery members are privately owned, and they will need to make business decisions as to whether they’re going to start downsizing or not.”

He adds that the program got a slow start partially because it took years for seeds to become ready-to-plant seedlings, plus a significant effort to create the infrastructure to fulfill such ambitious goals. Now that this infrastructure is finally in place, it may need to be dismantled with the sudden drop in demand.

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Keen says the uncertainty created by the program’s end forces employers to make difficult decisions. “Our nurseries were very concerned with this reduced number of seedlings that are being planted at a time when, with all these wildfires, we should be increasing . . . the amount of seedlings being planted, not only for the ecological value that provides, but in the jobs that it provides as well.” Keen notes that many positions created by planting projects go to youth, rural and Indigenous workers. “Then it’s a question of do they start laying off staff?”

Other organizations, including Forests Canada, have issued similar warnings. Evidence for Democracy called the termination “climate backsliding.” Clean50, a sustainability leadership organization, described the move as “short-sighted,” pointing out that more than 8% of Canada’s forests have burned in the past three years and that these areas can no longer regenerate naturally without restoration help. The group wrote in an open letter that some 31,000 existing and expected jobs will be lost as a result of cancelling the program in a move contrary to Canada’s 2030 Nature Strategy, which aims to stop and reverse biodiversity loss.

“Forests are probably our greatest natural resource, and it’s the government’s responsibility to take care of that asset,” he says.

This article was updated with comments from Natural Resources Canada. 

Leah Borts-Kuperman is a journalist based in North Bay, Ontario. Her previous reporting has been published by Canada’s National Observer, The Narwhal, The Logic and The Walrus, among others.

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This elaborate system is an example of what conservationists call “ecosystem services.” In addition to sustaining life on Earth, these services generate all manner of valuable goods; commercial fishing and coastal logging, for instance, have poured tens of billions into B.C.’s economy over the past century. But those profits have come at a steep environmental cost, illustrating an age-old cycle with a vicious feedback loop: nature provides the essentials for a functioning society and healthy economy, from clean water and food to energy and wood. The more we harvest, the richer we get; the richer we get, the more we consume; the more we consume, the faster nature unravels.

The most obvious solution, protecting large swaths of nature from resource-hungry humans, simply reverses the problem. Instead of making money, environmental conservation renounces profit. Ban logging to protect a forest? Okay, who will pay next month’s rent for those loggers? Where will that money come from? And what will the rest of us use to build our houses?

In the early 1980s, amid dawning global awareness of humanity’s collision course with the biosphere, the field of conservation finance emerged to tackle this conundrum. A blend of economics and ecology, the core goal of conservation finance is to harness free markets to pay for ecological protection.

Decades later, however, the original problem persists. It still costs money to protect nature. And if you follow most money far enough, you’ll arrive at a scene of environmental destruction. Wrecking one part of the world to save another is not a sustainable solution. To truly escape the vicious cycle, you’d have to make conservation profitable. Somehow, nature has to pay for itself.

Which brings us back to the coast of British Columbia, to a place called the Great Bear Sea.

A more intelligent resource economy

On June 25, the governments of British Columbia, Canada and 17 First Nations formally launched the Great Bear Sea initiative. It’s a marine sequel to the Great Bear Rainforest agreement of 2007, which invested $120 million in Indigenous-led conservation over 64,000 square kilometres of B.C.’s island-studded northern coastline. That deal converted a resource-loaded region the size of Ireland to ecosystem-based management – logging hasn’t stopped, but 70% of the Great Bear’s old growth is now permanently protected. More than 100 new businesses have been created (everything from small-scale forestry and ecotourism to solar power instalments, kelp farms and tug-boat operations) along with a thousand full-time jobs.

The Great Bear Sea initiative more than doubles that scale. It places 100,000 square kilometres of some of the world’s richest fishing waters under joint Indigenous-Crown authority and gives Coastal First Nations $335 million ($200 million from the federal government, $60 million from B.C. and $75 million from private donors) to build a new economy.

“Our leaders of the day knew the Great Bear Rainforest agreement was going to be a blueprint for us to continue on with this important work,” says Christine Smith-Martin, CEO of the Coastal First Nations coalition and a key negotiator of this new Great Bear Sea initiative. “We are the stewards of our territories. We’ve been able to measure how many new sustainable businesses our communities have grown since we signed that agreement. It’s not just us saying it. We’re actually tracking it.”

Over the next 20 years, Great Bear Sea funding is expected to seed 200 new businesses supporting 3,000 jobs in sustainable fisheries, manufacturing and processing, marine stewardship and research, transportation, ecotourism and more. The Great Bear Rainforest delivered a three-to-one return on its initial investment; this one is forecast to attract $750 million in future business investments.

We’ve been able to measure how many new sustainable businesses our communities have grown since we signed that agreement.

