Canada’s federal government is failing to back a volunteer committee of scientists so they can properly assess animals at risk of extinction, delays that could have “serious impacts” on vulnerable wildlife across the country, an audit has found.
The federal audit is one of several released Thursday from Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development Jerry DeMarco. The commissioner, who serves under the Office of the Auditor General of Canada, found Environment and Climate Change Canada provided “limited support” to the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC).
Arne Mooers, a professor of biodiversity at Simon Fraser University and a member of COSEWIC, said a lack of funding combined with hard limits on the number of species scientists can assess in a year has handcuffed the group.
“COSEWIC is ground zero for conservation,” said Mooers. “When everything else hasn’t worked, we’re brought in to shine a light on the bits of biodiversity that have somehow fallen through the cracks.”
“It is becoming increasingly hard to keep up with the legal obligations.”
The independent committee is made up of more than a hundred volunteer scientists. Their assessments start with field biologists, who are contracted to study each species and write a detailed report. COSEWIC's experts then review that research and assign the species one of seven statuses, which top out at threatened, endangered, and extinct.
The assessment represents an essential first step under the Species at Risk Act that allows the federal government to protect, manage and recover species headed toward extinction. It's also a tool to understand where conservation efforts are working.
That's why Mooers said he was shocked when a few years a go, the federal government put a cap on the number of wildlife species they could assess.
“The fewer things that get assessed, the fewer things get protected,” said Mooers.
“We can't even report back up to the Canadian public that things are improving.”
Committee faces potential 120-year backlog
Mooers said Environment and Climate Change Canada limited the number of species the committee can assess in 2021, when they put an 80 species cap on the group. Since then, the annual cap has dropped, hitting 60 in 2023-2024.
The audit found the latest cap was done “without a formal analysis to demonstrate why the target was chosen.” And in the end, the department still did not provide the support to meet its own target, according to DeMarco.
Mooers said the group of scientists receive a list of species for assessment twice a year. This month, when COSEWIC received its latest biannual list, fewer than a dozen species were on it — by far the lowest total going back to 2016, according to numbers shared with Glacier Media.
“Every half year, the number we have been given is going down, down and down,” added Mooers.
Backlogged assessments, meanwhile, shot up more than 18 per cent to 389 over the past three years.
Under Canada's current yearly limit, it would take the scientific committee almost 30 years to assess all prioritized species, and over 120 years to assess wildlife flagged as potentially at risk, the audit says.
The audit blamed the rising backlog on a high workload for departmental staff and a lack of staff and budget to carry out the work. While some of the challenges were out of the department's hands — such as the COVID-19 pandemic — the audit found the department could have done more to help scientists keep up with the work.
"The backlog was building before these limits were put in place. It’s getting worse and it’s going to get worse," said Mooers.
"If we were better resourced, our capacity would go up."
93% of species at risk reassessments delayed beyond 10 years
The department limit means it’s impossible for the committee to keep up with reassessments, which are required under law to be carried out every 10 years for species at risk, said the commissioner. But between 2021 and 2023, 93 per cent of completed reassessments occurred beyond that 10-year window.
Under the status quo scenario, the audit projects backlogs on reassessments will continue to grow, hitting just shy of 600 by 2030. To eliminate uncompleted work by the end of the decade, the department would need to boost its support of COSEWIC so it could carry out 106 reassessments each year.
If that doesn't happen, the audit found delays could have “serious impacts on species.”
“Given the scale of the global biodiversity crisis, the current rate of assessments and reassessments negatively affects Canada’s ability to protect plants and animals from disappearing because of human activity,” DeMarco added.
Take native bee populations: of the 31 at-risk bee species in Canada, eight were not assessed by the committee. Scientists also lack knowledge and understanding of another roughly 500 bee species in the country — a potentially serious blind spot for a common pollinator that could play a critical role in human food systems.
While Mooers said COSEWIC can always play catch up, over the long term, species that don't assessed get pushed to the back of queue, threatening their chances of survival.
The audit comes at a time when climate change is combining with habitat loss to put increased pressure on wildlife species’s ability to survive, said Jens Wieting, senior policy and science advisor at the Sierra Club BC.
Wieting said the species assessments are vital to inform Canada’s plan to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030, a target it has committed to as part of a strategy to protect 30 per cent of its land base by 2030.
“We might see a lot more protected areas,” said Wieting, “but without the web of life as we know it.”
