How Nature Canada is building a web of partners at all scales to help Canada achieve its biodiversity conservation goals

This case study is part of the 2024 Canadian City Parks Report, showcasing Inspiring projects, people, and policies from across Canada that offer tangible solutions to the most pressing challenges facing city parks.

Summary

• Reaching Canada’s goal to protect 30% of land, water, and marine areas by 2030 will take the work of many partners across the country.
• Nature Canada acts as a hub connecting many of these partners to tell a unified story about impact.
• While governments and non-profits are important partners, individual residents and community groups play an important role as those closest to the ground and able to hold politicians to account.

By 2030, 30% of Canada’s land, water, and marine areas will be protected. That is, of course, if the country meets this goal, which was set by the international community at COP15, the United Nations Biodiversity Conference.

Reaching such an ambitious goal requires strong collaboration. All levels of government, First Nations, Inuit, and Métis communities, local non-profits, private landowners, and individual residents must all work together. But how do you build such a broad, but also deep coalition?

The work of Nature Canada–a national organization dedicated to protecting Canadian wildlife and wilderness–is all about bringing those various actors together in a concerted effort to work both nationally and hyper-locally through the Municipal Protected Areas Program to ensure Canada meets its 30×30 goal.

While protected natural areas may conjure images of vast uninterrupted pristine landscapes far away from where many of us live, Nature Canada Organizing Manager Dylan Rawlyk argued that protecting land within urban areas is vital.

One practical reason is that the most biodiverse landscapes within the country are situated along the southern edge of Canada where the majority of the population lives within a constellation of urban areas. Another less obvious reason has to do with storytelling. Bringing protected natural areas close to where people live their everyday lives helps make the importance of biodiversity more tangible. “[People] know it, they love it, and they’re connected to it,” Rawlyk said. 

While cities often have natural area management and restoration plans in place, they each undertake conservation in slightly different ways, so part of the work of achieving the 30×30 target is working with cities to “unify all of our collective impacts,” Rawlyk said. While the majority of cities listed it as a priority, Park People’s 2024 survey found that one third of cities said addressing federal biodiversity and land protection goals was a high priority in 2024.

Nature Canada has forged both cross-country and hyper-local partnerships, creating, as Rawlyk put it, a web of organizations. At Nature Canada “we play the role of convening all those groups together and ensuring that we can see how the actions each one is doing is contributing to the greater whole.”