—Christine Smith-Martin, CEO, Coastal First Nations

A substantial portion of the funds will also go into expanding the network of Guardian Watchmen programs that monitor the coast, like a hybrid of biologist and coast guard. But the Great Bear agreements aren’t just aimed at protecting nature; they’re also designed to protect industry. The north coast isn’t being turned into a national park. Coastal First Nations depend on fishing and logging as much as non-Indigenous people do, supplying almost half the workforce of both industries.

In order to survive, those industries have to change. British Columbia, long a poster child of colonial resource extraction, has almost eaten through its entire ecological inheritance. Eighty percent of the province’s primary forest has already been logged, while salmon and herring populations are at less than a 10th of their pre-industrial abundance.

“We have to be a more intelligent resource economy,” says Nathan Cullen, B.C.’s minister of water, land and resource stewardship. “There’s some that choose to say we either have to maintain the practices of three generations ago or shut it all down. Those extremes are not at all where the solution lies. The environment is telling us we’re coming up against the limits of what you can do sustainably. Whether it’s climate change, declining salmon, more expensive forestry operations, forest fires, the list is pretty long in terms of the feedback that we’re getting.”

Cullen emphasizes three interconnected priorities guiding the provincial government: “Reconciliation over governance of the land. A historic protection of land and waters. And a much more sustainable natural resource economy. When we stand up good conservation projects, we have to keep our eye on all of those three primary elements at the same time.”

In the Great Bear Sea, that translates into an overall reduction of just 8% of the commercial catch, from salmon, halibut and cod to shellfish. But the remainder will be far more targeted than before. A network of biodiversity hot spots and vital spawning grounds, known as marine protected areas, will see tight restrictions placed over 30,000 square kilometres of ocean.

“Sometimes you hear people say, ‘Oh, we’re gonna shut down the coast’ – that’s not it at all,” Smith-Martin says. “We always lead these conversations with ‘The reason we are doing it is not just for us. It’s for you, too, so that you can pass on your boat to the next person in your family. If we don’t do these protected areas, you’re going to have nothing.’”

How nature can pay for itself

Expressing the value of life in dollar terms is a fraught enterprise; it calls to mind Oscar Wilde’s definition of a cynic as someone who “knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” On the other hand, it’s helped stop traditional economists from treating ecological collapse as an externality. And the numbers do tend to be eye-opening, even if they involve large margins of uncertainty.

A 1997 study published in Nature, for instance, concluded that global ecosystems provide between US$18 and $61 trillion worth of goods and services to civilization, roughly on par with the cash then circulating in the global economy. A 2010 analysis of the forests and wetlands surrounding Vancouver found that these provided $5.4 billion worth of ecosystem services per year. A 2022 study of Grindstone Creek, west of Toronto, discovered $2 billion worth of flood protection alone.

Figures like these underpin conservation finance, which has turned protecting nature into a global business worth some US$50 billion per year. There is now a dizzying array of international markets and financial mechanisms devoted to preserving ecosystems around the world. Carbon credits, conservation trust funds, resilience bonds, habitat mitigation banking, debt-for-nature swaps and too many more mouthfuls to name have helped bankroll the protection of countless ecosystems, from the cloud forests of Costa Rica to Zimbabwe’s Zambezi River.

What sets the Great Bear Sea fund apart is the direct involvement of Indigenous communities, and the fact that industry here is being reformed instead of cancelled. Nature-protection schemes have a long history of overlooking the people who actually live in said nature (usually Indigenous), often kicking them out to turn their home into a park. But the Great Bear Sea initiative was led from the outset by First Nations; their goal is to keep harvesting every possible resource from the region, just more sustainably than industry has up to now.

Sustainable harvests don’t deliver the short-term bonanza that comes from total liquidation, but if you can learn to live on that interest, you’ll never go bankrupt

The financial model itself is also unique. Half the Great Bear Sea fund is stored in a permanent endowment: money that generates interest, and you spend only the interest. This model of conservation finance has its own ungainly name: project finance for permanence, or PFP. The 2007 rainforest agreement was the first PFP in history; a handful of others have been implemented since, mostly in South America. Altogether, just over two million square kilometres of the earth’s surface – an area the size of Mexico – is now covered by PFPs.

“I would compare it to a private–public partnership,” says Eddy Adra, CEO of Coast Funds, a trust fund created to manage the money first delivered by the Great Bear agreements. “It’s a way of funding a large infrastructure project, where the large infrastructure project in this case is the conservation of a globally significant, ecologically significant territory.”

PFPs offer a good metaphor for the sustainable economy now coming into view on B.C.’s north coast. Think of an ecosystem as nature’s permanent endowment. Human industry can skim off the interest that accrues each year – a certain amount of salmon and oysters and spruce and cedar – but mustn’t dig too deep. That’s how nature pays for itself, with no need for a bailout. Sustainable harvests don’t deliver the short-term bonanza that comes from total liquidation, but if you can learn to live on that interest, you’ll never go bankrupt.

