Implementing the 30% Target

Every day, all around our planet, persistence of biodiversity is being affected by actions that either degrade or, conversely, protect or restore terrestrial and aquatic environments. The main role of conservation science in this process should be to inform planning and decision-making using best-available data and knowledge.

Setting the 30% Target

On December 18 of 2022, the United Nations, set a number of targets. Included in that list is Target 3 (pg 9)

“Ensure and enable that by 2030 at least 30 per cent of terrestrial, inland water, and of coastal and marine areas, especially areas of particular importance for biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services, are effectively conserved and managed through ecologically representative, well-connected and equitably governed systems of protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures, recognizing indigenous and traditional territories, where applicable, and integrated into wider landscapes, seascapes and the ocean, while ensuring that any sustainable use, where appropriate in such areas, is fully consistent with conservation outcomes, recognizing and respecting the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities, including over their traditional territories.”

In August of 2022 the Government of Canada, in a Ministerial Statement stated:

“The Government of Canada has pledged to protect 25 percent of land and waters in Canada by 2025 and, along with nearly one hundred other countries, including its North American partners, the United States and Mexico, is supporting an ambitious but achievable global target to conserve 30 percent by 2030. With 640 at-risk species in Canada and many of our wildlife populations in decline, we are committed to halting and reversing biodiversity loss in Canada by 2030.”

On December 7 of 2022 the Premier of British Columbia assigned the Minister of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship responsibility for:

Partnering with the federal government, industry, and communities, and working with Indigenous Peoples, lead the work to achieve the Nature Agreement’s goals of 30% protection of BC’s land base by 2030, including Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas.

Implementation of the Target

Under the International Convention on Sustainability states have assumed a responsibility to enact environmental legislation.

Principle 11

States shall enact effective environmental legislation. Environmental standards, management objectives and priorities should reflect the environmental and developmental context to which they apply. …

Governments have not yet decided how to implement the goal of protecting 30% of nature. One method would be to identify and set aside 30% and protect it as a biodiversity reserve. The is aspirational.

There is conflicting information on the percent of lands protected in British Columbia.

The Challenges

In Fall 2002, the UBC Centre for Biodiversity Research assessed the effectiveness of BC’s Protected Areas Strategy in protecting rare and endangered species in British Columbia.

Overall, there was found to be a marked lack of coincidence between the current protected areas and the occurrence of large numbers of the endemic species, federal COSEWIC listed species, provincially Red-listed species, and potentially rare and endangered invertebrates in the province.

Recommendation

Clearly, there needs to be more inventory of rare and endangered species undertaken in BC’s protected areas and other areas with biodiversity conservation potential.

Biodiversity Conservation and Protected Areas in British Columbia G.G.F Scudder

Method Used in the Study

Distribution data were assembled for species listed at risk by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC), provincial ‘Red-listed’ species, endemic species, and potentially rare and endangered invertebrates in British Columbia, together with similar data on all species of butterflies, Odonata (dragonflies and damselflies), small mammals and vascular plants. From these data rarity and richness hotspots in British Columbia were determined to identify areas with high numbers of species at risk and areas of high biological diversity. The coincidence of the top 5% of the rarity hotspots with the protected areas within the province was then computed.

A report done in 2004 identified a number of challenges that may still apply in 2023

Conservation of Species and Ecosystems at Risk: BC Parks and Protected Area Challenges ,Victoria Stevens and Laura Darling

Finding the balance between promoting tourism and maintaining the essential elements of biodiversity, such as species and ecosystems at risk, continues to be a major challenge. The Recreation and Conservation Section of the Parks and Protected Areas Branch advocates an approach to conservation that looks at the entire land base and evaluates priorities for active management based on the level of threat to conservation values, the importance of the value, the cost of addressing the threat, the cost of ignoring the threat, and the probability of success. Protected area status will play a role in determining both the level of threat and the probability of success.

The First Challenge

• The challenge of fragmentation is to recognize the ecological needs of species that may require either elements or processes found outside the protected areas system or protected connecting fragments between larger reserves.

The Second Challenge

• The challenge is to manage this fluid system with a design of static protected areas to maintain species and ecosystems at risk as part of the entire suite of species and ecosystems in British Columbia. Clearly, this cannot be done on 12% of the land base and will require cooperative management across protected area boundaries.

The 1993 Gap Analysis Workbook for regional protected areas teams suggested that the following process be adopted for the selection of protected areas.

