BC & FEDERAL GOVERNMENT COMMIT TO MAJOR CONSERVATION PLAN

​The British Columbia government has just created a major conservation area that it bills as one of the most significant new protected areas in a decade. To meet its lofty environmental goals, it will need to create many more protected areas like the Incomappleux Valley in the coming years: the equivalent of 175 more over the next seven years.

Canada also needs B.C. to succeed if it is to meet its own promises at the COP15 biodiversity conference last year. Despite the strong political alignment between the two governments, a nature agreement that would fast-track conservation has proved elusive.

The federal government has committed to reach “30 by 30,″ the shorthand phrase for 30 per cent protected areas by the year 2030. Further, it has promised that it won’t pad the numbers by protecting barren landscapes, and has been working to identify key biodiversity areas that are at risk.

Starting with Canada’s first national park in 1885, the country has managed to set aside almost 15 per cent of its lands and waterways. Finding new, biologically important greenspace in the face of development pressure today is not getting easier, as the battle over Ontario’s Greenbelt makes clear.

British Columbia, with one-10th of the country’s land base and an outsized share of Canada’s biodiversity, has protected a greater share of its lands than any other province or territory.

But it still needs to add another 10 million hectares of protected areas to hit its own 30-by-30 target.

“It’s an ambitious goal,” Nathan Cullen, B.C.’s Minister of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship, said in an interview. “Our biodiversity is so rich and things we are trying to protect, like the Incomappleux Valley, are so rare.”

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