Nature, however, has mostly been left out of these regulatory schemes – even preventing deforestation, averting wildfires and restoring landscapes are effective ways to lower the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Chris Costello, chief economist at Environmental Defense Fund, wants governments to bring nature in their mandatory carbon markets. Here, managing editor Mark Mann asks him about the opportunities – and the risks.

This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for publication. Watch the full conversation here. 

Mark Mann: I’m on a learning curve with this space, and I imagine many of our readers are, too. So let’s start at the beginning. What is a carbon market?

Chris Costello: You’re not the only one on the learning curve. I mean, to be honest with you, we’re all on the learning curve and things are shifting every day, so there’s always something new to learn. In a way, it’s better to do that in order to understand the failures of the current system. Why do we keep hearing “Oh, we’re supposed to be happy about this thing,” and then the next day there’s an exposé about a big corruption scandal around carbon markets. How do we sort these things out? How do we actually move forward together?

MM: There’s a hot debate here in Canada right now because we have an industrial pricing system and we see think tanks and institutes trade barbed articles over it. But it’s a debate that’s hard to follow for anyone outside of it.

CC: We can talk about all of carbon pricing and carbon markets, but I think a big opportunity that’s been untapped is in nature. That’s actually where the controversy gets most heated.

We all want to make progress on climate change, but we want to do it affordably. There’s a thousand ways you could convince people or force people to emit less carbon. But a lot of those ways are really expensive and really burdensome and really difficult to get people to swallow. I think carbon markets, if they’re designed right, offer an opportunity to make fast progress on climate change, but do it in a cost-effective, affordable way that’s really transparent.

So what is a carbon market? What are we even talking about here? There are really two kinds of carbon markets. There are what are called compliance markets, and there are 50 or 60 of those around the world. These are markets that at a whole-country level or sometimes a regional level put a cap on all carbon emissions, usually from the polluting sector. That’s great because now we actually are working towards some kind of goal and maybe that cap gets reduced a little bit each year, so we’re making progress. Canada’s got a net-zero claim by 2050. So by mid-century, they have to get there. How are you going to get there? Well, you set a cap and you keep reducing the cap and pretty soon it’s zero. That’s basically how it works.

The clever thing about the market side is that you put a cap – let’s say it’s 100 tons are allowed to be emitted – then polluters get to trade those tons. So if I want to pollute a little bit more because I’m starting up a new factory, I have to buy a ton from you. And if you’re willing to reduce your emissions because you have a new electrification of your production line, you can reduce tons, and we can trade. The trade part means that we’re getting those tons that we want in the cheapest way.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube

CC: Exactly. Someone’s doing the math. And if you look globally, the equation doesn’t add up. So 53 gigatons — 53 billion tons a year — is the total amount we emit as polluters in the world. And if we actually want to get to net-zero, we have to turn 53 billion into zero. Those caps have to start emerging all over the world and they have to be reduced.

Believe it or not, we are making progress on that front. If you look at these compliance markets around the world, they really do have strict caps, and they really are reducing those caps. They really are causing an energy transition in the countries that have them.

There are also voluntary markets, which are not compliance markets, so there’s no government or entity saying, “Here’s the cap that you have to meet.” They’re more like individual contracts, and they take lots of different forms. There are some success stories out there, but a lot of the controversy comes from that type of market.

It gets particularly fraught when you think about nature, because nature is not part of compliance markets, except in New Zealand. All the other 60 or 70 carbon compliance markets don’t include nature. There are lots of contracts on the voluntary side in nature, but they don’t have this structure where there’s a cap and there’s a whole jurisdiction that is being measured and you’re reducing that cap over time.

If we get it right and bring nature into the compliance markets, I would argue this is the world’s largest untapped opportunity to make progress on climate change. What my whole team has been working on at Environmental Defense Fund is how to do that in a really effective and durable way.

Here are some of the numbers. I mentioned 53 gigatons. That’s 53 billion tons a year. That’s our net emissions. Right now, if you add up all the compliance markets of the world and you look at how much they are reducing emissions, it’s on the order of one to two gigatons out of that 53. If you look at nature and you say, at a relatively low price, if we were to put these into compliance markets and do it properly, how many tons could we get out of those? Our numbers are like eight to 14 gigatons per year. So nature could dwarf everything we’re already doing in the polluting sectors, if we do it right. There’s a lot we have to do to get there.

MM: What are we already doing? What is the distinction if nature could add so much value?

CC: So here’s the interesting thing: if you want to make progress on climate and have an energy transition, it’s really easy to think about the smokestack coming out of the coal-fired power plant or the steel mill, or maybe the tailpipe of your car. We don’t think of nature as an emissions source. But there is a smokestack coming out of nature.

Every time you deforest an acre of land in the Amazon, you are releasing carbon. That’s just like the smokestack from the coal-fired power plant. When you mismanage your forest and get megafires, that is a smokestack coming out of nature. Canada’s annual carbon emissions from forest fires are in the same ballpark as their annual emissions from all industrial and transportation activity. So nature is just as important an emission source in Canada as other emission sources.

MM: Why does it emit to cut down a forest? How is it a smokestack?

CC: It’s a great question. There is a subtlety here. Trees store carbon, so there’s a lot of carbon embedded in that tree trunk and the leaves and everything. When you cut that tree down, it depends on what you do with it. If you’re in the rainforest, often what’s happening is you’re deforesting in order to make room for agriculture. And often the way we deforest to do that is by burning. So that makes it really clear. Now if you’re cutting trees down to make furniture and you’re embedding that carbon in furniture that’s sitting in your house, it isn’t being released. So there’s some subtlety there, and we have good data on how much is actually being released.

MM: The takeaway is that actually most people wouldn’t really expect or realize that nature is contributing to the climate problem.