The process needs to be evaluated and updated for use in 2023. It has 5 major steps:

1. Describing ecosystems (to a significant extend done)
2. Identifying gaps and areas of interest
3. Evaluating areas
4. Identifying broad land use and economic considerations
5. Recommending studies

Technical support is required to:

• Enable a systematic approach
• Provide a consistent framework
• Provide a technical rationale
• Inform the land use planning process

Types of Targets

There are three main types of targets used in conservation planning. Target Models traditionally underpin systematic conservation planning. A crucial question is how to reconcile timber production, conservation of biodiversity, and other ecosystem services in human-dominated landscapes under increasing demands for wood and biomass.

Forest Management Targets

Harvesting Targets: Forest management in British Columbia has been focused on determining the annual allowable cut (the harvesting target).

Policies of sustainable forest management currently consider the value of multiple ecosystem services and nature’s benefits to people.

Planning involves meetings between government and forest owners, consideration of cost-effectiveness, accepting opportunistic work models, adjusting retention levels to stand and landscape composition, introduction of temporary reserves, creation of ‘receiver habitats’ for species escaping climate change, and protection of young forests.

Conservation Management Targets

Spatial Protection Targets; The United Nations Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biodiversity set a spatial target of protecting 30% of land and water in defined areas.

Species Protection Targets

Protection targets specify the desired number of a species to be protected.

One or a number of species may serve as surrogates for biodiversity as a whole (e.g. mapped vegetation types, or distributions of better-known species such as birds.

Targets & Modelling

Ecological science is concerned with 5 areas. They are modelled to explain the behaviours of:

1. The atmosphere: the relationship of the thin layer of gas above the Earth’s surface to weather and climate. The chemical composition of the atmosphere has an impact on the amount of heat reflected by or absorbed by the atmosphere.
2. The hydrosphere: (the oceans and water cycle, and their relationship to weather and climate) Clouds are closely related to storms. Oceans absorb heat.
3. The geosphere: geological components, rocks, soils, marine sediments, and the formation of fossil fuels.
4. The anthroposphere: Humans influence on the composition of the biosphere, (harvesting plants and animals affecting populations of pollinators and other insects), changing landscapes, the storage, flow and composition of water, all of which have an impact on climate.
5. The biosphere: the layer of living things in water, on land and in the air and their relationship to the atmosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere and anthroposphere. The biosphere has an impact on carbon, water and nutrient cycles. Plants absorb light and heat.

The focus here is on the impact of 4 of these components on the biosphere and the behaviour of the biosphere.

Models

A model is an informative representation of an object, person or system. Scale models replicate objects. Mathematical models are used in ecology. to try to predict the outcome of managing a natural conservancy.

Target models use three broad approaches

• Planning for the future state (condition) of habitat across a landscape
• Anticipating the level of persistence expected for one or more species.
• Integrating individual expectations for a number of species to estimate the persistence expected for biodiversity as a whole.

The type of modelling used to manage forest harvesting and biodiversity can be quite different.

Forest Management Models

For many years, natural forests were viewed as homogeneous, low-diversity ecosystems. Models assumed stand-replacing disturbances with short return intervals (< 100 years). Management strategies involve development of an understanding of forest dynamics and structure in a given landscape over time, protecting representative habitat types and their various developmental stage as reference areas and developing an understanding of disturbances and diverse post-disturbance successional pathways.

Boreal forest models in Europe assumed stand-replacing disturbances with short return intervals (< 100 years) and predict that young forests mainly dominate the forest age-class distribution, while old forests are estimated to be a minor component of landscapes.

With the development of scientific understanding, such simplified views changed. Current understanding of the intrinsic dynamics and structure of forests is that their natural dynamics, are shaped by diverse disturbances and that old trees and diverse disturbance legacies are natural and dynamic forest landscapes. The conditions of forests prior to intensive human usage are important baselines. The natural (or historical) range of variation (NRV) of ecosystems has become another important baseline for developing strategies.

Defining forest age in naturally dynamic forests is not straightforward. Accumulated evidence indicates that old forests—uneven-aged with trees at least 150 years old or more—are a prevalent or even dominant feature in naturally dynamic boreal forests.

Studies involve examining multiple scale levels varying from individual trees to areas of thousands of hectares.Ecological theory supports the multi-scaled approach, and retention efforts at every harvest occasion.

References

Forest Management

Biodiversity Conservation in Swedish Forests: Ways Forward for a 30-Year-Old Multi-Scaled Approach

Other Conservation Models

Management of sustainability combines ecological and economic models. Models can be complex but nevertheless oversimplify reality. Different models and modelling approaches exist. One study examined the benefits of over 60 models selected from 5 ecological and economic journals.

