Canada is pursuing two major federal initiatives that are moving in opposite directions.
Canada’s federal government pledged $3.8 billion on April 29 to protect 30% of its lands and waters by 2030 through its new nature strategy, A Force of Nature. The strategy promises a major push to map and safeguard the country’s most biodiverse and carbon-rich areas before development is allowed to proceed.
Less than two weeks later, it released a second proposal—Getting Major Projects Built in Canada—that would fast-track approvals for the very pipelines, LNG facilities and offshore energy projects that the proposed mapping is meant to guide. The process would be on a timeline too short for the mapping to be finished, let alone used.
Many scientists, legal experts and Indigenous leaders have already raised serious concerns about the potential impacts of these reforms to species at risk, habitat destruction and Indigenous sovereignty.
What’s missing from the conversation is the climate cost of fast-tracking decisions that could disturb the very ecosystems that are actively protecting us from the worst of climate change.
Nature as a Climate Buffer
Nature acts as a buffer to climate change by drawing carbon dioxide into long-term sinks, removing that carbon from the atmosphere on a timeline that slows the pace of climate change.
Globally, vegetation and soils are estimated to store roughly 2,000 to 3,000 billion tons of carbon, a figure that does not consider our planet’s largest carbon sinks in the ocean.
As global-change scientists and ocean-policy experts with the University of Victoria’s Blue Carbon Canada research program, we study how much carbon is stored in the biosphere and what happens when this carbon is disturbed. Our focus is specifically on blue carbon, the organic carbon captured by marine vegetation that ends up in waterlogged sediments at the bottom of the ocean, where it can remain for centuries to millennia.
Our team’s research has shown that Canadian seabed sediments alone hold more than 10 billion tonnes of carbon and that kelp forests draw between 1.1 and 6.2 million tonnes into their canopies each year. A large portion of this kelp carbon reaches the deep ocean and other long-term sinks. Similar assessments of tidal marshes and seagrass meadows are ongoing.
If we protect these ecosystems, they will continue to draw carbon from the atmosphere.
Disturb them without knowing what’s there, and we risk turning a natural carbon sink into a source of emissions at exactly the moment we most need such sinks.
The Climate Cost of Fast-Tracking
This risk is not hypothetical. Major projects such as Ksi Lisims LNG, a proposed floating natural gas facility on the north coast of British Columbia, would jeopardize blue carbon through a cascade of seabed disturbances, from trenching and installing subsea pipelines and cables to the chronic abrasion of moorings and the churn of increased vessel traffic.
Other proposed developments, such as offshore wind development in Nova Scotia, carry many of the same risks.
The government has been clear about what these projects stand to deliver. Ksi Lisims alone has a projected economic benefit of $15 billion over 30 years. What the government hasn’t accounted for is the potential climate cost of disturbing natural carbon stores that may be in the path of development.
By the federal government’s own estimate, our coastal and marine environments provided $5.5 billion in carbon sequestration services in 2023 alone, a figure absent from the conversation entirely. These ecosystems also support biodiversity and coastal livelihoods, generating an estimated $1.2 billion annually from wild-caught fisheries and $458 million a year through nature-based tourism.
At first glance, there appears to be an economic trade-off between speed and scientific rigour. But far worse long-term trade-offs could arise for ecosystems and communities from neglecting these important natural assets in decisions about major projects.
A Mismatch in Federal Policy
The central issue is not whether Canada should pursue infrastructure projects or protect nature. Some of the proposed projects, including offshore wind and hydropower, have the potential to significantly reduce Canada’s emissions, creating win-wins for nature and the economy.
But how we plan for this development matters just as much as why. And right now, the sequence is backward.
The new nature strategy gets a lot right. It proposes to improve the scientific basis for planning by coastal mapping hot spots of biodiversity and carbon. This would enable integrated conservation and project planning.
Based on the scope and pace of comparable coastal and marine mapping and synthesis efforts currently underway in Canada, this kind of baseline data could realistically be compiled within three years.
In principle, this would allow the federal government to identify areas where development can proceed safely, where the precautionary principle would dictate caution in data-poor areas and where the risk of releasing long-stored carbon is too great to ignore.
However, this timeline is not currently factored into the Major Projects proposal, which could compress scientific due diligence to a point of near irrelevance. The proposed one-year window for federal review is not long enough to complete the mapping and analysis planned under A Force of Nature, let alone integrate the findings into environmental review.
Accelerated review timelines, concurrent permitting and environmental-assessment processes plus the potential for pre-approval of broad development zones could result in decisions being locked-in before critical ecological and carbon data are available.
This problem is further compounded by a critical funding gap. Fisheries and Oceans Canada, the agency best positioned to deliver ocean-mapping initiatives under A Force for Nature, has not received any dedicated funding under the strategy to do so.
While the proposal would allow for more flexibility in habitat offsetting, which restores lost habitat function through restoration elsewhere, it is not always possible to recover blue carbon once lost.
The result is a policy mismatch where one federal initiative undermines the other.
How Ottawa Can Align the Two Agendas
Canada has a narrow window to align these two initiatives before legislation is tabled this fall.
Four steps could help resolve this mismatch.
First, Fisheries and Oceans Canada needs dedicated funding under A Force of Nature specifically for coastal carbon and biodiversity mapping. Without it, the work could compete with core mandates or be allocated to other departments that do not have a mandate for marine areas.
Second, the Impact Assessment Agency’s new federal review co-ordinator role, created under the Major Projects reforms, should be mandated to flag for extended review those projects that overlap with unmapped coastal and marine areas. This would be an improvement over defaulting to the standard one-year timeline.
Third, cabinet should exclude coastal and marine areas that lack baseline carbon data from consideration for Federal Economic Zone pre-approval until critical baseline data exists.
Fourth, once baseline assessments are available, federal reviewers should be required to formally incorporate them into project decisions and the mitigation hierarchy. In areas where data remains incomplete, a precautionary approach should apply by default.
We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to get this right. But we can do that only if science and knowledge-based evidence is used to inform the decisions being made right now. Development does not have to come at the expense of nature.
Completing the promised coastal mapping before development decisions are locked-in and ensuring that data is integrated into the review process benefits everyone. It allows us to use the research and spatial-planning tools we already have to make informed decisions about where development can proceed.
We can still meet Canada’s commitments to fight climate change and protect nature. We have the tools. We just need to use them.
Jennifer McHenry is a global-change scientist and geographer with expertise in blue-carbon ecosystems. She studies their role in national climate mitigation and their co-benefits for biodiversity, coastal communities, and livelihoods. Currently, she is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Victoria.
Bryce O’Brien is a PhD student at the University of Victoria, where he evaluates opportunities to align climate and biodiversity benefits in conservation planning in Atlantic Canada.
Susanna Fuller, PhD, has worked in ocean science policy for two decades, with a focus on Canada and international waters. She has worked for non-government organizations and is currently a VP at Oceans North, based in Halifax.
This post was originally published by Policy Options under a Creative Commons licence.