First Nations lived by that economic model for thousands of years before colonization; their leadership now is a defining characteristic of the Great Bear PFPs. “In a typical model, you would see global funders come in with conservation goals and work with government directly,” Adra says. Indigenous communities would be consulted near the end of the process only, if at all. “The Great Bear Sea PFP really flipped that upside down,” Adra says. “This was something the Nations had been developing for 20 years. And when the opportunity came along, they brought in their partners to the table to get this done.”

That opportunity was a rare confluence of provincial and federal priorities – a different kind of PFP, and every bit as crucial as the money. In 2019, British Columbia became the first jurisdiction in the world to sign the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) into law; the Declaration Act requires B.C. to share decision-making authority over the land base with more than 200 First Nations across the province. Canada followed with a federal version two years later. These are now the only two governments on the planet to have gone beyond casting a symbolic vote for UNDRIP, turning the voluntary declaration into binding legislation. Their collaboration is crucial, since oceans fall under federal jurisdiction and forests are provincial.

Then in 2022, Canada hosted the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15) in Montreal, where member countries agreed to protect 30% of their land and water by 2030. The federal government’s $200-million contribution to the Great Bear Sea comes from an $800-million fund created to meet that commitment.

“It’s not many countries where you have governments sit at the table and say, ‘Okay, Indigenous-led communities, you guys can lead this process and we’ll be partners,’” Smith-Martin says. “It’s a good road map for Indigenous communities, philanthropic communities, federal and provincial governments. How does this all work and what kind of commitment did it take to get here?”

As the ecological crisis deepens, that road map points the way to a new kind of treasure. The Great Bear Sea may be unique, but the history of extraction it’s working to reverse is all too universal. Citizens around the world, searching for a way out of their own vicious cycles, can now look to B.C.’s north coast and say, “X marks the spot.”

Arno Kopecky is a Vancouver-based journalist and author. His latest book is The Environmentalist’s Dilemma.

Reporting for this story was supported by the Sitka Foundation and the Science Media Centre of Canada.

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The South American country struck a $20 million debt-for-nature swap agreement with the U.S. that transfers debt payments to conservation initiatives like improving protected areas and natural resource management. The deal also included four NGOs: Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, Wildlife Conservation Society and World Wildlife Fund.

The groups donated a combined $3 million — in addition to the $15 million contributed by the U.S. — to make the deal happen.

“Our goal is to contribute to the effective management of protected areas and implement other conservation measures in the Peruvian Amazon,” said Fernando Ghersi, director for The Nature Conservancy – Peru. He added, “The debt-for-nature swap represents a significant step towards achieving the long-term financial sustainability of the Peruvian system of protected areas.”

Peru’s investment grade took a hit this year amid ongoing political instability marked by violent protests, corruption, controversial political reforms and impeachments. The country has had six presidents and several overhauls of congress since 2016. This summer, it entered a technical recession after enjoying years of growth that outpaced much of the region.

The political and economic instability has taken a toll on conservation efforts in recent years. Some government agencies haven’t received sufficient budgets to fight environmental crime in protected areas, an official told Mongabay at the end of last year.

This is the third debt-for-nature swap deal struck by Peru and the U.S. The other two were made in 2002 and 2008 and have generated around $36 million for the conservation of tropical forests, according to the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

The U.S. has now made 13 debt-for-nature and debt-for-climate swaps in Latin America and 22 worldwide. Other Latin American countries with similar deals include Belize, Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala and Paraguay. El Salvador, Costa Rica and Panama all have two deals with the U.S.

Other countries with deals include Bangladesh, Botswana, Indonesia, Jamaica and the Philippines.

“As Global South countries face crushing interest payments, compounded by losses from our climate and biodiversity crises, other multilateral funding sources continue to shirk their responsibility. These countries must not bear that cost alone,” said CEO of Conservation International M. Sanjayan. “Debt-for-nature and debt-for-climate swaps can fill a clear supplementary role in relieving that undue burden.”

In addition to lowering the risk default for countries, debt-for-nature swaps can help improve biodiversity, the IMF has said, which can save carbon sinks, create new opportunities for revenue-generating carbon credits and reduce emissions. It could also create new possibilities for ecological tourism.

Some critics of the debt-for-nature and debt-for-climate concept — which was first introduced in the 1980s — warned that combining debt-related issues and climate initiatives isn’t always the right solution for some countries and could lead to “greenwashing.” Analysts at investment bank Barclays said funding needs to be better monitored to ensure it actually has a positive environmental impact.

But a study of Peru’s previous swap agreements found that funding did in fact go towards work like community resource management, constructing guard posts along rivers, inspecting forest concessions and designing training manuals for forest and water management in Indigenous communities, among other things.

“The Peruvian Amazon, like the whole Amazon, faces multiple challenges, and we must act now to prevent the biome from reaching the point of no return,” said WWF-Peru Country Director Kurt Holle. “…Through innovative debt swap initiatives, we can transform economic challenges into nature-friendly solutions for people.”

This story was originally published by Mongabay.com. Read the original story here.

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How developers made direct requests to a minister’s chief of staff to take properties out of the Greenbelt.  

