A female adult barn owl. The species is one of several classified as endangered by Ontario.ETIENNE TORBEY/AFP/Getty Images
Southern Ontario’s rural heartland features bucolic farm country, a growing suburban footprint and some of the most stunning shorelines and wilderness areas in Canada.
It is also home to at least 133 species of vertebrates, insects and plants that are at risk of elimination from the province and, in some cases, complete extinction.
That presents a conservation conundrum: How best to protect so many species at risk in one of the country’s most populated and productive landscapes?
Now, researchers have provided a comprehensive study of what it would cost to rescue a significant fraction of Southern Ontario’s threatened wildlife. The answer – about $113-million a year for 27 years – illustrates the magnitude of the challenge and offers a strategic roadmap for how to invest conservation dollars for the greatest benefit.
The study aims to provide policy makers and environmental advocates alike with guidance on how best to address species declines in Southern Ontario. The task is especially complex because most of the land in the region is privately owned and, barring some exceptions, outside the jurisdiction of the federal Species at Risk Act.
Land classifications in the
Lake Simcoe-Rideau ecoregion
Based on the 2024 Annual Crop Inventory data
Lake Simcoe-Rideau
ecoregion boundary
MURAT YÜKSELIR / THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE:
STATISTICS CANADA; ONTARIO GEOHUB;
AGRICULTURE AND AGRI-FOOD CANADA
Land classifications in the
Lake Simcoe-Rideau ecoregion
Based on the 2024 Annual Crop Inventory data
Lake Simcoe-Rideau
ecoregionboundary
MURAT YÜKSELIR / THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE:
STATISTICS CANADA; ONTARIO GEOHUB;
AGRICULTURE AND AGRI-FOOD CANADA
Land classifications in the Lake Simcoe-Rideau ecoregion
Based on the 2024 Annual Crop Inventory data
Lake Simcoe-Rideau
ecoregion boundary
MURAT YÜKSELIR / THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: STATISTICS CANADA; ONTARIO GEOHUB;
AGRICULTURE AND AGRI-FOOD CANADA
The province has its own species law that was significantly altered when the Ford government passed Bill 5 earlier this year.
The new legislation removes some barriers to the development of natural spaces and reduces protections for many of the province’s species at risk.
“Species in that region have virtually no protection now in terms of federal or provincial safeguards,” said Tara Martin, who heads the Conservation Decisions Lab at the University of British Columbia and whose team led the new study, published Monday in the journal Ecological Solutions and Evidence.
The study was conducted in collaboration with the environmental organization WWF Canada.
Dr. Martin specializes in an approach known as priority threat management. It starts by recognizing that resources are finite and then seeks to determine which actions are likely to lead to the most favourable outcomes for a given budget.
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Dr. Martin’s group has previously applied the method to southwestern Saskatchewan and B.C.’s Fraser River Delta, among other locations. The Ontario study is the largest and, in many ways, the most complex that the group has undertaken.
For the study, the teamed focused on a 63,000-square-kilometre swath of Ontario known as the Lake Simcoe-Rideau ecoregion.
It features a highly diverse mix of land-use types, including forests, farms, wetlands and built areas. Geographically, it stretches from the lower Ottawa River valley west to Lake Simcoe, the Bruce Peninsula and Manitoulin Island. Several urban areas, including Ottawa, Kitchener-Waterloo and Barrie are located in the region, which is bordered to the north by the Canadian Shield.
The study did not include the Greater Toronto Area or southwestern Ontario, which forms its own distinct ecoregion.
Starting in 2022, experts were asked to identify key threats to 133 species categorized into 16 ecological groups found in the region as well as actions that could mitigate those threats. A 27-year time period for action was chosen to match with targets for the year 2050 set by the Kunming-Montreal global biodiversity framework, to which Canada is a signatory.
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Among the experts consulted were those representing government agencies, conservation authorities, First Nations, environmental groups, industry and research institutions. Proposed actions ranged from legislation and other policy measures to physical interventions such as landscape-restoration projects and wildlife-safe highway crossings.
They estimated the cost-effectiveness of each action and scored them based on expected benefit. They also considered the benefits when various actions were pursued in combination.
If none of the actions are implemented, the study found that nearly all of the species groups, encompassing 130 out of the 133 species at risk, would have a less than 50-per-cent chance of persisting to 2050.
This assessment improves as measures are added strategically. In the best case, for an annualized cost of about $113-million a year, 15 of the 16 species groups have a better-than-even chance of persisting.
James Snider, vice-president of science, knowledge and innovation for WWF-Canada, said the study demonstrates the need for a larger vision to balance needs such as food security and housing while also protecting the region’s important natural assets and restoring marginal lands that are now lying fallow.
“We need to be bringing habitats back online for these species and that’s where the investment is needed at scale,” he said.
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He noted that the study’s estimated price tag, though significantly higher than what the province currently spends on conservation in the region, amounts to less than one tenth of 1 per cent of Ontario’s annual budget – about $7 per resident a year.
Research into public attitudes, including a Quebec-based study published last month, suggests such a price tag falls well within what people would be willing to pay to save just a single species from extinction.
Dan Kraus, a conservation scientist and consultant based in Guelph, Ont., who was not involved with Dr. Martin’s study, said the results should prompt stakeholders in the region to think long term about planning and budgeting for meaningful conservation.
“For a long time, I think we’ve undervalued and underfunded nature,” he said. “It’s really important that we do start thinking about how much conservation is going to cost.”
The study also found that investments toward species would carry additional measurable benefits in the form of reduced carbon emissions. Dr. Kraus said that flood protection and human well-being could also be considered as net gains from conservation investments.