CC: Yes, but it’s our mismanagement of nature. I’m an economist; I’m trying to bring a market-based approach to change the incentives around forest management so that you don’t get the severe megafires. 2023 was the worst fire year ever, I think, for Canada. There were, like, three billion tons of carbon emissions that came from the forest fires in Canada in a single year. It completely dwarfed all industrial emissions combined. We have to think of that side of the equation. There’s a huge, untapped opportunity to manage those emissions by incentivizing.

That’s trying to stop the bad thing from happening. We have to do that. But the real magic of nature, and one of the reasons I’m so excited about it, is that it’s also a machine to suck carbon out of the atmosphere. And if you manage forests and ecosystems in the right way, you can suck more carbon out of the atmosphere. If you get those incentives right for both of those things, you have an enormous, untapped potential in nature to make rapid progress on climate.

MM: The situation you’re in is that you’re making this pitch at a moment when there’s huge skepticism for the idea of pricing nature and trading in this way because of what happened in the voluntary carbon market. Is that fair to say?

CC: That’s fair to say, yes. But I’m not coming into this naively saying, “I’ve got snake oil here, I’ve got the next big thing.” I’m borrowing from the successes of the 60, 70 or 80 carbon markets out there in the world that we’ve learned a lot from, that are reducing tons, and that are solving the very problems in the voluntary market through the compliance architecture. So I’m taking that compliance architecture and asking, “How do we apply that in nature?”

MM: What is the smaller narrower thing that the compliance architecture is doing? Where are they currently getting their emissions reductions?

CC: Almost all compliance markets except New Zealand don’t include nature. So in those compliance markets, how are you getting the carbon reductions? It depends on the sector. You’re getting it in transportation; you’re getting it often through EVs and electrification. In other sectors, you’re getting it through transformation of production processes or even sometimes electrification of historically fossil [fuel] production processes. The key point is when you have to pay for every ton of carbon you’re emitting or you get rewarded financially for reducing your carbon emissions, there’s an enormous carrot out there to innovate. That’s what we want people to do. We can try to legislate and tell people how to produce stuff, but that doesn’t work very well. What you want to do is give them an incentive to do it and then they invent the best way to do it. And that’s what I meant by low cost.

MM: You’re not telling them to implement a particular technology. You’re just setting the cap and then they have to meet it however they can.

CC: Exactly. We think that the same kind of incentive structure can be used in nature, both to incentivize someone to not deforest when they otherwise would and to incentivize restoration. If you have degraded land but you can restore it to a healthy forest and get paid to do that because you’re now pumping carbon out of the atmosphere, why wouldn’t we want to incentivize that? Especially if the data suggests that’s one of the cheapest ways to get reductions.

MM: Clearly the voluntary market broke ground here and then faltered. The voluntary market is tiny compared to the compliance market. So now you want to level it up into this regulated system of incentives. How do you do it better this time? What are the solutions to the problems that happened before?

CC: I want to give some credit to the voluntary market. My interpretation of the exposés is that when you find one project that failed or didn’t deliver on what it was supposed to, that casts a shadow on the whole enterprise. But the intent of the voluntary is great. The idea is that someone wants to get carbon reductions and they want to do it in a cheap way, so they find a project, often in a developing country. But what happens is, if I said, “Hey, I’m looking for someone who will agree not to deforest next year, come sign up for my program,” the first people to sign up are the people that wouldn’t have deforested anyway. This is called the “additionality problem”: you’re paying somebody for a ton of carbon, but the payment isn’t really translating into a change on the ground. And if you want these things to function at scale, it has to be true that you’re actually changing something on the ground.

The way the compliance approach fixes that additionality and several other problems is that you’re not just measuring the emissions from one project. You’re taking the whole jurisdiction and you’re measuring emissions every year, or even more frequently, from all the properties in that place. And then you set the cap on all those entities and that’s where trading is allowed. That cap ensures that your tons are additional.

MM: Is there not a challenge with making trade-offs in nature? You’re losing some nature over here but gaining more over there, but can you really compare these things?

CC: It’s a really important question. The way I think about the climate problem — the 53-gigaton problem — is that I want to reduce that number quickly and affordably. If we can get the cheapest tons from nature, and they’re just as valid as reductions from a coal-fired power plant, I want those tons.

I want net emissions to fall, and I think compliance markets are the way to do that. If nature can be put on a level playing field with industrial emissions, it could lower the cost of reducing emissions and allow governments to set more ambitious climate targets. If reductions cost $30 a ton instead of $80, you can set a more ambitious target. If the tons are real and cheap, we should be going for them.

MM: This is another facet of the debate that I personally find confusing. What I’ve seen with the debate about the Canadian industrial carbon price, the struggle for Ottawa is to keep the price high enough. And I think a critique is that if the price is too low, then it’s too cheap to pollute. Could you explain that dynamic?

CC: It’s a hot topic right now, with a lot of debate around it. I think your question is, if we’re really successful with this nature approach and it lowers the carbon price, is that a problem?

There are two reasons prices can be low in a carbon market. The first is a lack of integrity or credibility. If you’re not sure something is actually delivering what it claims, you won’t pay much for it. It’s like buying a used car when you can’t drive it, look under the hood or inspect it — you might be skeptical of its quality. That has been responsible for low prices in some voluntary-market transactions historically.

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But there’s another reason prices can be low: you have fully credible, real tons being removed from the atmosphere, and you’ve found an inexpensive way to make progress on climate change. I like that. I want more of those tons, not less.

So which is it? Is the price low because of integrity problems or because we’ve found an opportunity that lowers the cost of addressing climate change? I want to live in the second world, not the first. That’s how we’re designing this: to be fully robust from an integrity standpoint while using the market to find the cheap, credible tons we want.

MM: So if you can make tons that are essentially beyond reproach and also they’re cheap, then people will buy them. One hurdle here, I think, is the quantification aspect. You have to know what you’re getting out of these. That’s got to be part of making these tons real and authentic. But then it just seems like it’s a tall order as a data exercise. What’s the story there?

CC: We’re still learning and trying to improve. People call this “MRV” — monitoring, reporting and verification. Even in a compliance market for polluters, you have to measure emissions. Even if you simply told people, “You can only emit 30 tons today,” you would have to measure their emissions to know whether they are above or below that limit.