That government complied, making formerly protected areas available for development.  

For me, the sad thing is how the Greenbelt is conceived.  

Investors and politicians see it as land parcels, dark circles on a map, numbers tallied on a chart. Where is the childhood memory of walking the Bruce Trail in spring surrounded by a flowering of red and white trillium?  

On August 9, provincial Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk released a 95-page assessment of Ontario’s plan to remove from protection 3,000 hectares (7,400 acres) of farmland, wetland and forest. Written in response to a request from three opposition parties, it explains in exquisite detail the removal’s financial and environmental consequences.    

Few will be surprised by the AG’s discoveries – little at Queen’s Park is shocking, these days – but she presents them with admirable assurance. Her findings are damning and definitive.    

Notwithstanding government claims, opening the Greenbelt was never necessary to meet provincial housing goals. Lysyk learned this from city planners working in the regions where the protection designation would be scrapped. Even Ontario’s own Housing Affordability Task Force “determined that a shortage of land was not the cause of the province’s housing challenges and that the Greenbelt and other environmentally sensitive areas must be protected.”  

Lysyk offers a precise picture of land-removal profits. The scale is staggering. It’s one thing for tree huggers to make this point; it’s quite another when proclaimed by the auditor general. She writes: “Developers/landowners could see a $8.28 billion increase in the value of their land after the removal of 15 sites from the Greenbelt . . .” (Ontario wants the private sector to build “affordable” homes here.)  

Most Ontarians refuse to see the Greenbelt as land whose potential is only achieved when it’s monetized. 

The consultation process was poor. Interested parties had just 30 days to weigh in. Indigenous communities were not adequately engaged. And Housing Ministry staffers didn’t have enough time to assess public comments. Government received 35,000 submissions, which were “overwhelmingly negative.” It didn’t matter. Queen’s Park did not change its plans.  

I’m struck by Ontario’s very conception of the Greenbelt. In its response to the AG’s report the premier’s office defends itself, saying it’s “unlocking lands” to build housing. The words are telling. In this worldview, protected green space is seen as imprisoned. Here nature is not in need of preservation, but liberation – in the form of development. When woods and fields become a subdivision, they’re set free. Such is the perverse vision guiding our decision-makers. For Queen’s Park, the Greenbelt is a commodity no different than tin or pork belly. It’s this impoverished notion of creation that troubles so many of us.  

Earlier this summer, I walked the protected Niagara Escarpment near Tobermory. There in a field I saw for the first time a pair of sandhill cranes. I jumped the fence and put binoculars to my eyes. They were bowing their heads, spearing grain as herons spear fish. These were not abstractions. I experienced the birds and escarpment as a personal gift. I’ve loved this landscape since adolescence. I have dreams about its limestone sinkholes.  

I’m not alone. Most Ontarians refuse to see the Greenbelt as land whose potential is only achieved when it’s monetized. Our relationship to it is one of intimate friendship, not commerce.  

This, to its peril, is what the government cannot comprehend.  

Gideon Forman is a policy analyst at the David Suzuki Foundation. 

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Decades later, I never expected to be back on the blockades or fielding calls again from concerned customers of British Columbia forest products. When I was arrested by the RCMP with other forest defenders at a blockade in Fairy Creek last month, I had just visited one of the most beautiful old-growth forests I have ever seen. These old-growth forests on Pacheedaht and Ditidaht territories, on the west coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, are among the last of their kind anywhere in the world. I was astonished to see yellow cedars more than a thousand years old. The ancient giant trees that are iconic around the globe are not only the pillars of these rare temperate rainforest ecosystems – they are part of the most carbon-rich forests on earth. Standing among these giants, there is no question that they are worth more than any dollar amount their felled lumber can deliver. It’s clear why Indigenous leaders, scientists and their allies are risking their safety and freedom to defend them.

Civil disobedience is a last resort, especially in the middle of a pandemic. When it comes to old-growth forests in British Columbia, it is no secret how desperate we are. More than 97% of the original large, old forests that stood in this province prior to colonization and the advent of industrial logging have been destroyed. But even more shockingly, the majority of what remains is still unprotected and open to logging. In the case of forests on Ditidaht and Pacheedaht territory, those old-growth forests are still standing thanks to the tireless efforts of forest defenders, but they remain at imminent risk.

On June 9, B.C. Premier John Horgan publicly accepted a call from Pacheedaht, Ditidaht and Huu-ay-aht First Nations to defer old-growth logging in parts of their territories, including areas in Fairy Creek and the Walbran. Hogan called the two-year deferral “monumental.” While it’s an important development, it has not stopped the chainsaws.  The new deferral leaves critical old-growth forests in the area – and in fact, all across B.C. – open to logging. Elder Bill Jones has asked forest defenders to stand their ground and continue protecting these ancient trees. As arrests continue, it is clear that without broad bans on old-growth logging, the situation will only escalate. Elsewhere, many First Nations, including most recently the Squamish Nation, have publicly demanded old-growth logging deferrals or declared moratoria on old-growth logging in their territories.

