How Indigenous communities in Canada are already implementing the Global Biodiversity Framework

“Industrialization has had a major devastating effect on every community that I’ve worked with — and I’ve worked with many communities both on the East Coast and West Coast of Canada, and a few in the interior. They know that they have to start building up their own science programs and their own monitoring programs.

If Indigenous communities and Indigenous nations are leading this work, that value system that is inherent and woven through the Indigenous knowledge approach is something that’s going to come out. I always say that if Indigenous communities thrive, we all benefit.” – Ken Paul, member of Wolastoqey First Nation at Neqotkuk and advisor to WWF-Canada’s IPCA Support Fund

“We come to these negotiations, and there’s a lot of talk of could and should. Well, today, we’re going to shine a light on can and is,” said WWF-Canada president and CEO, Megan Leslie, while introducing the speakers at our COP16 panel event about Indigenous-led conservation in Cali, Colombia.

“The restoration goals of the GBF are possible. We know that because of the work our partners are already doing on the ground.”

This breakfast panel was part of the UN’s two-week biodiversity summit aimed at ironing out the details of the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) that the world community had signed two years earlier at COP15 in Montreal, pledging to protect and restore a third of the planet by 2030.

Those signatures turned out to be the easy part. Successfully and effectively implementing the GBF requires a lot of one the ground conservation and stewardship efforts.

In Canada, much of this work is being led by First Nations, Inuit and Métis communities that are combining Traditional Ecological Knowledge with Western science and technology.

To showcase this progress, WWF-Canada’s panel highlighted three examples of how Indigenous communities are helping to implement the GBF by leading conservation efforts in their traditional territories. We were honoured to have our three panelists join us at COP16 to talk about their work.

“We don’t separate ourselves from our lands and our waters,” explained Ken Paul, a member of Wolastoqey First Nation in New Brunswick and a member of the advisory board for WWF-Canada’s Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area Support Fund. “The river system, the Wolastoq — colonially, it’s the St. John River — it’s kind of like our blood vessels, or our veins and our arteries.”

He explained how the community is connected to the rivers and the land, and how restoration means not only healing nature but also preserving the community’s culture, language and ancestral memories, as well as ensuring that they have fish for the future.

Angela Kane, CEO of Secwepemcúl’ecw Restoration and Stewardship Society (SRSS), spoke about the devastation of wildfire and the loss of culture that results from it, but also the hope she has for ongoing research into the regeneration of these lands.

“I’ve really learned a lot about how important the land is to our communities and how important their culture is,” she said, noting that from a non-Indigenous perspective, we know that forests and trees and biodiversity are important but that for First Nations, it’s more than that.

“It’s their way of life.”

Communities use the forest in their day to day — hunting, gathering, fishing — so, the research happening now on how to best regenerate those areas looks at everything from nutrients in the soil to the seeds needed for reforesting.

Finally, Kimberly Armour, a guest to Katzie First Nation and their director of territorial guardianship and referrals, spoke about how Pitt Lake is considered the heart of Katzie territory, and how in the upper watershed, industrial logging has caused immense damage to the river and its fish. But planning for the nation means that logging must now meet Katzie standards, and as a result it has been suspended for the last two years.

“We recently had a rewatering ceremony for a channel that hadn’t seen water for more than 100 years because a logging road had blocked it,” she said, adding that when they went to see new channels that had been dug a few years earlier as part if this restoration work, they were pleased to find them “swimming with sockeye.”

At WWF-Canada, we know that the GBF’s overarching goal to halt and reverse biodiversity loss won’t be achievable without the participation and contributions of Indigenous communities in Canada and around the world, which is why we were proud to provide a platform for these stories to be shared on an international stage.