Most climate action requires some kind of measurement. We tend to think it’s easier to measure carbon from a smokestack than to measure emissions from cutting down a tree. Nature is harder in that sense. But we already have an MRV architecture for compliance markets.

The surprising thing is that, much of the time, we aren’t measuring carbon emissions directly. We’re measuring proxies. Every gallon of gasoline burned emits about this many tons of carbon, for example, so we can measure gallons of gasoline and use that conversion.

If I get my wish, we’ll use this approach in forests and agriculture. I want farmers to be incentivized to improve soil management, because soils can sequester a lot of carbon. I also want to incentivize mangrove restoration and, in Canada, kelp forests — both of which can take up a lot of carbon.

MM: My secret is if I could throw it all away and do something else, I would go and be a kelp farmer.

CC: [Laughs] Okay, so how do you measure kelp — the amount of kelp, the carbon it sequesters, or the emissions released by deforestation or a forest fire? Different aspects of nature require different technologies.

We’re pretty good at measuring carbon fluxes in forests. We’re less good in agriculture, and we’re kind of terrible at measuring them across most of the ocean. We know it’s happening because the physics and chemistry tell us it has to be, but it’s very hard to say it was eight tons rather than seven.

For me, as an economist thinking about market design, the question is how precise you have to be and what technologies you need to underpin a market. I think we know enough to start with forests and build a market there. We probably don’t know enough to start on day one in the oceans. There’s work to do, but I don’t think it’s insurmountable, and I think there are places we can start right now.

Mark Mann is the managing editor of Corporate Knights. He is based in Montreal. 

The post The case for putting nature at the heart of carbon markets appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The analysis builds on a modelling framework that examines how the loss of natural capital affects economies and, in turn, financial markets. The findings raise questions about current approaches to financial risk modelling, with as much as $83 trillion of financial assets potentially mis-priced.

The two biggest surprises were “how far behind the financial system is on developing hard numbers around nature-related risk” and “how large the effects could be,” said the University of Sussex’s Matthew Agarwala, one of the authors.

Published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, a peer-reviewed scientific journal, the paper examined how declines in ecosystem services could affect sovereign credit ratings, the probability of defaulting on debt and government borrowing costs. With biodiversity largely treated as an environmental issue, the authors argue it should also be understood as a macro-financial one.

They looked at just three key ecosystem services – wild pollination, marine fisheries and tropical timber – and modelled a partial-ecosystem-collapse scenario, before incorporating the resulting economic effects into their credit-risk calculations based on S&P Global’s methodology.

A blind spot in the system

Among the 23 countries examined, representing 5.5 billion people, China and India were found to bear the greatest risk, but there were also significant potential consequences for developing nations. Madagascar, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bangladesh, Angola and Pakistan were found to be the most vulnerable, facing losses to gross domestic product of more than 15% by 2030. Under such a scenario, already cash-strapped governments would have even less to invest in infrastructure, health, education and climate adaptation. GDP could decrease globally by $2 trillion annually by 2030.

Agarwala says that the findings demonstrate a “blind spot” in the system and highlight a fundamental policy choice: act now to ensure resilience through upfront conservation investment or pay later through higher borrowing costs. “Countries will pay this money either way,” he says. “Policy just lets us choose who, when and how.”

The scale of the potential increase is significant, as mounting debt-servicing costs would exceed 70% of the annual biodiversity finance target ($200 billion) under the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

The real question is whether these risks should be assessed proactively rather than only after they have become visible in traditional macroeconomic indicators.

– Daniel Cash, credit-rating researcher

Agarwala says the potential financial threat should be considered in terms of both scale and speed. The 2008 global financial crisis, sparked by the U.S. subprime mortgage market, had effects felt worldwide. Globally important ecosystems could affect economies on a much wider scale, he warns. “So long as nature loss remains gradual, without tipping points, and in largely isolated one-off collapses, biodiversity risks may be gently absorbed,” he says. “But if we see coordinated collapses and abrupt tipping points that catch us by surprise, then yes, a global crisis is possible.”

Assessing risks proactively

Agarwala says the findings are not intended as forecasts, but rather as forward-looking scenario-based assessments that anticipate how global financial systems might respond to major ecological shocks.

Daniel Cash, a researcher specializing in credit-rating methodologies, says rating agencies were already accustomed to assessing uncertain long-term risks, from demographic change to geopolitical tensions to institutional deterioration. The challenge with biodiversity was not uncertainty itself, he says, but establishing a reliable link between environmental change and sovereign creditworthiness. “Rating agencies need robust evidence that demonstrates how environmental change will affect a sovereign’s economic performance and repayment capacity within a defensible analytical framework,” he says. “The paper makes an important contribution by proposing one methodology for doing exactly that, translating biodiversity loss into macroeconomic variables that are already central to sovereign rating analysis.”

Despite not explicitly taking into account such nature-related risks before they occur, current risk-assessment methodologies already factor in the economic consequences of environmental shocks retrospectively, including changes to indicators such as debt-to-GDP ratios. For example, after Hurricane Melissa caused extensive damage in Jamaica when it made landfall in late October 2025, S&P revised its outlook from positive to stable.

However, the report authors argue that this approach is largely backward-looking, as by the time the economic effects are reflected in credit-rating agencies’ assessments, the damage has already been done. “The real question is whether these risks should be assessed proactively rather than only after they have become visible in traditional macroeconomic indicators,” Cash adds.

The climate threat

Comparing a business-as-usual approach with a partial-ecosystem-collapse scenario, China, India, Malaysia and Bangladesh could face sovereign credit-rating downgrades of at least four notches under the latter. For those countries whose economies rely heavily on tropical timber, marine fisheries and wild pollination services, the impacts were proportionately more acute. “Under this scenario, the DRC, Angola and Madagascar become unratable, as their simulated ratings fall below the lowest grade found in the training data,” the report says. “In practical terms, this scenario would probably lead to a sovereign default.”