Examples of Models

• Models are used to manage the inherent risk of ecological fragility caused by geographical and landscape features of different habitat patches.
• Models are used to describe migration dynamics and local biodiversity relationships.
• Influence diagrams are used to model causal webs and structural equation.
• Modeling is used to quantify relations, as a general framework for building models of habitat from which a known degree of inference can be made to biodiversity variables.
• Whole-landscape modelling of biodiversity persistence allows for a range of factors affecting persistence.
• Thresholds: In the life and natural sciences, the concept of thresholds or points or zones of change from one state to another has been investigated since the late 18th century. Ecologists and economists have been using ‘ecological thresholds’ in natural and modified systems, primarily as a conceptual basis for the development of tools to conserve and sustainably manage natural resources.
  
  Disturbances which breach thresholds may lead to succession, changes in an ecological system. Critical thresholds of habitat loss and fragmentation occur, below which local populations cease to be viable. A bifurcation point may cause a system to ‘flip’ to a different state. Ecological thresholds can be controversial and thus attract vigorous debate.
• Systematic conservation assessment has evolved from earlier research into reserve selection focused around the principle of complementarity. The total level of biological diversity includes (or represents) collectively in a protected-area system, determined largely by the extent to which protected locations differ from (i.e. complement) one another in terms of the biological entities (species) in the area.
  
  Synthesis of Pattern and Process in Biodiversity Conservation Assessment: A Flexible Whole-Landscape Modelling Framework

Data Deficiencies

There may be ten million species of plants and animals on earth. Determination of the conservation status of many species is hampered by:

• insufficient or complete lack of data.
• the lack of evolutionary information (phylogenies) for most groups of organisms; and lack of data on the impact of evolutionary traits
• lack of data from longitudinal studies

Population declines can go undetected, despite ongoing threats.

By exploiting generalities across species that share evolutionary or ecological characteristics we can fill crucial gaps in the assessment of species’ status. The main strategy is to draw parallels between related species.

Economic Models ~ Natural Capital

Ecological services consist of flows of materials and energy which when combined with manufactured and human capital, serve to provide for human welfare. The continuous supply of services from available assets is dependent upon a healthy, functioning, environment. Meeting human needs in a sustainable way requires that total capital (the productive base required to support well-being) is maintained and increased over time.

Nature supplies provisioning services (food, fiber and fuel) and regulatory services such as climate, erosion control and crop pollination.

Economic Model for Managing Biodiversity

In order to make an increased level of conservation politically acceptable, a balance needs to be achieved between conservation measures and economic growth.

Science has provided an understanding of the environment, the dynamics of ecological processes, the irreplaceability of many ecological resources and contributed the understanding essential to making economic decisions.

Models provide direct links between the decline of biodiversity and economic activities such as hunting, habitat destruction and fragmentation, environmental pressures, climate change, and land use.

Knowledge about the value of earth’s ecological systems provides clarity that assists us to anticipate problems and develop strategies for wealth management.

Forms of Capital

Ecological assets and services have value. Wealth is the combination of natural, built, human, and social capital as increased by investment.

• Natural Capital: Natural capital is the stock of ecological systems that exists at a point in time, the structure and diversity of habitats and ecosystems. Natural capital consists of both renewable ecosystem resources (vegetation, animals and water) and non-renewable resources (for example oil and gas reserves and minerals). Natural Capital and wealth can increase through restoration and improved management of ecosystems.
• Human Capital: the accumulated knowledge, education, experience, and skills people rely on to produce goods and services for human consumption.
• Built Capital: infrastructure ie., man-made assets (homes, factories, farms, mines) used as habitation and physical means of production of goods and services
• Social Capital: the capacity of people to act together and collectively solve problems and maintain sustainability

The Maintenance of Natural Capital

Human activities have impact on the environment. Natural capital can be improved or degraded by the actions of people over time. Wealth is lost when ecosystems (natural capital) are degraded. As natural capital and ecosystem services become stressed and more scarce, their price increases, while the aggregate value decreases.

Planning and investing in natural capital benefits producers and populations both socially and economically. Well-maintained farms, forests and rivers can provide an indefinitely sustainable flow of food and timber. If the productive base of a system is maintained, future generations can make their own choices about how best to meet their needs.

The best current estimates suggest that built and human capital have increased in the last 50 years in most countries, but that natural capital has declined as a result of depletion of both natural capital and not renewable resources, by over utilization, climate change, pollution and loss of the functional benefits of biodiversity.

Conversion of Natural Capital

The conversion of natural capital to different forms has impact. Some of the effects of conversion of natural capital is set out in the following table.