At Fairy Creek, the logging company in question is not a stranger to the controversy of logging old-growth forests in B.C. Teal Jones, headquartered in Surrey, ships wood products to a variety of locations and sectors, including lumber for building and shingles for siding. As tensions mount around the remaining old-growth forest and the lack of government action, customers of Teal Jones and other old-growth logging companies (including Canfor, West Fraser, Western Forest Products and Interfor) should expect a sharp increase in scrutiny on their sourcing. Many home- and office-supply and building companies, including Home Depot and Staples, have policies against sourcing from endangered forests after long campaigns from Stand.earth (then known as ForestEthics) and our partners. Now is the time for builders, home supply stores, and pulp and paper customers to be proactive and commit to ending any purchasing sourced from at-risk old-growth forests. If they don’t hold themselves accountable, our movement certainly will.

In my experience, what customers of wood and paper products want is certainty. Certainty that the forest products they buy are harvested sustainably and don’t come from endangered-species habitat, endangered ecosystems or increasingly rare old-growth forests and certainty that they will not become embroiled in controversy such as what is unfolding in British Columbia.

Photographer TJ Watt captured images of old-growth trees before and after logging in Vancouver Island’s Caycuse Valley in the spring and fall of 2020. Caycuse Valley is not protected by deferrals being applied to other areas of Fairy Creek.

Provincial and federal governments in Canada have a vital role to play in delivering that certainty. B.C.’s NDP government was elected on a promise to implement the recommendations of an expert panel on old growth, which included immediate logging bans in at-risk old-growth forests like the ones at Fairy Creek. But Premier Horgan and his government have instead faltered on their promise, with recent deferral announcements leaving the vast majority of old-growth forests on the chopping block.

Both B.C.’s and Canada’s commitments to large-scale nature protection and bold climate action are seriously undercut when some of the most carbon-rich forests on the planet are being clearcut. The provincial and federal governments need to collaborate to ensure protection of our remaining old growth and threatened species habitats. They have the funds and the tools to support Indigenous stewardship initiatives and land-use visions, as well as a just transition for workers and communities away from old-growth logging. All they need is the political will, and growing marketplace concern and the escalating actions at Fairy Creek and across B.C. will give it to them one way or another. To date, 222 people have been arrested while standing up for these ancient, giant trees.

Almost 30 years ago when I was on my first blockade at Clayoquot Sound, I knew that the solutions to these issues would be difficult. But I never thought that all these years later, we would still be fighting to defend irreplaceable old-growth forests – only now, even fewer stands of these ancient trees remain. This must be the last time. We owe it to our grandchildren and their grandchildren to leave a liveable world, one where they can walk through an old-growth rainforest and crane their necks up at the treetops in awe.

Tzeporah Berman is the international program director at Stand.Earth, chair of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Committee, and  an Adjunct Professor of Environmental Studies,  York University.

The post B.C.’s old-growth forests not out of the woods appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The widespread floods exacerbated the already dire economic state of the Maasai Mara caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has gutted the tourism industry, says Brian Kearney-Grieve, executive director of the Sidekick Foundation, the primary funder of the Mara Elephant Project. MEP, as it is known, protects the region’s 2,400 pachyderms by mitigating poaching and human-elephant conflict and preserving habitat. As a keystone species, elephants are invaluable to the Maasai Mara, eating brush and trees and spreading seeds via their dung, keeping the Serengeti plains fertile and open for herds of grazing animals.

The Maasai Mara, which is part of the vast Serengeti plains, draws thousands of foreigners every year to watch the spectacular Great Migration, when more than two million animals – wildebeest, zebras and gazelles – undertake their annual odyssey from Tanzania north into Kenya, making the region the country’s most valuable tourism asset.

The threat to elephants lies with the revenue-base collapse, says Kearney-Grieve. The Maasai tribes people, renowned for their extravagant beadwork and tall stature, are the legal landowners of the Maasai Mara. Together with such stakeholders as ecotourism camp owners, they manage 14 areas, called “conservancies.” These are lease agreements worth about US$10 million a year that is derived from tourism. Payments are given to individual Maasai landowners in exchange for keeping their fields open to wildlife, rather than growing crops or grazing livestock.

This past spring, because of COVID-19, the conservancies were negotiating reduced lease rates with the Maasai landowners while scrambling to find emergency funds to pay the teams of rangers and related expenses, such as vehicles, used to keep a lid on poaching.

Their fears about a possible increase in poaching proved to be justified. In late April, Rhino Conservation Botswana reported that poachers had killed six rhino after the global pandemic shut down tourism in the southern African nation.

MEP’s conservation work includes a remarkably successful anti-poaching intelligence network. And while MEP hadn’t detected a rise in poaching as of late April, Kearney-Grieve fears that poachers from neighbouring Tanzania may take advantage of the absence of tourists and the reduced ranger numbers to venture into the Maasai to shoot elephants for their ivory.

