"We Don't Need No Stinking Scientists"

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Science gets shut out of rainforest negotiations

Reed Noss, Paul Paquet and Faisal Moola

Special to the Sun
October 15, 2005

Environmental groups recently ran a full-page ad in the New York Times urging Victoria to save a vast swatch of the province's central coast wilderness nicknamed the Great Bear Rainforest.

All the B.C. government has to do, the ad claims, is rubber-stamp an agreement reached by environmentalists, logging companies and first nations after years of negotiations.

You would think the province would be scrambling to legislate an agreement made between such historic adversaries as environmentalists and logging companies. After all, the ad asks, "Who could be against protecting a rainforest when even logging companies are for it?"

For ecologists like ourselves, however, the more pertinent question is,
"What, exactly, is being protected?"

In 2001, the province appointed a panel of scientists working under the auspices of the Coast Information Team. For two years, these researchers sat with rolled sleeves and sharpened pencils to determine what areas needed to be protected to save the biological integrity of this global treasure -- which represents a quarter of the world's remaining temperate rainforests.

By 2003 the CIT had developed a set of recommendations to the negotiators, including the recommended level of protection necessary to meet a range of conservation goals: 40 to 70 per cent.

Just as important, they carefully defined areas of "high conservation" value, the most ecologically rich, old-growth forests, with the most productive salmon streams, supporting the greatest number of species, including many threatened and endangered plants and animals, like grizzly bears.

Those of us who worked on the CIT project were dismayed to learn that the current agreement proposes a mere 28 per cent of the rainforest be partially protected -- which includes the nine per cent of the region already protected by previous governments. Thus the negotiations have really only added protection to an additional 19 per cent of the rainforest -- a far cry from what the scientific panel proposed.

In fact, the deal leaves the vast majority of Canada's last remaining temperate rainforest open to development. According to a recent report by the Raincoast Conservation Society, the proposed agreement would leave 83 per cent of critical grizzly habitat open to logging. The David Suzuki Foundation's 2005 Status Report on Canada's Rainforests found the deal does
not protect 80 per cent of kermode bear habitat, 75 per cent of remaining old-growth forests, or 65 per cent of the most productive salmon streams.

Clearly, this is not good enough. And it's indicative of a problem facing conservation planners. Effective conservation is not just about how much is partially protected, it's about what is protected and where. A recent National Geographic article, for example, calls for an urgent review of global conservation strategies, claiming that protected areas will not prevent wide-scale extinctions in coming decades if they aren't created in the right places.

The central coast rainforest suffers from this exact problem. The proposed protected area may seem enormous, but it's not one big protected area -- it's a collection of politically negotiated areas that are poorly connected and too small to provide enough habitat for wide-ranging carnivores like wolves and grizzlies.

Indeed, a high percentage of patially protected areas in the region are "rock and ice," habitats of little value to logging companies. Conversely, the most productive, species-rich, valley-bottom, old-growth forests, where the biggest and most valuable trees are found, have been left unprotected and thus remain vulnerable to logging, mining or other development.

The current deal also ignores a CIT recommendation to shift from clearcutting to ecologically responsible forestry called "ecosystem-based management." EBM is still there, but in name only.

Environmental and first nations groups have worked hard to get the best deal they could for the region and they deserve credit for hanging in there year after year. But the deal simply isn't good enough to provide even the slimmest chance of maintaining the biological integrity of one of the most ecologically valuable areas on the planet.

Premier Gordon Campbell should sign the agreement as promised, but he should do so with the full knowledge that it is just the beginning of conservation planning in this rainforest, not the end.

Reed Noss is professor of conservation biology at the University of Central Florida; Paul Paquet is professor of environmental design at the University of Calgary; Faisal Moola is a PhD candidate in biology at Dalhousie University.

© The Vancouver Sun 2005