Guilbeault, Suzuki see Indigenous leadership role in biodiversity protection at COP15

Two longtime environmentalists attending the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP15) of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity in Montreal have different frustrations. Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault (Laurier–Sainte-Marie, Que.) is concerned that “some progress is being made, but not enough to my liking.” “I have been talking to some of my peer ministers and have asked them if they could instruct their delegations to show more flexibility and if we could try and accelerate the pace of negotiations,” he told The Hill Times. “There’s no reason some of the technical issues can’t get agreed upon by negotiators this week.” Guilbeault said he hopes that the 130 environment ministers from around the world who are gathered in Montreal will have “a text as clean as possible” to review. He said he believes there is “a lot of willingness” for a “good deal” to emerge from COP15, signalled in part by the participation pickup in the High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People, co-chaired by France and Costa Rica (with the United Kingdom as co-chair of the ocean tranche), which Canada joined in 2020 and includes more than 120 countries, according to the minister. Guilbeault said he is heartened by being joined by other environmentalists-turned-cabinet ministers in the COP collaboration, including Zac Goldsmith, a life peer in the United Kingdom's House of Lords and the former editor-in-chief of the British environmental journal, The Ecologist, who serves as the U.K.’s minister of state for overseas territories, Commonwealth, energy, climate and environment; Chilean Environment Minister Maisa Rojas, who holds a PhD in atmospheric physics from Oxford University; and African conservationist Lee White, Gabon's minister of water, forests, the sea, and environment. “These are real environmental activists who, like me, decided to go into politics to continue their activism,” said Guilbeault, who prior to entering federal politics in 2019 served as senior director for Équiterre, Quebec’s largest environmental organization that he co-founded in 1993. “So I’m really not alone in this situation.” Much of the focus at the conference has been on the global 30-by-30 goal, shared by Canada, to protect 30 per cent of land and oceans by 2030. “It’s what scientists are telling us is the minimum necessary to help nature recovery, but it’s not enough,” said the environment minister. “We need to work on restoration and reversing biodiversity loss, and resource mobilization for Indigenous people and developing countries.” “Donor countries like Canada and many others need to show that we’re serious about mobilizing resources—not just public money—but also the private sector, philanthropy, multilateral institutions.” However, “there are probably 40 different issues under negotiations with 196 countries involved, so complexity is obviously part of this process,” added Guilbeault, a past director of Greenpeace’s Quebec chapter. “But I continue to be very optimistic that we will be able to have a good outcome.” Based on past international meetings, David Suzuki isn’t so sure. Environmentalist David Suzuki credits Steven Guilbeault as ‘the best possible person to be the environment minister,’ but says ‘he’s being held back by politics.’ Photograph courtesy of Flickr/UN Biodiversity He said he believes that climate change and biodiversity are “absolutely interlinked” and that biodiversity is the “only solution” to addressing the climate crisis—one that Canada needs to confront. “We have not met a single promise we’ve agreed to in reducing emissions over eight international agreements we’ve signed onto. That’s our track record,” said the legendary founding and outgoing host of CBC’s The Nature of Things, who in 1990 with his wife, Tara Cullis, co-founded the David Suzuki Foundation committed to conserving and protecting the environment while creating a “sustainable” Canada. One exception on the international front, he pointed out, was Canada’s major role in negotiating the Montreal Protocol, signed in 1987 to protect the ozone layer. Suzuki credited Guilbeault as “the best possible person to be the environment minister—who certainly knows the issues very well—but he’s being held back by politics.” Funding is a major issue, and Suzuki pointed to the Dec. 7 federal announcement of up to $800-million for Indigenous-led conservation projects as “nickels and dimes” and “chump change,” compared to the federal government’s $4.5-billion purchase of the Trans Mountain Pipeline system, whose extension is now estimated at $21.4-billion “and will probably be up around $40-billion by the time it’s through.” “Biodiversity and climate change have to absolutely be at the top of the agenda as an emergency in the same way as COVID, when billions of dollars started pouring out instantly,” he said. Data from the Canada Institute for Health Information found that last year, the federal government spent a record $308-billion on health care, due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, Guilbeault highlighted that since 2018, the federal government has been investing $5-billion in nature conservation—not including last week’s $800-million commitment—in partnership with Indigenous communities, along with the provinces and territories. “Do I think that what we’ve done so far is enough? No,” said the environment minister. “We will need to continue doing more.” More also means recasting the approach to addressing biodiversity loss, according to Suzuki, which in his view is “a moment for Indigenous people” around the world to play the lead role. He is proposing a “global guardians program,” based on Australia’s rangers’ initiative that, according to the program, supports Indigenous people to combine traditional elder knowledge with conservation training for young people to protect and manage their land, sea and culture. In Canada, the Haida Nation has a Guardian program to protect marine ecosystems. “If you look at the last vestiges of nature and biodiversity, over 80 per cent of it is on Indigenous lands,” said Suzuki. “It’s about empowering and financing Indigenous people around the world to be the guardians of the last bits of nature that we’ve got left.” “It’s not only their traditional territory. It’s the way they see the land. They have a responsibility,” he explained. “Indigenous people always talk about reciprocity. We take from nature but we have a responsibility then to care of nature.” Guilbeault supports Suzuki’s call for Indigenous leadership, “both domestically and