Farmers will also be more protective of their crops in the upcoming months, because of the economic hardship, and therefore less tolerant of crop-raiding elephants, says Kearney-Grieve. “Communities are so under threat in terms of their income that they might be more aggressive in terms of how they protect their crops from elephants.”

Roberta Staley is a Vancouver-based author, magazine editor and writer and filmmaker.

Read Roberta Staley’s feature:

Banking on the wildlife trade

The finance sector could hold the key to stopping the trade that puts the health of millions of animals and humans at risk

The post Tourism collapse in Kenya raises fears of poaching uptick appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The illegal wildlife trade (IWT) goes beyond market stalls – it’s organized transnational crime that involves criminal trafficking syndicates. And it’s flourishing due to high demand, ineffective law enforcement and a lack of financial surveillance. Wild animals are in demand not only as culinary indulgences and traditional medicine, but as exotic pets and status symbols. The effect is devastating, with thousands of species of wild animals being pushed to the brink of extinction as a result. The weakening of ecosystems and the threat to biodiversity, as well as the enormous mounting threat to human life, compounds what many have been saying for years: IWT is an offence commensurate to terrorism financing and drug, human, and weapons trafficking and thus should be fought using the same resources afforded these illegal activities. As with other illegal activities with enormous profits, a key tactic is to “follow the money.”

And that’s where the bankers come in.

Black markets worth billions

The United Nations estimates IWT to be worth upwards of US$23 billion a year. Cash is only one form of currency facilitating the operation of wildlife black markets. Much of the profit is laundered via legitimate banking channels and online payment platforms, which are increasingly being used as an underground means of buying and selling animals, particularly with many legal wildlife markets being shuttered. Hence, the financial sector has a crucial role to play in the mitigation of IWT. According to the Coalition for Private Investment in Conservation, IWT is the globe’s third-largest form of illegal trade after street drugs and weapons. A 2018 Interpol report, Global Wildlife Enforcement, states that the criminal kingpins involved in IWT are well organized and often involved in tax evasion, fraud, document falsification, money-laundering and firearms trafficking. IWT trafficking pipelines are commonly used to smuggle other illicit commodities, such as drugs and weapons, Interpol reports.

A key element making IWT as dangerous a crime as weapons trafficking is the link to pandemics like COVID-19, caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. COVID-19 is genetically similar to the SARS-related coronavirus (SARS is short for severe acute respiratory syndrome), which emerged in China in 2002/03, leaping, it’s suspected, from bats and wild Himalayan palm civets to humans, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). There are hundreds of coronaviruses circulating among animals, and seven are known to infect humans via a biological process called zoonosis, which is when viruses jump to another species, according to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the United States. (Human encroachment into wild spaces, primarily because of agriculture, is another major factor facilitating zoonosis.)

Widespread theories suggested that ground zero for COVID-19 may have been the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China, where domestic, wild and illegally trafficked animals were often kept in deplorably cramped cages – conditions that act as ideal disease vectors. A recent Chinese study published in the journal Nature suggests the market wasn’t so much ground zero for the virus, but an early “superspreader” or amplifier event among humans.

Regardless, research has found that COVID-19 likely originated in bats and then moved to humans via an intermediate species. Some researchers have suggested the missing link to be the scaly, ant-eating pangolin, which carries coronaviruses related to SARS-CoV-2. As the Wall Street Journal noted in late May, “It is possible that another animal was involved in some way, with the virus bouncing between a farmer and his animals, or a wildlife smuggler and his poor pangolins.”

Whether or not endangered pangolins are the missing link, they remain the most trafficked animals in the world – and they are emblematic of how human encroachment on threatened habitats and species is putting all of us at risk.

Illegal wildlife trade as a financial crime

Before the outbreak threw the wildlife trade into the spotlight, financial institutions had already begun collaborating to crack down on IWT. Last fall, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), which is headquartered in Paris and positions itself as the globe’s money-laundering and terrorist-financing watchdog, announced that it would be making IWT a key priority under its current president, Xiangmin Liu of the People’s Bank of China. In June, FATF will provide governments and the financial industry practical guidance on combatting money laundering linked to IWT, FATF’s media relations manager, Duncan Crawford, stated in an email to Corporate Knights. With a top priority being the stop of the financial flows and laundering of the proceeds of IWT, the tools are intended “to disrupt, dismantle and deter the flows of illicit financing,” Crawford wrote.

TRAFFIC, a U.K.-based NGO that focuses on biodiversity conservation for wild plants and animals, was one of the founding members of another task force: the United for Wildlife Financial Taskforce, a bank-led group of more than 30 global financial institutions committed to combatting IWT that was founded in 2018. TRAFFIC is set to imminently publish case studies for enforcement agencies revealing the various techniques used by criminal networks to funnel and launder ill-gotten gains from IWT, TRAFFIC spokesperson Richard Thomas says. “It’s long been known that following the money is a very effective way to bring down criminal networks. Everything you do, every transaction, has a financial record,” Thomas says.

