Today More Than Ever, Biodiversity Needs Single-Species Conservation

(MENAFN- The Conversation) Through the federal Building Canada Act,“projects of national interest” are being fast-tracked while hundreds of major resource projects are already under construction or planned in the next decade .

Clean water, climate stability, economic health and cultural heritage all depend on biodiversity. Yet this foundation is hardly mentioned as the government seeks to shore up Canada's economic future amid a shifting global order.

The pressure to expedite approvals to dig, drill, cut and pipe has the potential to further weaken already fragile biodiversity protections . This is particularly the case for species at risk - those on the front lines of biodiversity loss that have never been adequately safeguarded under Canada's existing policies.

Dedicated laws to protect individual species began to emerge in the 1970s, creating some of the best known and tested tools for preventing extinction. Yet in Canada, implementation has consistently fallen short: the federal Species at Risk Act has been the subject of sustained criticism over the past 20 years.

Academic researchers and civil society groups have shown that implementation has been inefficient and inconsistent. The evidence is clear that single-species conservation is taking too long , failing to recognize all endangered or potentially threatened species and their habitats and suffering from biases that favour economic priorities over protection.

In their race toward deregulation, some Canadian governments are using critiques of existing single-species laws to argue that they're defunct or of relatively little value. The British Columbia government appears to have walked away from long-standing commitments to develop a provincial statute focused on the needs of individual species. The Ontario government recently repealed and replaced one of the strongest species-at-risk acts in the country.

Read more: Ambitious changes to Canadian conservation law are needed to reverse the decline in biodiversity

Endangered mountain caribou benefit from supplemental feeding, a single-species conservation effort. (Chris Johnson) Individual species need protection

In our recent study , we argue that these legislative tools are essential for assessing and protecting individual species. While current single-species conservation is costly, inefficient and biased, weak implementation doesn't mean there's no need for legislation. Deregulation in the name of economic expedience is not reform; it's erosion of essential protections for biodiversity.

Species such as the swift fox and the whooping crane have been pulled back from the edge of extinction through intensive, costly and invasive conservation actions. Species-at-risk legislation is intended to enable this kind of dedicated attention through measures like captive breeding, translocation, veterinary care or active management of people, predators and ecological competitors.

Despite those successes, Canada lacks a coherent approach to halting biodiversity loss . Even commitments for more protected and conserved areas, while important and overdue, have not been designed to prioritize the needs of at-risk species.

Species like the whooping crane have been pulled back from the edge of extinction through dedicated conservation efforts. (Unsplash/Josie Weiss) What the evidence says

We used publicly available conservation data to count the number of species that were threatened because there were only a few individuals, or that were found across a very small area in the wild. These are species that need help now. We also quantified threats to at-risk species, identifying those threats that need to be addressed directly by tailored actions, not simply more protected land and water.

Of the 550 wildlife species in Canada that were assessed as threatened or endangered by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada , more than 20 per cent were classified as at risk because they were a small population or had a very restricted distribution and were at risk of becoming extinct over a short time. For example, 97 endangered species had less than 250 mature individuals.

Data from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (ICUN) revealed that the most prominent threats facing at-risk species were from consumptive use including deliberate and unintentional harvesting, followed by pollution and the effects of climate change. These threats are not easily addressed by only focusing on increasing protected areas.

What's at stake

Conservation success stories tell us that focused actions, such as captive breeding , are sometimes the only way to maintain small and range-restricted populations. Equally important are efforts to manage ecosystems on a large enough scale through protected areas, and by addressing pressures from human development and cumulative impacts that steadily erode habitats.

These broader measures can deliver long-term benefits for biodiversity as a whole, but they cannot substitute for processes that assess the status of individual species and empower targeted recovery actions. Weakening or abandoning species-specific policies is not just a policy shift; it is the loss of a crucial set of conservation tools.

Critiques of single-species approaches must not come at the expense of their continued implementation, whether through species at risk legislation or sector-specific natural resource regulation.

Species-at-risk legislation facilitates focused recovery actions, such as maternity pens that reduce mortality for caribou calves. (Chris Johnson)

These conservation tools can mobilize public and political will by drawing on the emotional power of threatened species and generating essential information about ecosystem change. They can also provide mechanisms to begin the process of rebuilding populations.

Although species-focused efforts have played an essential role in conservation , a fundamental shift is needed to move beyond crisis-driven, reactive measures and toward proactive, preventative strategies.

Addressing biodiversity loss at its roots requires mitigating systemic drivers of decline and adopting policies that prioritize long-term ecosystem resilience. To forsake species protections is not to move forward. It is to close the door on recovery before the story is over.

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