The Biodiversity “CRISIS” – What Canadians Need to Know

Contributed by Robert Lyman © 2025. Robert Lyman’s bio can be read here.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Bill C-73, the Nature Accountability Bill, an Act respecting transparency and accountability in relation to certain commitments Canada has made under the Convention on Biological Diversity, was introduced into Parliament on November 22, 2021, but has not proceeded to Second Reading or Committee stage. Consequently, there has been almost no attention paid to a law that could rival the Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act in terms of its adverse effects on Canadians’ lives.

In this article, I will describe the background to the proposed legislation, including the efforts that are being made to present the loss of biological “diversity” as posing a catastrophic threat to Canada and the world and one that, like climate change, requires urgent and radical changes to economic systems.  In a subsequent article, I will summarize the main provisions of the proposed legislation and comment on their potential implications for Canada.

The  controversies over biodiversity often concern claims that biological diversity (i.e. in simplest terms, larger numbers of species) is healthy not just for nature by for human beings as well. The biodiversity issues are often portrayed as centred on the rate at which species are becoming extinct but actually involve a wide range of questions about habitat loss, species health and the alleged effects of human-induced climate change.

A study published in 2019 by the intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) warned that: “human actions threaten more species with global extinction now than ever before” and that “around I million species already face extinction, many within decades, unless action is taken to reduce the intensity of drivers of biodiversity loss.”

The conclusions of the IBPES report were widely reported in the media and accepted by governments. Canada, along with 195 other countries, adopted the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework at the 15^th Conference of the Parties (COP15) to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity. The conclusions in the IBPES report are at odds with the data compiled by the International Union for Conservation of Natural Resources (IUCN), which catalogues every known species that has become extinct since the year 1500. There are 529 species included on the IUCN’s “Red List”. The number of extinctions by decade has been in significant decline since 1920. It is thought that this extinction peak coincides with the introduction of non-native species, primarily on islands. In contrast to the claims of the IPBES that we can expect 25,000 to 30,000 extinctions globally per year, the average over the last 40 years is about 2 species annually.

In the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, the Parties agreed “to catalyze, enable and galvanize urgent and transformative action by Governments and subnational and local authorities, with the involvement of all of society, to halt and reverse biodiversity loss”. The Framework sets out four goals and establishes 23 targets. The targets entail  the massive expansion of land use planning and regulation of economic activities in almost all areas. The global biodiversity policies basically involve an unresolved debate about how many species are threatened, how severely they are threatened, about how much is due to overexploitation and agriculture (i.e. food production) and human-induced climate change and about the validity of current methods for assessing these things. There is a long leap between acknowledging that some species are threatened and accepting the claim that the nature of the threat is so severe that it requires an urgent and massive intrusion of state control over most land and marine areas. In short, no “crisis” has been demonstrated.