From November 25 to 28, members of the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) met in Ottawa to assess the conservation status of 12 species. Five of the species were being assessed for the first time, while the other seven were being reassessed.
The committee determined that all five of the newly assessed species should be considered at risk and added to Canada’s Species at Risk Act. Four of these species were deemed endangered, meaning they’re at imminent risk of being lost to Canada. This included the short-billed dowitcher, short-fruited rush, circular-leaved peat moss, and the valley grasshopper. The addition of these species brings Canada’s total number of at-risk species to 860.
Of the seven species being reassessed, notably, the Nova Scotian population of northern bottlenose whales is still considered endangered. And the black-tailed prairie dog, Butler’s gartersnake, and Lewis’s woodpecker are still considered threatened, meaning they’re at risk of becoming endangered if no conservation efforts are taken.
“The largest issue facing biodiversity now is habitat loss,” says David Lee, the COSEWIC chair. “Because of the increasing pressure for more human land uses, the list of species to assess is increasing, and the threats affecting species are increasing.”
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The federal, provincial, and territorial wildlife directors created COSEWIC in 1977 as an official, scientifically-sound committee that would identify wildlife species at risk of extinction. Today, COSEWIC is made up of 34 voting members, primarily academics and specialists in their fields. The committee’s role is to advise the Minister of Environment and Climate Change Canada on at-risk species. These species are then added to the Species at Risk Act and Environment and Climate Change Canada is required to create a management plan or recovery strategy depending on the species’ status.
At-risk species are classified as either special concern, threatened, endangered, or extirpated (meaning the species no longer exists in Canada, but exists elsewhere in the wild).
COSEWIC meets twice a year. It relies on nine subcommittees to determine which species to assess at each meeting. These subcommittees focus on amphibians and reptiles; arthropods; birds; marine mammals; molluscs; mosses; terrestrial mammals; vascular plants; and Aboriginal traditional knowledge. The subcommittees put forward candidate species to COSEWIC that either require assessment or reassessment.
COSEWIC then ranks these species according to priority. “Under the Species at Risk Act, we’re supposed to focus on those species that are at imminent risk of either extirpation or extinction. So, we would obviously place a higher priority on threatened or endangered species,” says Lee.
Once it’s ranked the species, COSEWIC puts out a call for bids from outside contractors who will assemble all available information on a species and write up a report. Lee says this process generally takes two years, and the report may be reviewed by more than 100 people for authenticity. COSEWIC uses these reports to assess a species’ conservation status.
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To determine the species’ status, COSEWIC looks at several factors, including the reduction in mature individuals over the last 10 years, how large an area the species occupies, and the total number of mature individuals.
But COSEWIC is currently grappling with a serious backlog of species in need of assessment. An Auditor General’s report from this year stated that there were 389 species in need of reassessment. This is expected to grow to 574 by 2030. Species are expected to be reassessed every 10 years, but the report said that this backlog would take the committee 30 years to get through, and over a century to assess all of the species potentially at risk.
The Auditor General placed blame for the backlog on Environment and Climate Change Canada, saying that the ministry has reduced its support for the committee. In 2021 – 2022, the ministry provided resources to perform 80 species assessments. That fell to 75 in 2022 – 2023, and 60 in 2023 – 2024. The report said the ministry did not provide a formal analysis to justify the reduction in support.
Lee blames the reduced support on the Covid-19 pandemic, saying it changed several government processes, including scientists’ ability to travel when studying species, impacting the reports used by COSEWIC.
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However, rather than additional support, Lee is urging the government to focus on the issue of habitat loss. Shrinking habitats makes it extremely rare for species to transition out of the at-risk category. But it’s not impossible. During COSEWIC’s spring meeting, it assessed the narwhal as not at risk thanks to its northern habitat, the first one Lee’s seen in a while. “In those environments where there is habitat and limited impacts on the species, I think it’s quite possible to see those sorts of outcomes,” he says.
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