Given the study’s limited scope, with just three biodiversity services examined, the findings represent a conservative estimate of the potential impacts of nature-related risks.

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“In my opinion, it is hard to overestimate the long-term importance of climate change,” Moritz Kraemer, one of the co-authors, said as Europe and the United States were gearing up for yet another heat wave. “The current heat waves on both sides of the Atlantic – and likely poor harvests and higher food prices down the road – should help to refocus attention,” he says.

While Kraemer’s comments focus on climate risk, he argues that reduced regulatory attention could also weaken banks’ capacity to assess broader environmental risks, including biodiversity loss.

Agarwala calls on financial institutions and central banks to use the findings to stress-test their bond holdings under future ecological scenarios.

As Cash notes, “Whether approaches like this become part of mainstream rating methodologies will depend not only on the quality of the underlying science, but also on whether agencies are confident enough to institutionalize those judgments within their formal processes.”

Soraya Kishtwari is a contributing editor at Green Central Banking.

This article was originally published by Green Central Banking. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. View the original here. 

The post Nature loss could send government debt costs soaring, research warns appeared first on Corporate Knights.

And now there’s a new element in the mix: the seaweed belt is changing shape. The most significant patch, known as the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt, was first detected in 2011 and now measures as much as 8,800 kilometres long. It can be found from West Africa to the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. By the end of last year, it weighed 38 million metric tons, a 40% increase from its last record in 2022.

Why so much seaweed? There isn’t a single reason that scientists can point to, but rather a variety of shifting factors. “The climate is having a very significant effect on this bloom, but there are many underlying drivers of climate change,” Brian Lapointe, principal investigator at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute at Florida Atlantic University, told The New York Times in 2025: “everything from high temperature, extreme rainfall, droughts and rainfall events, and winds.” Meanwhile, a northern patch located in the Sargasso Sea, in the North Atlantic between Nova Scotia and Bermuda, has dwindled by some 90% since 2015, because of warmer water.

The Atlantic seaweed situation is evolving so rapidly that scientists have enlisted NASA to track the bloom from space. The sensitive instruments on their satellites can detect the sargassum signature as it moves across oceans, helping to predict where it is headed and which ecosystems might be more at risk of being overwhelmed by the vegetation.

Natalie Alcoba is a Buenos Aires-based journalist and senior editor at Corporate Knights.

The post Climate change is redrawing the map of global seaweed blooms appeared first on Corporate Knights.

There’s no tangible evidence that caribou have memory the way humans have memory, but researchers, such as biologist Anne Gunn, have observed tundra caribou change migration routes based on past experiences. If a route is too icy and foraging is difficult, for instance, older female caribou – who lead the herd – may remember a different, less icy path they used a previous year.  

“The average cow lives, say, 15 years, and she will have learned [routes] from her mother, because when she was a yearling, she will have followed her mother, who would have followed her mother,” Gunn says. “So there’s collective memory. They learn from each other.” 

As the barren-ground caribou population declines – with the Bathurst herd in particular thinning out by 98% – the risk of caribou losing their collective memory increases. The key to retaining that memory, beyond ensuring the population doesn’t go extinct, is making sure those migration routes stay accessible to caribou, Gunn says. But infrastructure initiatives in the Canadian Arctic, such as the proposed 400-kilometre all-season road from the Northwest Territories to Nunavut, are poised to cut through a significant portion of caribou migration range, blocking the routes these animals have crossed for millennia. 

“We know that caribou, especially barren-ground migratory caribou, really do not like crossing roads,” says Elie Gurarie, professor of wildlife ecology at the College of Environmental Science and Forestry at the State University of New York.  

Researchers have a good sense of how caribou might react to the all-season road based on their behaviour on smaller roads linking the Diavik and Ekati diamond mines in the Northwest Territories to Yellowknife. These mining roads are not open to the public, with traffic increasing seasonally along with mining activity. 

Data from GPS-collared caribou – collected by the Northwest Territories’ Department of Environment and Climate Change – have recorded caribou crowding along the sides of these roads when traffic is active, unable to cross and roam their natural range. “Caribou are just remarkably successful in the Arctic,” Gurarie says. “The environment is really harsh and not very protected. I think the key to that success is that collective memory, their sociality and their freedom to move.”  

Barren-ground caribou have extremely variable migratory routes, so it’s not as simple as making sure one path is free for them to use. They need a lot of space to roam. When it came to the diamond mine roads, one solution, Gunn says, was to close these roads for a few hours each day during the high migratory season.  

The proposed all-season road, however, is much bigger than the mining roads. It’s part of the $40-billion Arctic Economic and Security Corridor linking mines, military operations and communities under Prime Minister Mark Carney’s nation-building projects list, which allows it to be fast-tracked through the approval process. A portion of the road, called the Grays Bay Road and Port project, cuts right through the dwindling Bathurst herd’s migratory range.   

If we don’t look after the herd well enough when they’re declining, and we lose most or all of a herd, all that collective memory of the landscape is lost.

— Anne Gunn, biologist

But there are three ways the impact of the road on caribou can be mitigated, Gurarie says. The government could collaborate with researchers and local Indigenous wildlife monitoring groups – including the North Slave Métis Alliance, Tlicho Ekwǫ̀ Nàxoèhdee K’è and Yellowknives Dene First Nation – to map a route least intrusive on the caribou range. The road itself could be designed to make crossings easier, such as with lower embankments, so that the animals don’t have to climb anything to make it through. And the roads could be closed for dedicated periods when migration activity is highest.  

With the project still in its infancy, the fate of the caribou can still be changed. As their natural habitat becomes ever more fragmented – spurred by industrial operations and a warming climate that affects the vegetation they need – caribou populations, and the memory they rely on, are on a precipice.  

 “If we don’t look after the herd well enough when they’re declining, and we lose most or all of a herd, all that collective memory of the landscape is lost,” Gunn says. “But the herds are still there, and there are still knowledgeable individuals among the caribou there. So, not letting a herd go extinct is really important.” 