internationally.” Cassidy Caron, president of the Métis National Council, speaks at COP15 in Montreal on Dec. 11. On Dec. 7, the federal government announced up to $800-million for Indigenous-led conservation projects. Photograph courtesy of Flickr/UN Biodiversity “You can’t come to me with a proposal for a new conservation area, a new national park, if Indigenous people are not there at the table from the get-go,” he said. “We’re trying to ensure that the agreement in Montreal reflects the essential role Indigenous people are playing and will be playing in achieving an ambitious conservation goal.” The environment minister conceded that Canada does not have many international allies in advancing a more prominent role for Indigenous Peoples in the biodiversity-protection conversation, save Australia, New Zealand, Colombia, and Brazil, under Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s return to that country’s presidency. “I am being told by many of my peers that the model we are developing in Canada is an example,” said Guilbeault. “This investment of $800-million is, to our knowledge, the largest investment in Indigenous-led conservation in the world.” Environmental issues also need to top the federal government’s agenda, in Suzuki’s view, and that involves reconstituting the cabinet structure. He said that at the moment, “Guilbeault is a minor minister,” compared to Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland (University–Rosedale, Ont.) who is “the big dog”—and who, as Suzuki underscored, supported the Bay du Nord deep-water oil project, off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador, while Guilbeault did not. (In April, the federal government approved an environmental assessment of the development project.) Guilbeault told The Hill Times that he had concerns. “It was a tremendously difficult decision for me to make, both professionally and personally—not because I was under pressure from other cabinet colleagues but because it was a difficult situation,” he offered. The environment minister said that the federal Impact Assessment Agency, which is accountable to him, studied the project for four years, met “hundreds of experts,” held 40 meetings with Indigenous communities, “and made a recommendation that, with conditions including carbon neutrality, that the project would not have significant impact.” “So they recommended to me that I go ahead with the project,” explained Guilbeault, who also stressed that when the federal government created the agency through Bill C-69—that enacted the Impact Assessment Act, and which was passed by Parliament in 2019—“we said we would rebuild impact assessment and give the agency independence, and abide by their recommendations and that we would depoliticize impact assessment.” “So, I would have taken a political decision pushing aside four years of work they’d done on this,” he said. Yet Suzuki still maintains that “politics and economics are determining everything.” “Look at the COP27 meeting , for Christ’s sake. The biggest official delegation there was the fossil-fuel industry,” he said. Suzuki said he would like to see a top cabinet minister oversee a new department of the biosphere. “Under him or her would be ministers of terrestrial, marine, atmosphere, and energy,” he said. The other departments, such as “economics,” would be “way underneath” on the organization chart. “We live within the biosphere: the zone of air, water, and land where all life exists,” said Suzuki. “Carl Sagan told us if we reduced Earth to the size of a basketball, the biosphere would be thinner than a layer of Saran wrap. That’s it. That’s our home. That’s where every living thing exists.” In his view, politicians’ responsibilities are to “Mother Earth” and “not to voters.” “Look at Catherine McKenna,” Suzuki said about the former —and first—federal minister of environment and climate change who established the advisory firm, Climate and Nature Solutions, after leaving politics last year. “I said she should quit her job because she was not telling us the truth,” he said. “Now that she did, who’s one of the big champions of the environment? She’s out there saying what she should have been saying as minister of the environment but she couldn‘t say it because of politics.” Although Suzuki’s reimagining of cabinet would, in his current role, put Guilbeault at the top of the heap, he doesn’t expect such tinkering to occur any time soon. “I have tremendous respect and admiration for David. I’ve known him for more than 25 years,” said Guilbeault. “We’re not doing what he’s proposing. But we are working on changing some of the way we make decisions at the cabinet level when it comes to the environment or climate change.” Guilbeault said there are two cabinet committees on economy, inclusion and climate “by which any projects will need to go through, and environment is part of those committees.” “More and more now, if you want to bring a memorandum to cabinet as a minister, as much as you need to show that you’ve done your consultation, your work with Indigenous people, that you’ve done your GBA , we will be making sure that ministers also look at the impact on the environment of what they’re proposing—and if there are impacts, how they will they be mitigated.” Furthermore, as Guilbeault underscored, the need to consider climate change is featured in the mandate letters of other ministers not directly associated with the file, such as Freeland; Innovation, Science, and Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne (Saint-Maurice–Champlain, Que.); Transport Minister Omar Alghabra (Mississauga Centre, Ont.); and Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson (North Vancouver, B.C.). “Maybe one day we will find ways of governance that are more holistic. The way we’re working, people tend to have their own little sandbox,” said the environment minister. “That doesn’t mean, if someone comes with an issue on forestry, I just put my hands up and say, ‘Oh well, it’s not me, it’s someone else.’ It doesn’t mean I can’t talk to a minister about an issue. It happens,” he explained. “I will go to the finance minister, I will go the natural resources minister if someone brings something to me and it’s not under my purview. We are cabinet colleagues. We can and should work together.” The Hill Times

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Guilbeault, Suzuki see Indigenous leadership role in biodiversity protection at COP15

Environmentalist David Suzuki is proposing a ‘global guardians program’ supporting Indigenous people to combine traditional elder knowledge with youth conservation training.

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