OTTAWA — Environment Canada is developing a new strategy, in the midst of multimillion-dollar cuts, to expand its capacity to evaluate the economic value of natural ecosystems, parks and wildlife, according to internal documents obtained by Postmedia News.
The internal briefing notes, prepared for the department’s deputy minister, Bob Hamilton, estimated that more than 13 per cent of Canada’s Gross Domestic Product — an economic measurement of the market value of all goods and services in the country — depended on healthy ecosystems. But the notes warned that several “major threats” — including irresponsible development of resources, invasive species, climate change and pollution — were causing “significant biodiversity loss.”
“Conserving biodiversity is critical to the long-term health, prosperity and security of Canadians,” said the documents, released through access to information legislation.
“The wise management of genetic resources is increasingly seen as essential to innovation in key economic sectors such as agriculture, forestry and the pharmaceutical industry.”
The briefing notes, which also highlighted efforts to cut $60 million from the department’s budget including scientific research activities, said that biodiversity was contributing to “essential” ecosystem goods and services such as the production of food and fibre, carbon sequestration, clean air, clean water, disease and pest control as well as recreational, aesthetic and spiritual benefits.
“Healthy and resilient ecosystems are one of our best defences against a changing climate,” said the notes prepared in the summer of 2012 when Hamilton was appointed as Environment Canada’s top bureaucrat.
By comparison, the federal government has estimated that the oilsands industry, also considered to be the fastest growing source of heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions in Canada, represents about two per cent of the country’s economy.
The briefing notes said that the government had expanded protected parks and marine areas by 54 per cent since 2006. It also estimated that Parks Canada, the agency overseeing national parks, was contributing more than $3 billion to the Canadian economy, generating the equivalent of about 42,000 jobs.
Newly minted Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq could not be reached for comment.
But Martin Heintzelman, a New York-based environmental economist, said that traditional economic measurements such as GDP estimates traditionally do not generally account for all costs or benefits of natural ecosystems such as forests, as highlighted by Environment Canada.
He also cautioned that specific numbers should be viewed with skepticism.
“The entire economy depends on ecosystems in some sense or another,” said Heintzelman, the director of the Center for Canadian Studies at Clarkson University.
“It’s so tightly interlinked and it’s very difficult to separate.”
Heintzelman also said it would be difficult to compare the value of oilsands development with the value of forests.
“The oilsands extraction in a given year may be two per cent of Canada’s GDP, but to say that it’s more or less important than the role of forests in Canada is, I think, a tricky statement,” said Heintzelman, the Fredric C. Menz scholar of environmental economics at the university. “Forests have a lot of different benefits and you have to be very careful to capture them all.”
For example, he said forests could have various economic benefits for timber, paper products as well as benefits that are harder to measure in dollar figures such as recreational value or their role in protecting endangered species.
His comments echoed warnings from a former government advisory panel, the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, that was dismantled in the 2012 federal budget in order to save about $5 million in federal spending per year.
“Our entire well-being, economic and otherwise, relies on healthy functioning ecosystems,” said the advisory panel in a 2011 report about the economics of climate change entitled “Paying the Price.”
The briefing notes also said that the department introduced a strategy in 2011 to strengthen its economic analysis capacity in a division of about 50 employees because of “increasing pressures” to deliver high quality research in support of “ambitious” climate change and clean air policies.
Stewart Elgie, a professor of law and economics at the University of Ottawa, suggested that the government’s numbers underestimated that value of natural ecosystems in providing services such as clean air and water. He also said public policies should consider hidden subsidies given to fossil fuel burning energy industries such as coal, which he said haven’t been paying for all the environmental and healthcare costs associated with their pollution.
“What’s the air that you breathe worth to you?” asked Elgie, who was named in the briefing notes as part of a department strategy to engage with academics. “What’s it worth to you to have safe drinking water? What’s it worth to have healthy soil that can produce food? Those things are almost incomparable in value. Our whole life depends on them.”