Ayesha Habib is a Vancouver-based journalist. 

The post How researchers are working to preserve caribou collective memory and migratory routes appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Shortly after entering the ocean, they were moving along the sand when Peterson looked up and saw a white shark passing a few metres away. “One half of me was like, ‘Yes, jackpot,’” Peterson says. “And the other half was like, ‘Oh crap.’”

The animal disappeared into the murk, and then reappeared – first, her dark eyes and toothy smile, and then the rest of her muscular body – moving straight toward them. Peterson grabbed the harness of the other diver, a tourist from the United States, and pulled him to the bottom, where they waited, maintaining eye contact. The shark approached repeatedly, coming so close they could almost have reached out and touched her, before veering off each time (cutting off their exit, Peterson later realized). “This shark was investigating us,” Peterson says. “It was trying to figure out if we were food.”

After three passes, the shark decided they weren’t and disappeared into the gloom. Peterson and the other diver quickly surfaced and swam to shore, where they told the people swimming to get out of the water. With the danger passed, Peterson was exhilarated to have encountered an apex predator in her natural environment. “I was thrilled,” he says. “[It was] such a rare and special occurrence.”

Speaking with a biologist afterward, Peterson discovered it wasn’t as rare as he thought; in fact, he was about the 10th diver in the area to have reported an encounter with a white shark in the past three years.

Across the region, it’s not just divers noticing a change. There’s been a notable uptick in the number of people reporting white sharks along Canada’s Atlantic coast over the past decade. For a long time, white sharks were so rarely documented that scientists thought occasional sightings were just fringe members of a more southerly population. Now, they appear in Atlantic Canadian waters in the summer with a regularity that suggests a recurring seasonal population in the thousands.

“Atlantic Canada is the new white-shark population on the planet, at the moment,” says Nigel Hussey, professor of movement and trophic ecology at the University of Windsor. While there is some uncertainty as to the extent to which white sharks are moving in, scientists say that all signs point to a local population that’s growing, as white sharks recover from overexploitation and move northward because of warming waters.

That increasing presence elicits complex feelings in the region. White sharks have an almost unparalleled ability to inspire fear – yet sharks also have the potential to bring new benefits to the region: in research opportunities, in economic activity and in healthy ecosystems. But experts note that some white-shark prep work is also required, especially in a region billed as “Canada’s ocean playground” by one province’s licence plate.

“It’s very exciting, but also there is some degree of challenge for [Canada] to start generating the data to manage it, because it’s an endangered species . . . and to manage the risk of negative human–shark interactions,” Hussey says.

A shark sector is born

Ocean shorelines exert a magnetic pull for vacationers around the world; coastal and maritime tourism represents a significant portion of the global tourist economy, generating approximately US$3 trillion in 2025. Shark- and ray-based tourism is an increasing share of this, producing about US$314 million annually from activities such as diving, fishing and boat tours, according to one 2013 study. Shark tourism takes place in dozens of countries, and in some cases, researchers suggest that it has the potential to contribute more to gross domestic product than fishing.

In Atlantic Canada, this activity is still in its infancy.

The first company to offer cage diving tours began operating on Nova Scotia’s south shore roughly three years ago. In starting the business, marine biologist Neil Hammerschlag was inspired by his master’s degree in South Africa decades before, where he ran cage diving tours to fund his research. After an academic career in the United States, he began looking for a way to return to Canada and, seeing the increasing number of shark sightings in Nova Scotia, recognized a chance to return to his roots: “I thought, why not kind of use this idea of combining cage diving and the public’s interest in sharks with science, and essentially came up with this concept for Atlantic Shark Expeditions, which is cage diving to support science.”

Hammerschlag says it took a few seasons, but Atlantic Shark Expeditions has managed to dial in its formula. In 2025, they saw white sharks on every expedition and identified 109 different individuals, tagging six sharks with satellite tags. The company has taken hundreds of people on white-shark expeditions, many of whom describe being motivated by the desire to participate in research or to see sharks up close. “Interestingly, it’s not thrill-seekers at all,” he says.

Hammerschlag’s operation came up against some local opposition initially. Local surfers and other ocean recreationalists raised concerns that its approach would make human–shark conflict more likely. Some of that concern was fuelled by rumour. People had heard that the company was throwing fresh chunks of fish in the water, a practice known as chumming, meant to draw the species in. Hammerschlag denies this, though the company does use tuna and seal blubber as bait. It also lowers waterproof speakers into the water to produce a low-frequency sound attractive to sharks. Hammerschlag acknowledges that some people have concerns about changing shark behaviour, but he says their own research doesn’t support the idea that bait causes sharks to hang around. Of the 109 sharks they saw, most they saw only once. “If they’re being habituated, you would expect to see the same ones day in and day out, right? But you don’t. You see completely different ones. They’re moving through.”

Researchers in other jurisdictions where shark tourism is more established have drawn similar conclusions. Studies of wildlife tourism in Mexico and Australia found no long-term habituation from baiting, though that didn’t stop Mexico from banning white-shark tourism on Guadalupe Island in 2023, citing bad practices in the industry that had sometimes proved deadly – for the sharks.

This reflects the broader reality: there were 12 confirmed fatalities from shark encounters worldwide in 2025, and there were 65 “unprovoked” attacks, including one in Nova Scotia, where a white shark bit through a paddleboard at a beach near Halifax (the paddler was unharmed). That pales in comparison to the number of sharks killed by humans, which exceeds 100 million a year.

Despite these stark figures, sharks are nonetheless often perceived as remorseless killers and humans their defenceless victims – a narrative whose strength demonstrates just how deep-seated (and culturally reinforced) our fear of them is. In Atlantic Canada, scientists warn, a lack of familiarity and preparation has the potential to drive conflict.

