The federal government has announced three new potential areas of protection off the coast of Nova Scotia in order to help meet its international conservation targets.
Fisheries and Oceans Canada announced Thursday it has identified the 2,000-square-kilometre Eastern Shore Islands and the 7,100-square-kilometre Fundian Channel-Browns Bank as areas of interest for future designation as marine protected areas (MPAs) under the Oceans Act.
Additionally, an area known as the Eastern Canyons, at 36,000 square kilometres, has been proposed as a new conservation area under the Fisheries Act.
If approved, these three areas, combined with other already designated areas, will total more than 84,000 square kilometres of protected waters off the coast of Nova Scotia.
The new areas were selected from a larger MPA network design for the Maritimes region, which will soon be released for public consultation, says a Department of Fisheries and Oceans news release.
Susanna Fuller, senior marine co-ordinator with Halifax’s Ecology Action Centre, said she welcomes news of further environmental protection and said the upcoming designation process for the Eastern Shore Islands offers a good opportunity for the federal government to work with coastal communities and establish a more bottom-up approach to stewardship.
The Eastern Shore Islands area of interest is currently the largest proposed coastal (inshore) MPA, the first inshore MPA proposed off Nova Scotia, and is part of an area that includes a lucrative lobster fishery.
Moreover, the region is already the target of conservation efforts, as many of the islands are already protected through provincial and private conservation efforts, including the Nova Scotia Nature Trust’s 100 Wild Islands Legacy Campaign.
“How do we create stewardship that continues to allow livelihoods. That’s going to be the challenge,” Fuller said.
“I think there’s potential for it to go quite well, there have been lots of pre-conversations with community members, and this community has fought tooth and nail to keep out open-net pen aquaculture so there clearly is an ethic of conservation (in the region). At the same time, this area is a productive fishing area, so how that process happens and the level of engagement and agency of the communities and the fishermen have in moving this forward will be the key to its success or not.”
The Nova Scotia chapter of the Canadian Parksand Wilderness Society (CPAWS-NS) said in a news release that the organization will be looking very closely at the issue of open-pen finfish aquaculture for the Eastern Shore Islands site, to ensure the activity is not allowed anywhere
within the marine protected area.
Because the areas announced on Thursday have not yet been designated for protection, details about which activities will be prohibited are yet to be determined.
Fuller said it will likely take a minimum of a few years to designate the two MPAs. Currently the process can take up to seven years for an area of interest to become an MPA, but legislation aimed at speeding up the designation process by cutting red tape, known as Bill C-55, is before lawmakers. She said the fisheries closure will likely be implemented much sooner.
In 2010, Canada committed to setting aside five per cent of the country’s ocean for protection by 2017, a goal which it met, and 10 per cent by 2020 as part of its obligations under the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity.
There are already two MPA: St. Anns Bank, a 4,400-squarekilometre swath of ocean on the Scotian Shelf east of Cape Breton that received official MPA status in June; and a 2,400-square-kilometre submarine valley known as The Gully, located on the edge of the Scotian Shelf, east of Sable Island, which was designated in 2004.
Both areas are regions of vast biodiversity and are home to a number of at-risk and endangered species.
There are seven additional areas in Nova Scotia’s waters that contribute to Canada’s targets, mainly Fisheries Act closures, which add up to 32,307 square kilometres of protected ocean surrounding Nova Scotia. There are also hundreds of different fisheries closures that do not count toward Canada’s conservation targets.
According to CPAWS-NS, DFO is also in the process of developing a marine protected area network plan for the entire Scotian Shelf bioregion, while that plan has not yet been released publicly, DFO has indicated that a public consultation will be launched shortly.
Last winter, Fisheries and Oceans confirmed to The Chronicle Herald that studies have identified the Cape Breton Trough, which encompasses the Area 19 snow crab zone, as another potential area of interest.
Last year, the Nova Scotia government complained to Ottawa that the province had more MPAs in its waters than all of the other provinces and that a large percentage of new areas being considered were off Nova Scotia, raising concern about the impact on commercial activities like fishing and oil and gas exploration. In response, Ottawa agreed to a more balanced approach.
In response to a media request, provincial Department of Energy spokeswoman JoAnn Alberstat said Nova Scotia is deeply committed to the protection of the environment and the responsible and sustainable development of our natural resources.
“We already have a number of large marine protected areas with some of the strictest and most comprehensive regulations in the country,” she said on Thursday.
“We will actively participate in this discussion, and we remain ready to continue to do our part. These decisions must be based on science, and thoroughly consider the impact to our economy.”
According to the DFO news release, Ottawa will work together with the provincial government, Indigenous groups, the fishing industry, local communities and other stakeholders to determine the boundaries, conservation efforts and management measures for each MPA, and will develop a multi-sector advisory committee to ensure the necessary input is collected.