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The Bottle-Neck Effect


 

Photo of Killer Whale courtesy of http://www.maniacworld.com/killer-whale.htm

 

Over 500 species of plants and animals are considered at risk in Canada. The 2003 Species At Risk Act (SARA) was implemented to protect these species. However, out of those 500 species that are currently listed, only 150 have recovery strategies and only four have implemented recovery action plans.  It is clear that this act must be improved if Canadian species are going to be protected. This was the motivation behind the November 2010 paper, “Science, Policy and Species at Risk in Canada” by Dr.Jeannette Whitton et al. This paper took an in-depth look into how SARA works and how to improve it.   (See video for an overview of the paper.)

 

 

Video: The Bottleneck Effect

 Issues with SARA:

Listing stage

 

  • Lack of expertise
When the Committee On the Status of Endangered Wildlife In Canada (COSEWIC, www.cosewic.gc.ca) prioritizes the species that are more likely to go extinct, the species for which there is less expertise ends up being classified as “data deficient,” and most likely do not get listed. The government has no obligation to conduct further research or assessment on them, so “data deficient” species remain unaccounted for. This may become a bigger problem in the future as the focus switches to listing invertebrates, where there is even less knowledge.
  • Timing is Everything

Status assessment by COSEWIC and legal listing by the federal government are currently two separate steps in SARA. Unfortunately, this structure gives the government “an opportunity to avoid or delay the costs and consequences of protecting imperiled wildlife species.” This may explain why the federal government chose not to list 23% of the species recommended by COSEWIC between 2003 and 2007. On the other hand, this separation “allows a time window for stakeholders and civil society to become more involved in the legal listing process” and “allows for a transparent separation of science and policy.” Researchers believe these benefits far outweigh the negative effect of separation.

  • Economics vs. Science

Governments have to take into account the financial impacts of their decisions, and Canada’s government is no exception. The government relies on economic impact analysis to decide which COSEWIC-recommended species should be labelled “at risk” but researchers see their analysis as “incomplete.” Economic concerns make up “50% of the cases in which listing has been denied outright [by the government].” For this reason, researchers question the effectiveness of the current structure, stating that the “economic analysis is not supplied as independent science advice but rather is embedded in a nonscientific policy-based framework.” They suggest that the analysis comes too early in SARA’s evaluation process and thus economic concerns end up outweighing scientific considerations and dominating the listing process.

 

 

Recovery strategies: Ineffective meshing of science and policy.

 

  • Lack of Clarity
Creating recovery strategies has been “slow and problematic.” Scientific assessments and socioeconomic considerations quite often end up contradicting each other and therefore it should be made clear which is considered the most important in each case.
  • Lack of Definitions
To help at risk species survive and recover, we need to explicitly define these terms. The Canadian government has suggested survival “would mean maintaining the current population in the ‘short term’.”  But it is open to interpretation what represents ‘short term’ in Canadian policy? Also if this was the case, for a species at risk of extinction, merely maintaining its population in the short term “would provide little assurance of continued survival.” Recovery has been defined as “long-term persistence” or when decline is “arrested or reversed.” The ‘or’ in this definition allows the government to choose the easier option of arresting decline rather than reversing it.  Do you think stopping decline is enough to be classified as recovery?
  • Defining Habitat Issues

Classifying the critical habitat of species has been highly controversial. The law to identify critical habitat “to the extent possible using the best available information” is not reflected in how many habitats have actually been identified; habitat has only been defined for 23 of the 104 species with finalized recovery strategies. However, researchers think this may improve in the future as a result of two court cases in 2009 that successfully challenged recovery strategies that omitted known critical habitat from the final strategy.

  • Conflicting Interests Overshadow Scientific Content
The biggest issue in preparing recovery strategies is that the government ministries that currently oversee the process “may have conflicting interests.”  To prevent this influence from distorting scientific assessments, researchers propose the science should be presented separately from governmental assessment in a new two-step listing process.  The proposed differences can be seen in figure 1 below.

Current and suggested structures of SARA "Science, Policy and Species at Risk in Canada"

 

 

Suggestions for Improving SARA
In conclusion, the current Species at Risk Act is leading to a bottleneck effect; only 4 species have recovery action plans even though over 500 species are listed as ‘at risk’.  SARA considers both scientific and economic concerns, but it is not always clear which of these two factors is viewed as the most important. To improve the number of action plans being finalised, the researchers make a number of suggestions.

 

The paper’s suggestions:

  1. creating a mandated framework with a two-step listing process to separate independent science and government policy decisions.
  2. incorporating timely independent, non-governmental peer review of decisions.
  3. defining important terms more clearly to avoid misinterpretation and taking shortcuts.
  4. making the whole process more transparent.

 

One of the researchers, Dr. Jeannette Whitton thinks the transparency of science is especially important during the creation of recovery strategies. It needs to be clear what the ideal situation for the recovery of a species is, what the most realistic scenario will be, and why these two assessments differ.  The taxpayers are funding this process and therefore they have a right to see what is happening.  The government is currently conducting a long overdue review of SARA and the researchers hope that their suggestions will be taken into account.

 

See the SARA website http://www.sararegistry.gc.ca/default_e.cfm for up to date information on the Species At Risk Act, new listings and recovery strategies.

 

Banff Spring Snail Photo © Mark and Leslie Degner

Podcast – Detailed information of specific species
[kaltura-widget uiconfid=”535″ entryid=”0_xcn217mz” width=”100″ height=”86″ addpermission=”” editpermission=”” /]
 A discussion with Dr. Whitton about specific species at risk
References
  • Movie by: Grace Jauristo
  • Script by: Grace, Maki, Matt and Junaid
  • Blog by: Maki Sumitani and Matt Wagstaff
  • Podcast by: Junaid Sargana
  • “Science, Policy, and Species at Risk in Canada” by Arne O. Mooers, Dan F. Doak C, Scott Findlay, David M. Green, Chris Grouios, Lisa L. Manne, Azadeh Rashvand, Murray A. Rudd, and Jeannette Whitton.  Published in BioScience, Vol.60 No.10, November 2010
Thank you!
  • We would like to thank Dr.Jeannette Whitton and Geoff Hoare for their contributions
  • Thank you to the Beaty Biodiversity Museum at UBC and the Vancouver Aquarium for allowing us to film and take photos
  • Thanks to the science 300 professors, Eric Jandciu and Jackie Stewart for all their help and advice.
  • Take a look at this link for some more information: endangered species in Canada

Posted: 12|2|11 at 7:40 pm. Filed under: Final Project, Interview Project, Issues in Science, Public Engagement, Science Communication, Science in the News.
Comment | Trackback

3 Responses to The Bottle-Neck Effect

  1. Eric Jandciu
    December 4th, 2011 at 1:53 pm

    It’s so dark in the Biodiversity Museum, but you managed to get some great shots down there. Very brave putting yourselves in the video! Is that Matt examining the specimens in the background? The blending of science, policy, and the public is such an important area and I think you’ve done a nice job highlighting some issues that many people may not have been aware of.

  2. bdunham
    January 18th, 2012 at 1:39 pm

    An interesting and important topic; there’s lots of statistical questions in this field too. For instance, how do we estimate the number of surviving members of a species that is at risk of extinction? Even estimating the number of species in Canada isn’t easy (see Bebber et al. Proc. R. Soc. B 2007 274, 1651-1658, for some recent work on this problem).

  3. norbert-hofer
    February 6th, 2016 at 12:44 pm

    norbert-hofer

    SCIE 300 Communicating Science » Blog Archive » The Bottle-Neck Effect

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