Good afternoon.

As Lisa said, my name is Rachel Plotkin. I'm the boreal project manager at the David Suzuki Foundation, where I work to protect species at risk and maintain and restore healthy forest ecosystems.

I'm going to follow Lisa's lead with three points of my own, which are set in the context of forest biodiversity.

The first is that the current suite of policy and regulatory tools intended to protect biodiversity is not working. This is primarily due to the fact that Canada's approach to protecting nature has often operated with a mitigation framework, which makes sense as an approach in the fight against climate change, but it has driven the loss of biodiversity. Under it, protected areas are safe—well, to some extent—from the impacts of resource extraction and development, but outside of protected areas, which is over 70% of the land and water in Canada, harm to nature is continually approved, even if it is mitigated or made less bad. This leads to ongoing habitat loss and fragmentation and is what we call death by a thousand cuts.

An example of how this plays out is boreal woodland caribou, which are threatened with extinction in almost every province and territory in Canada due primarily to habitat fragmentation caused by forestry and oil and gas extraction activities.

The second point is that change can only come about with a strong road map outlining how to achieve it. In order to maintain and restore nature, we must develop more effective tools that create limits to the footprint of resource extraction and development activities and clearly demarcate areas of ecological importance. Canada's new nature strategy, which outlines steps to identify degraded areas, support indigenous leadership and assess priority areas for restoration, is a start, but it needs legislative backing.

My third point is that an effective nature accountability law will bring greater certainty and transparency, which can reward progressive forestry practices in the global marketplace. Clear objectives and mechanisms for reporting on them can help create confidence in both investors and consumers, which is critically important in industries such as forestry.

The global stocktake decision, signed by 193 countries last year at COP28 in Dubai, includes a 2030 deadline for halting and reversing deforestation and land degradation. Additionally, the EU has adopted a deforestation regulation prohibiting trade tied to deforestation and forest degradation. This means preventing forest degradation is critical to the success of the Canadian forestry industry in the global forum.

In Canada, we're still largely stuck in the mitigation framework, limiting damage on a site-by-site basis while overall forest degradation remains the trend. The maintenance and restoration of biodiversity are this generation's collective responsibility. If we are to achieve it, we need a road map to get there with targets, timelines, policies and clearly identified leaders because despite good intentions, our stumbling to date has been grossly insufficient to halt and reverse the loss of nature.

Thank you.

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