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Through the federal Building Canada Act, "" are being fast-tracked while hundreds of major resource projects are already .

Clean water, climate stability, economic health and cultural heritage all depend on biodiversity. Yet this as the government seeks to shore up Canada's economic future amid a shifting global order.

The pressure to expedite approvals to dig, drill, cut and pipe has the potential to further . This is particularly the case for species at risk—those on the front lines of biodiversity loss that have never been adequately safeguarded under Canada's existing policies.

Dedicated laws to protect individual species began to emerge in the 1970s, creating some of the best known and tested tools for preventing extinction. Yet in Canada, implementation has consistently fallen short: the federal has been the subject of sustained criticism over the past 20 years.

and have shown that implementation has been inefficient and inconsistent. The evidence is clear that single-species conservation is , failing to recognize all endangered or and suffering from that favor economic priorities over protection.

In their race toward deregulation, some Canadian governments are using critiques of existing single-species laws to argue that they're defunct or of relatively little value. The British Columbia government appears to have to develop a provincial statute focused on the needs of individual species. The Ontario government recently one of the strongest species-at-risk acts in the country.

Individual species need protection

, we argue that these legislative tools are essential for assessing and protecting individual species. While current single-species conservation is costly, inefficient and biased, weak implementation doesn't mean there's no need for legislation. Deregulation in the name of economic expedience is not reform; it's erosion of essential protections for biodiversity.

Species such as the and the have been pulled back from the edge of extinction through intensive, costly and invasive conservation actions. Species-at-risk legislation is intended to enable this kind of dedicated attention through measures like captive breeding, translocation, veterinary care or active management of people, predators and ecological competitors.

Despite those successes, Canada lacks a . Even commitments for more protected and conserved areas, while important and overdue, have not been designed to prioritize the needs of at-risk species.

What the evidence says

to count the number of species that were threatened because there were only a few individuals, or that were found across a very small area in the wild. These are species that need help now. We also quantified threats to at-risk species, identifying those threats that need to be addressed directly by tailored actions, not simply more protected land and water.

Of the 550 wildlife species in Canada that were , more than 20% were classified as at risk because they were a small population or had a very restricted distribution and were at risk of becoming extinct over a short time. For example, 97 endangered species had less than 250 mature individuals.

revealed that the most prominent threats facing at-risk species were from consumptive use including deliberate and unintentional harvesting, followed by pollution and the effects of climate change. These threats are not easily addressed by only focusing on increasing protected areas.

What's at stake

Conservation success stories tell us that focused actions, , are sometimes the only way to maintain small and range-restricted populations. Equally important are efforts to manage ecosystems on a large enough scale through protected areas, and by addressing pressures from human development and cumulative impacts that steadily erode habitats.

These broader measures can deliver long-term benefits for biodiversity as a whole, but they cannot substitute for processes that assess the status of individual species and empower targeted recovery actions. Weakening or abandoning species-specific policies is not just a policy shift; it is the loss of a crucial set of conservation tools.

Critiques of single-species approaches must not come at the expense of their continued implementation, whether through species at risk legislation or sector-specific natural resource regulation.

These conservation tools can mobilize public and political will by drawing on the emotional power of threatened species and generating essential information about ecosystem change. They can also provide mechanisms to begin the process of rebuilding populations.

Although species-focused efforts have played an , a fundamental shift is needed to move beyond crisis-driven, reactive measures and toward proactive, preventative strategies.

Addressing biodiversity loss at its roots requires mitigating systemic drivers of decline and adopting policies that prioritize long-term ecosystem resilience. To forsake species protections is not to move forward. It is to close the door on recovery before the story is over.

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