Financial tools to hunt suspicious transactions

One of the most effective but underused weapons in fighting IWT is financial investigation, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the Asia/Pacific Group on Money Laundering, which co-published a report in 2017, Enhancing the Detection, Investigation and Disruption of Illicit Financial Flows from Wildlife Crime. Among its many recommendations, the report states that financial asset forfeiture should be used as a deterrent by depriving perpetrators of ill-gotten gains from IWT. It also recommended that financial institutions develop better intelligence linkages to identify suspicious transactions. Extra due diligence must also be applied to legitimate businesses operating in sectors like trucking, the antique trade, traditional medicine, the fashion industry and wild animal breeding.

Legal breeding farms create enormous loopholes for IWT perpetrators, says Adam Peyman, the wildlife programs and operations manager for Humane Society International (HSI). “The legal wildlife trade acts as a cover for IWT, just as captive breeding farms act as a cover for laundering animals from the wild,” Peyman says. A huge loophole was created by China when it prohibited the sale and trade of non-aquatic wild animals for food but not medicine, fur or research, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Online wildlife purchases on the rise

Another challenge to stopping IWT is that it’s being carried out via e-commerce. “Overall, there has been increased activity online by those who are trading in illegal wildlife,” says Ivonne Higuero, the secretary-general of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), from Geneva. She says CITES is developing a practical guideline to assist law enforcement authorities in combatting IWT internet crime.
Whether on the dark web or on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, as well as apps like WhatsApp, buyers can order and purchase vast arrays of illegal animal products: live amphibians, tropical fish, exotic birds, tiger cubs or baby primates, as well as products like pangolin scales, rhino horn or ivory, with a few clicks of a computer mouse. Much of the online demand comes from European collectors willing to pay upwards of $100,000 for a particularly rare specimen, says Higuero.

The Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online has been working with private companies like Facebook, eBay, Instagram and Google, as well as such Chinese companies as internet conglomerate Tencent Holdings, which are having some success policing and regulating online IWT. In a meeting with Tencent executives last November in China, Higuero was told that the company had detected more than one million IWT listings. As a result, Tencent closed 6,000 accounts, 128 arrests were made, and US$2.8 million worth of IWT products were seized, says Higuero.
Altogether, companies involved with the coalition reported removing or blocking more than three million listings for endangered or threatened species and associated products from their platforms. While these initiatives may catch collectors, Higuero warns that they’re insufficient to nab caches of tonnes of pangolin scales being spirited across porous borders, facilitated by bribing customs agents at busy ports, as well as lax monitoring and policing.

Rhino Impact Bond for the win

Additional financial tools for combatting IWT are being developed by the Coalition for Private Investment in Conservation (CPIC), a global initiative supporting the increase of private, return-seeking investment in conservation projects, thanks to enormous investor demand. One successful example was last year’s $50 million Rhino Impact Bond — response from investors was “off the charts,” according to the Zoological Society of London, which initiated the bond with the support of the finance company Conservation Capital. CPIC has begun channelling more private funds into conservation efforts that specifically reduce IWT.

A CPIC spokesperson stated in an email to Corporate Knights that “there is a huge gap in the finance we need for environmental and biodiversity conservation,” estimating that more than US$400 billion would be needed every year to reverse decades of declining populations. The urgency in halting IWT couldn’t be more dire. A 2019 report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services predicts the extinction of one million animal and plant species in the next few decades.

Higuero says that enhanced financial diligence must be supported by harsher penalties. “Prosecution is, ultimately, the most important thing. That’s the only way that you’ll create disincentive.” TRAFFIC’s Thomas agrees, pointing out the minimal punishments currently meted out. One smuggler, Gilbert Khoo, convicted this year of smuggling more than £53 million of endangered live eels out of the U.K., received a two-year suspended sentence. Cases like this indicate to criminals that IWT is “a big return for a relatively small risk,” Thomas says.

Ultimately, says HSI’s Peyman, it’s crucial to change public perception of wildlife in the global community from things that are consumed to “something that should be conserved, protected and appreciated.” This, he says, will require a dedicated and determined international effort coordinating all aspects of government, as well as, crucially, the financial sector.

Roberta Staley is a Vancouver-based author, magazine editor and writer and filmmaker.

 Also by Roberta Staley:

Tourism collapse in Kenya raises fears of poaching uptick

Massive floods and COVID gutted the tourism industry in Kenya’s Maasai Mara, now poaching may be on the rise

The post Banking on the wildlife trade appeared first on Corporate Knights.

In early May, the Prime Minister unveiled a new “bridge loan” program to support large businesses recovering from a pandemic economy. Among the conditions, companies must demonstrate how they will contribute to federal climate targets for decarbonization. By encouraging carbon offsetting in the plan, Canada has an opportunity to further reconciliation with Coastal First Nations and ensure our economies are not left behind in the recovery plan.