Nigel Hussey, who runs a field research station tracking sharks on Nova Scotia’s southshore, says that everywhere else in the world where there are significant white shark populations, there are programs to mitigate the interactions with people that will inevitably occur. Yet in Atlantic Canada, these are so far lacking.

Sharks are not interested in people, Hussey says, but because they spend most of their time in the same part of the ocean that we do, conflict can arise. “We’re certainly at a point, and have been for a while now, where [Nova Scotia] needs to acknowledge white sharks are here and they’re here in numbers,” he says. Without the right data and preparation, there’s a risk of a negative encounter, he says, which could in turn be negative for shark conservation.

Steve Crawford, professor of integrative biology at the University of Guelph, points out that visitors may not understand that white sharks are now part of 

the environment in Atlantic Canada. For several years, Crawford says, he’s been advocating for white-shark signage and accompanying trauma kits at popular coastal destinations in the region, as beaches in Maine and Massachusetts have done. “To date, not a single government agency anywhere in Atlantic Canada has made the responsible decision to provide this kind of risk-management signage.”

Getting the opportunity right

Increasing numbers of sharks are not only a source of risk – they’re also a draw.

In other shark hot spots, such as Australia and South Africa, sizable industries have arisen out of people’s desire to interact with sharks; a 2017 study found that shark-diving tourism contributed $25.5 million (AUD) annually to Australia’s regional economy. While research suggests that activities like cage diving have minimal behavioural impact, the context of that research is that it happened in jurisdictions that have navigated a learning curve to establish effective regulations, Hussey says.

Cage diving isn’t the only appeal. White sharks have the potential to fuel a range of economic activity, from scientific research and tourism to wildlife documentary production. “There is a whole economic ecosystem around white sharks that could be very positive in Nova Scotia, but we all acknowledge . . . we need regulations in place,” Hussey says.

It’s worth doing the work to get this right, scientists say, because as white sharks become more established in the region, opportunities to get close could help dispel fear of the unfamiliar.

In mid-summer of last year, Geraldine Fernandez was on an outing on the Atlantic Shark Expeditions vessel, as part of a research project she was doing with Dalhousie University’s Future of Marine Ecosystems lab. It was a day like any other: some guests were enjoying the ocean in the cage, and Fernandez was standing atop the cage, dipping a tool she uses for estimating shark length in the water.

A blue shark glided past, only to suddenly disappear; seconds later, a large white shark swam into view. Fernandez says he was more than four metres long and beautifully coloured, but what was most striking was his gracefulness. The shark was not interested in the bait but spent “what felt like forever” calmly observing the people in the cage and poking his head out of the water (a behaviour called spy-hopping) to look at the people on the boat. “He was soaking it all in with all the guests,” she says. “He was not afraid. We were not afraid. It was an absolutely incredible experience.”

Seeing the people there respond with delight and curiosity to an animal that’s so often maligned was a deeply fulfilling experience, Fernandez says. It’s an example of how, if managed correctly, the increasing presence of sharks in Atlantic Canadian waters can serve as a reminder about what is, after all, the shark’s environment: when we go in the ocean, we’re not alone. And we wouldn’t want to be.

Moira Donovan is an award-winning journalist based in Nova Scotia, specializing in the environment and climate change.

The post There’s a new apex predator in Atlantic Canada appeared first on Corporate Knights.

While the Galápagos is home to many species that exist nowhere else, implementing tourist fees in the name of conservation is common. Bhutan, for example, charges tourists a $100-per-night “sustainable development fee” that funds economic, social, environmental and cultural projects. Greece charges a nightly “climate crisis resilience fee” that is allocated to a dedicated fund for natural disaster preparedness and emergency response.

While the revenues generated from these examples and others fund community and environment projects, it also raises the question: does putting a price on a nature destination help protect it? Or does it just commodify it?

Natural accounting

Defining nature in economic terms – as the movement to codify natural capital as an asset class seeks to do – helps make it visible on a balance sheet. What may seem like an accounting exercise can produce striking insights. For instance, a 2026 United Nations Environment Programme report outlined a staggering gap between finance that harms the environment and investments in nature-based solutions: in 2023, $7.3 trillion flowed toward activities that harm nature, such as public subsidies for fossil fuels, whereas only $220 billion went toward solutions. In other words, for every $1 invested in protecting nature, $30 are spent destroying it.

When harm outpaces conservation 30 to one, building entire industries around keeping nature intact might seem like the obvious remedy. In 2023, the U.S. National Park Service estimated that it received 325.5 million visitors who collectively spent $26.4 billion in communities near national parks. This spending supported 415,400 jobs and contributed $55.6 billion to the U.S. economy. Despite the proven economic gains, the 2027 federal budget proposed more than a $736-million cut in parks funding. This comes after about 4,000 Park Service people were cut from the workforce in 2025. To compensate, already crowded U.S. national parks will need to attract more visitors as a source of funding, putting additional pressure on their infrastructure and habitats.

Markets can help businesses understand the value of nature, says Niak Sian Koh, researcher at the Nature Positive Hub at Oxford University, but economics can’t fully capture nature’s value: “because nature is not only something that’s isolated in a [national] park and in ecotourism – it’s also all around us.” A 2022 report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services highlighted the other ways that nature’s value can be understood and expressed, such as its relational value, like our personal connection to a forest or coastline, and its intrinsic value, the right for nature to exist. In other words, things that cannot be measured in dollars and cents.

Nature’s legal status

When it comes to nature’s right to exist, legislation is another tool that protects places, wildlife and the tourism it attracts. For example, the Whanganui River was granted legal personhood status in 2017, which means that harm to the river is the same as harming the Whanganui tribe. The Maori, Indigenous people of New Zealand, fought for the river’s rights for more than 160 years and have a cultural duty to protect the landscape. This legal status has unlocked protections and finances that are used to support the health of the river ecosystem. It reshaped the market forces affecting the Whanganui River: harm to the river became a liability and conservation became an asset. “Markets are supported by legal structures,” Koh points out. “We can redesign markets to do better, but often we don’t do this.”

