At risk, protection lacking

A UBC Okanagan professor says species at risk in Canada are not being fully protected.

A new study found that in many cases, Canada isn’t following federal legislation requiring the protection of threatened or endangered species and could be placing them further at risk of extinction.

“The legislation is crystal clear,” says co-author Karen Hodges, associate professor of biology at UBCO. “Once a species is listed as endangered or threatened, we have specific timelines to develop a recovery strategy that identifies the critical habitat for that species.”

But Hodges says that habitat protection work just isn’t happening, or it happens years later than the required timelines.

Hodges and co-author Sarah Bird found that of the 391 species under the protection of the Canadian Species at Risk Act, only 11.8 per cent had critical habitats fully identified, while more than 60 per cent had no critical habitat designation at all.

“Habitat loss is a primary cause of species loss,” said Hodges. “Without using these legal tools to the fullest extent possible, we run the very real risk of losing some of these species forever.”