The Great Bear Rainforest Carbon Project – led by nine coastal First Nations – is the world’s largest forest carbon initiative. Vast amounts of carbon are stored by old growth trees in the Great Bear Rainforest on the North and Central Pacific Coast and Haida Gwaii. The forests here represent one quarter of the world’s remaining coastal temperate rainforests. As coastal people, who have lived here for 14,000 years, we know that keeping ocean and forest ecosystems healthy is the key to preserving our way of life.

To create a sustainable economy, coastal First Nations looked beyond the destructive resource extraction model common to our coast 20 years ago. In 2000, the Coastal First Nations began working with BC on land use planning. A landmark 2006 agreement lead to the protection of the Great Bear Rainforest, making 85% of the rainforest off-limits to industrial logging. Then in 2009, when the two Parties signed the Reconciliation Protocol, it allowed for the validation and sales of carbon credits. ​

Corporations looking to take steps to meet their emission reduction targets can invest in protecting that rainforest with Great Bear Carbon Credits. All revenue from offset sales goes directly back into First Nations stewardship of our lands and waters, and supports projects to ensure traditional governance and community well-being.

Building off land use agreements, this carbon sequestration funding model also contributes to the adjacent coastal and marine areas.  The carbon offsets support the innovative funding model of the Marine Planning Partnership for the North Pacific Coast (MaPP), globally recognized as the gold-standard for collaborative marine use planning. MaPP undertakes marine ecosystem-based management with 17 First Nations and British Columbia.

Carbon offset sales support Coastal Guardian Watchmen who are highly-trained and experienced guardians of land, water, wildlife and cultural sites. In Kitasoo/Xais’xais territory on the Central Coast, Guardian Watchmen have led monitoring of world-renowned grizzly bear habitat and eradicated illegal hunting.

With dwindling government resources for science research, the carbon finance model has helped First Nations stewardship offices undertake some of the most advanced –and in some places, the only – species monitoring and wildlife data collection on the BC coast. As well, climate change research and planning by communities is taking place. This is science that benefits all Canadians. In Heiltsuk territory, offset funds provide core funding for advanced scientific research on crab, rock cod and invasive species to inform a sustainable approach to Indigenous fisheries management. Offset revenue also finances stewardship activities to monitor at-risk whales and Pacific salmon species in Haida Gwaii.

Carbon financing also offers a source of long-term funding for communities to explore meaningful opportunities for renewable energy projects on a diesel-dependent coast, sustainable shellfish aquaculture, ecotourism and non-timber forest product ventures.

The Great Bear Rainforest Agreements have put in place a world-leading model of ecosystem-based forestry management: 85% of our coastal temperate rainforest is set aside for protection and is now permanently off-limits to industrial logging.

Towering old-growth trees that reach up to 1,000 years in age can still be found in our territories. Our streams and rivers sustain 20% of the world’s wild salmon. Rainforest, ocean estuaries, fjords and islands support remarkable biological diversity – including iconic species such as grizzlies, Spirit bears and black bears, coastal Pacific wolves, humpback and killer whales and six million migratory birds.

The Great Bear Forest Carbon Project offers Canadian businesses and governments the chance to build back better in the wake of COVID-19 by working with Coastal First Nations to protect the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest right here on our Pacific Coast.  In the effort to regain lost economic momentum during the pandemic, buying Great Bear credits is an opportunity to invest in a conservation economy that balances ecological integrity with human well-being.

As the country works to revitalize the national economy and meet its 2050 climate goals, Canada must ensure First Nations economies are not left behind and build the new normal together. The federal government has the opportunity to support investment in sustainable jobs in our communities and protect climate resiliency by conserving one of the world’s largest carbon storage rainforests for future generations.​

Chief Marilyn Slett is president of the Coastal First Nations.

The post Build Back Better by investing in Coastal First Nations Great Bear Forest Carbon Project appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Discussion hosted by Diana Fox Carney, economist and public policy expert

Panelists

• Tzeporah Berman, International Program Director, Stand.Earth

• Valérie Courtois, Director, The Indigenous Leadership Initiative

• Magali Depras, Chief Strategy Officer, TC Transcontinental

• Rob Keen, CEO, Forests Ontario

• Daimen Hardie, Executive Director, Forests International

• David Martin, Chair, WWF Canada

• Jane Rabinowicz, Executive Director, SeedChange

• Darrin Qualman, National Farmers Union, Director of Climate Crisis Policy & Action

Expert Commentators

• Céline Bak, President, Analytica Advisors
• Terri Lynn Morrison, Director of Strategic Partnership, Indigenous Clean Energy (ICE)
• Lara Ellis, Senior Vice-President, Policy and Partnerships, ALUS Canada
• Dave Sawyer, Chief Economist, Canadian Institute for Climate Choices
• Ralph Torrie, Senior Associate, Sustainability Solutions Group and Partner, Torrie Smith Associates

The post CK TV: Watch our roundtable on Building Back Better with Forests and Farms appeared first on Corporate Knights.