While the tourist fees in the Galápagos and other celebrated destinations are designed with good intentions, their relationship to nature conservation is more complicated. Higher fees don’t necessarily equate to better protection. Popular destinations with lucrative markets could find their ecosystems under threat if a sudden policy change fails to prioritize the very nature that makes them special. “Markets can do what we design them to do,” Koh says. If “we don’t design them to think about communities, to think about diverse values of nature, they’re just going to perpetuate the same existing problems.”

The post How tourism is shaping the debate over natural capital appeared first on Corporate Knights.

“What she showed us is that nature doesn’t recognize our borders, and our protection systems have to catch up to that reality,” says Laurel Angell, director of government relations and policy at the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, or Y2Y, a transboundary U.S.–Canada–Indigenous wildlife protection non-profit.

Canada shares a nearly 9,000-kilometre-long border with the United States, and more than 500 migratory species cross that border each year, ranging in size from the monarch butterfly to the grey whale – and that’s not including the animals that roam across the border constantly, such as whitetailed deer, grizzly bears and grey wolves like Pluie.

Nature doesn’t recognize our borders, and our protection systems have to catch up to that reality.

– Laurel Angell, Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative

The two countries have collaborated on cross-border wildlife conservation for decades, sharing research and partnering on initiatives. Key to this has been the relationship between federal agencies, local governments, non-profits, scientists, private landowners and Indigenous groups. But as U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration slashes funding for conservation research and federal departments, and rolls back critical endangered-species laws, wildlife that rely on the stability of these relationships now face unbalanced protection.

“We are genuinely concerned about what’s happening to federal land and wildlife management agencies,” Angell says. “Our federal partners are essential to this work, and when you cut those agencies deeply, you lose the people, the research capacity, the field scientists and the relationships that make cross-boundary conservation actually function.”

In 2025, Trump began slashing jobs at U.S. public land agencies, firing rangers and land managers who protect public parks. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has had an 18% reduction in workforce – about 1,800 jobs, including around 500 biologists. In a letter to the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, FWS director Brian Nesvik said that “almost 60 percent of the nation’s wildlife refuges lack the resources and staff needed to fulfill their missions.”

Sixteen out of 22 land research cooperatives – government research centres that focus on science-based conservation – have been placed on indefinite hiatus. During his first administration, Trump proposed several provisions that would weaken the critical Endangered Species Act (ESA) to make energy and resource development easier. And the 2027 proposed budget would cut funding by hundreds of millions of dollars to a host of environmental programs and departments.

Staff cuts to the Fish and Wildlife Service predate the current administration, says Collin O’Mara, president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation. But the accelerated rate is worrying, he says, particularly the loss of scientists, who are integral to collecting the data sets that then inform conservation work. As climate change and biodiversity loss affect how transboundary wildlife – including endangered species such as caribou and monarch butterflies – shift their movements, up-to-date data and research is vital.

These aren’t solely U.S. problems. Many species protected by the Endangered Species Act migrate across the border, like the whooping crane, which travels from Texas to breeding grounds in the Northwest Territories and Alberta. These migration routes are essential to their survival.

On-the-ground conservation work across the border has been disrupted, too. “There are cross-border conservation projects right now where the U.S. side of critical habitat and connectivity mapping work is being cut mid-stream, leaving partners working from an incomplete picture of the landscape and leaving many people uncertain about what to even do,” Angell says.

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Connectivity mapping helps researchers maintain and improve wildlife corridors across borders, which are protected spaces that allow animals safe passage through busy roads and private lands. Making sure animal populations aren’t isolated is essential to their survival. For more than 30 years, Y2Y has worked to bridge the gap between two of the largest Rocky Mountain grizzly populations in Montana and Canada, which were split by 240 kilometres. Now, through land conservation and wildlife corridors, that gap is just shy of 50 kilometres. Once connected, the transboundary populations can migrate and mate, strengthening their numbers.

“That’s what we’re trying to protect,” Angell says. “And that last stretch to achieve real, full connectivity – which would be a landmark conservation success story – requires sustained investment and rigorous science, not less of both.”

Both Angell and O’Mara have cause for optimism, however. So far, the U.S. Congress has pushed back on most of the proposed budget cuts, “in a bipartisan, nonpartisan way,” O’Mara says. “I think at the end of the day, there’s so much support – across regions, across political ideology, across the national boundary – for this work,” he says. “That’s what gives me hope.”

Ayesha Habib is a Toronto-based journalist who has written for The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, The Narwhal and Maisonneuve.

The post Cross-border wildlife conservation between the U.S. and Canada is under strain appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Coste’s organization forms part of a complaint filed before the Competition Bureau of Canada challenging the integrity of SFI, a system created by the pulp and paper industry in 1994 that is meant to reassure environmentally conscious consumers. The standard applies to everything from furniture to cardboard boxes and toilet paper.  

The Competition Bureau enforces the Competition Act, which prohibits false and misleading statements about products or services companies offer. 

“People desperately want to believe that logging can be done well, and that we can meet our needs for timber and fibre without having a devastating impact,” Coste says in an interview. “The story that can’t be manipulated is the one told out on the land. You get out into some of these areas, into some of these clear-cuts in forests that are SFI-certified, and there’s absolutely nothing sustainable about it.” 

The complaint, led by Ecojustice on behalf of the Wilderness Committee, Greenpeace Canada and several other environmental groups, was filed three years ago. The complainants say they want SFI to stop calling their certification “sustainable,” to issue public correction of their claims and to pay a $10-million fine. 

SFI, a non-profit organization, has now certified more than 150 million hectares of forest in North America, of which 76% are in Canada. Products that bear its seal are understood to be sourced from forests that are responsibly managed.  

But, critics argue, forestry companies certified by SFI can continue to clear-cut forests, spray glyphosate to suppress natural regrowth, and replace them with lucrative softwood plantations. Coste calls it “greenwashing.” “Some of the biggest clear-cuts in the rarest old-growth forests are in SFI-certified forest operations,” Coste says. “It undercuts the credibility of all third-party certifications.” 

