Conservationists ask: Will Ontarians spend $7 a year to save 88 species?

Written By Peter Allan

The Blanding’s turtle is among the species at risk in southern Ontario. Photo by Dantesattic / iStock

By Jennifer Cole

Emily Giles spends a lot of time thinking about the Blanding’s turtle, a freshwater reptile that spends its days in the wetlands of the Lake Simcoe-Rideau ecoregion of southern Ontario. As senior manager for science, knowledge and innovation for the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Canada, it’s not just the turtles on her mind: it’s how the region is under increasing pressure from a growing population.

“I don’t think development has to come at the cost of conservation, nor should it,” Giles says.

Yet it has. Stretching from Lake Huron in the west to the Ottawa River in the east, the ecoregion is one of Canada’s most densely populated and includes cities such as Barrie, Peterborough, Ottawa and Kingston. Here, intense industrial and urban development has polluted waterways, increased greenhouse gas emissions and threatened habitat for at-risk species.

A report released last fall by WWF Canada and the University of British Columbia (UBC) warned that without immediate and targeted conservation action, 130 of the 133 species currently at risk in the ecoregion could be locally extinct by 2050.

Giles, along with conservationists from UBC’s Martin Conservation Decisions Lab, used a decision-making tool known as Priority Threat Management (PTM) to map out a solution that could prevent almost all the extinctions.

Based on Ontario’s current population of about 16 million people, if every Ontario resident contributed $7 annually, at least 75 per cent of the species currently under threat in the ecoregion could recover.

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