Strategy to protect woodland caribou gets failing grade: environmental group
By Randy Boswell
The woodland caribou will soon be "on the road to extinction" without immediate efforts by federal and provincial agencies to protect the animal's increasingly disturbed boreal habitat.
Photograph by: Valerie Courtois, Canadian Boreal Initiative
One of Canada's leading conservation groups has given the federal government a failing grade on its planned strategy to protect the woodland caribou, insisting above all that a proposed 60 per cent "survival threshold" across much of the animal's range must be increased to 80 per cent to prevent the extirpation of many herds.
A report card prepared by the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society — to be issued Monday near the close of a 60-day public consultation period on a federal caribou recovery blueprint announced in August — says the scientific basis for the strategy is strong, but that the government has chosen a habitat-protection target that's "too weak" to truly ensure the antlered creature will overcome its threatened status across Canada's boreal forest.
"The caribou graces our 25-cent piece," the group states. "This Canadian icon is also a sign of the health of our vast boreal forests which purify the air we breathe and the water we drink, and store vast amounts of carbon."
A number of environmental groups raised alarms when the federal strategy was unveiled on Aug. 25. But the deeper CPAWS analysis that's been six weeks in the making highlights two key problems with the Canadian government's plan, the society's national boreal conservation manager, Chris Henschel, told Postmedia News in advance of Monday's formal release of the report card.
The government, he said, was offered a range of options by scientists about how aggressively Canada should be protecting caribou habitat, but it chose a set of measures aimed at ensuring a "60 per cent probability of survival" for many of the country's 57 distinct caribou populations. In that scenario, disturbances such as forestry, mining and road-building would be allowed to affect about one-third of each population's habitat.
He called an 80 per cent target "a precautionary threshold that an everyday person understands. An 80 per cent chance of something happening is pretty decent; a 60 per cent chance of something happening is not much better than 50-50 — and it leaves no room for error, for unexpected events, the impact of climate change, bad fire years or whatever it might be."
The other major complaint outlined in the CPAWS report card is that even the proposed 60 per cent survival target applies to only about half of the 57 caribou populations, which range across a broad, sweeping band of Canada's boreal forest in seven provinces and two territories from the Yukon and northern B.C. in the West to Quebec and Labrador in the East.
"They've adopted this really low ambition in terms of probability of survival and then they've also created this huge loophole for half the herd," said Henschel. "What we need to do is get them to fix those two problems and then the caribou would have a really good shot."
In releasing its proposed recovery strategy in August, the federal government acknowledged that boreal caribou are "threatened by a reduction in the availability and suitability of habitat necessary to carry out the life processes necessary for their survival and reproduction."
It also stated that boreal caribou "are limited in their potential to recover from rapid, severe population declines."
In July, just weeks ahead of the government's release of its caribou recovery plan, an international panel of scientists issued an open letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper warning that the species will be "on the road to extinction" without urgent action by federal, provincial and territorial agencies charged with protecting the animal's increasingly disturbed boreal habitat.
An accompanying report by the International Boreal Conservation Science Panel, authored by 23 biologists and other researchers from Canada and the U.S., concluded that the woodland caribou's existence in several provinces and territories is threatened by industrial development and piecemeal protection efforts that have not significantly curbed habitat loss or reversed century-long decreases in caribou populations.
"Woodland caribou are in trouble,'' the scientists told Harper. "Once widespread — ranging as far south as the northern United States — forest-dwelling caribou have vanished from half of their historic range in North America, coincident with an expanding, continental front of human settlement and intensive resource exploitation."
A report card prepared by the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society — to be issued Monday near the close of a 60-day public consultation period on a federal caribou recovery blueprint announced in August — says the scientific basis for the strategy is strong, but that the government has chosen a habitat-protection target that's "too weak" to truly ensure the antlered creature will overcome its threatened status across Canada's boreal forest.
"The caribou graces our 25-cent piece," the group states. "This Canadian icon is also a sign of the health of our vast boreal forests which purify the air we breathe and the water we drink, and store vast amounts of carbon."
A number of environmental groups raised alarms when the federal strategy was unveiled on Aug. 25. But the deeper CPAWS analysis that's been six weeks in the making highlights two key problems with the Canadian government's plan, the society's national boreal conservation manager, Chris Henschel, told Postmedia News in advance of Monday's formal release of the report card.
The government, he said, was offered a range of options by scientists about how aggressively Canada should be protecting caribou habitat, but it chose a set of measures aimed at ensuring a "60 per cent probability of survival" for many of the country's 57 distinct caribou populations. In that scenario, disturbances such as forestry, mining and road-building would be allowed to affect about one-third of each population's habitat.
He called an 80 per cent target "a precautionary threshold that an everyday person understands. An 80 per cent chance of something happening is pretty decent; a 60 per cent chance of something happening is not much better than 50-50 — and it leaves no room for error, for unexpected events, the impact of climate change, bad fire years or whatever it might be."
The other major complaint outlined in the CPAWS report card is that even the proposed 60 per cent survival target applies to only about half of the 57 caribou populations, which range across a broad, sweeping band of Canada's boreal forest in seven provinces and two territories from the Yukon and northern B.C. in the West to Quebec and Labrador in the East.
"They've adopted this really low ambition in terms of probability of survival and then they've also created this huge loophole for half the herd," said Henschel. "What we need to do is get them to fix those two problems and then the caribou would have a really good shot."
In releasing its proposed recovery strategy in August, the federal government acknowledged that boreal caribou are "threatened by a reduction in the availability and suitability of habitat necessary to carry out the life processes necessary for their survival and reproduction."
It also stated that boreal caribou "are limited in their potential to recover from rapid, severe population declines."
In July, just weeks ahead of the government's release of its caribou recovery plan, an international panel of scientists issued an open letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper warning that the species will be "on the road to extinction" without urgent action by federal, provincial and territorial agencies charged with protecting the animal's increasingly disturbed boreal habitat.
An accompanying report by the International Boreal Conservation Science Panel, authored by 23 biologists and other researchers from Canada and the U.S., concluded that the woodland caribou's existence in several provinces and territories is threatened by industrial development and piecemeal protection efforts that have not significantly curbed habitat loss or reversed century-long decreases in caribou populations.
"Woodland caribou are in trouble,'' the scientists told Harper. "Once widespread — ranging as far south as the northern United States — forest-dwelling caribou have vanished from half of their historic range in North America, coincident with an expanding, continental front of human settlement and intensive resource exploitation."
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