In an emailed statement, SFI tells Corporate Knights that “this complaint has no merit and attempts to create confusion in the marketplace,” adding that “complaints like this are used to mislead brands, governments, and the public into the real value and impact of the SFI Standard.” 

Another signatory to the complaint, Peter Wood, is a professor in the Department of Forest Resources Management at the University of British Columbia. Wood has been studying forestry certification since 1999, first for the province’s Ministry of Forests and later for non-government organizations.

“Forest certification initially held a great deal of promise, as a way to bypass government inaction in addressing unsustainable rates of logging and ease pressure on the world’s few remaining primary forests,” he says. “This is not the way that it has played out.” 

In a 39-page complaint submitted to the Competition Bureau, the environmental groups argue that the SFI standard does not require specific environmental outcomes. While the framework outlines steps that could contribute to sustainable forestry, it does not mandate them.

Wood says many of the requirements are “vague and discretionary, largely aspirational.” Companies seeking certification hire the auditors who assess them, he adds, and the standards focus on whether companies have programs in place rather than whether those programs produce measurable results. As a result, Wood argues, industry-led certification systems have allowed large volumes of wood products to enter the market with sustainability labels, without significant changes to forestry practices. 

SFI submitted a six-page response to the Competition Bureau, arguing that the organization is governed by an 18-member board divided equally among industry (including representatives from Canadian forest-product giants Canfor and Irving), conservation, and Indigenous and social sectors. The organization says it undertakes a standards-revision process every five to seven years, which includes review from technical experts; Indigenous groups; industry; private forest landowners and public forest managers; Canadian government agencies, including the Ministry of Natural Resources; environmental non-profits; labour unions; and others. The public is also given an opportunity to comment on the revisions. 

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SFI also says that their “standards are internationally recognized methodologies” and stated that disagreement among experts does not mean that a methodology is false or misleading. 

“SFI has a very slick website and associated promotional materials, and they make big claims around the label’s ability to provide assurance of sustainable forest management,” Wood says. “But if you take a close look at the forest management standards, upon which all of their claims essentially rest, there’s nothing in there that is capable of assuring a given level of performance.” To illustrate the point, Wood points to SFI’s “performance measures” that require certified organizations to protect endangered species. The problem? They require only that companies to have a program in place that “addresses” this issue, with no reflection on whether a program is effective or what impact logging has had on the species.   

SFI tells Corporate Knights that “while SFI sets the standard, independent, third party-accredited certification bodies certify organizations to the SFI Standards” and that a certificate is issued only after the independent certification body determines that an operation conforms to SFI’s requirements. They also say that annual surveillance audits by certification bodies are “mandatory on all certified operations to maintain certification. So, if an organization doesn’t meet the standard, they do not receive a certificate.” Meanwhile, the complainants argue that they have not seen an SFI certification be refused or removed for not meeting the requirements of the process.  

In response, an SFI spokesperson says that they are aware of 19 certificates that were relinquished between January 2022 and June 2024 by companies that could not meet new requirements. 

“[The] government has a strong role to play in protecting Canadian consumers from bogus claims made in the marketplace, including the sustainability of the products they buy,” Wood says. “But this requires pressure from consumers and voters.”

Wood and the claimant ​​​​environmental groups consider the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), founded in 1993, to be a stronger option. Though smaller by comparison to SFI, certifying just 50 million hectares, Ecojustice’s submission to the Competition Bureau notes that FSC’s structure and governance were designed to give equal voting power to business, environmental and social interests, including Indigenous Peoples. But, Wood says, in the 1990s, the forestry industry put significant effort into creating other options. “It appeared that these were deliberately trying to detract from the efforts of the Forest Stewardship Council, supported by Indigenous organizations and environmental groups,” Wood says. “I hope the Competition Bureau upholds a high bar in this case and prevents corporations from greenwashing . . . It should not be left up to individual consumers to go around verifying the myriad claims that are made in the marketplace every day, or read the hundreds of pages of standards that support these claims.”

Kegan Pepper-Smith, a managing lawyer on the case at Ecojustice, notes the slow pace of resolution. In the three years since the organization brought the complaint, they have not heard anything apart from one meeting soon after the Competition Bureau’s investigation was launched. “The logging practices under the SFI standard continue, and there’s been no redress for our clients or for the consumers,” Pepper-Smith says in a phone interview. 

The Competition Bureau tells Corporate Knights that the agency is legally obligated to conduct its work confidentially and cannot provide details related to the case or its status. Likewise, SFI says that no enforcement action has been taken by the Competition Bureau as of writing.  

“That’s really impactful for folks who want to speak with their money and make choices about what products they buy, and are being misled to think that they’re purchasing products that are sustainably sourced,” Pepper-Smith says. “It’s not only about the impact in the forest; it’s also about the impact on the consumers and their ability to . . . [use] their money to support sustainable practices.” 

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

Response from the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI), sent on April 27, 2026:

“Contrary to the article’s claims, SFI’s Standard requires prompt reforestation using ecologically appropriate native species and prohibits the conversion of native forests to plantations. It also includes multiple safeguards to ensure that regenerated forests do not develop plantation characteristics, but instead resemble native or semi-natural forests at maturity.

The article’s assertion that SFI’s requirements lack measurable impact or performance is simply incorrect. Every Objective, Performance Measure, and Indicator in the Standard must be met and independently verified by a third-party auditor before an organization can achieve certification. These requirements are outcome-based, ensuring that meaningful and measurable results are delivered.

One example is SFI’s robust, performance-based requirements for the protection and conservation of old-growth forests. The Standard also mandates integrated pest management practices that minimize chemical use and prioritize the least-toxic, narrow-spectrum pesticides.”

The post Canada’s biggest sustainable forest label has a clear-cutting problem  appeared first on Corporate Knights.

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.

The post Scientists enlist sea turtles to fill gaps in ocean knowledge appeared first on Corporate Knights.

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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