Study shows Canada’s parks at risk of being ‘loved to death’

Canada’s parks are in danger of being “loved to death” by thousands of people trekking through the backcountry, says a co-author of a study that details the degradation of one-third of the world’s protected areas.

Oscar Venter, associate professor of forestry in the ecosystems science and management department at the University of Northern British Columbia, said Banff and Jasper are examples of iconic parks in Canada where a high number of visitors pose a challenge to maintaining healthy populations of some endangered species.

Economic pursuits, such as forestry, mining and oil and gas, are also part of the problem, Venter said. “In Canada, we value our natural environment, but we also put a lot of value on natural resource extraction,” he said.

Venter is part of an international team of researchers whose work was published recently in the journal Science. It looked at 50,000 protected areas worldwide and found one-third of the area is under intense pressure from activities like road building, logging and urbanization.

Venter said that while 2.5 per cent of Canada’s protected area has been modified by humans, there are challenges to managing the impact of human disturbance to endangered species, such as caribou in parks in the Rocky Mountains and elsewhere.

As for meeting its commitment by 2020, Canada has so far reached only 10.5 per cent of its goal while Namibia and Costa Rica are further ahead, he said.

“There’s a commitment from the federal government to protect 700,000 square kilometres of land. That’s an area the size of Alberta,” Venter said of Ottawa’s strategy, which was boosted with a $1.3-billion commitment in the last budget. “One of the first places we have to look is our recreational parks and how do we balance the recreational opportunities we provide in those areas with the conservation values we have.”