Progress and Problems in Canada’s Protected Areas: Overview of Progress, Chronic Issues and Emerging Challenges in the Early 21 st Century

Society establishes protected areas with the expectation that they will deliver certain values to society that would not be forthcoming without these areas. The essential indicators of progress would be whether protected areas are delivering those values in an effective and timely manner. Hence plotting the progress of protected areas is really a proxy for the achievement of certain values. This paper first explores these values and criteria for their assessment before evaluating some indicators of the protected area system in providing these values including ecological integrity, amount of area protected, visitor satisfaction, visitor learning and governance. It is also necessary to identify the potential barriers to achieving success. Some of these barriers could be easily identified 40 years ago, others are much more recent. Key ongoing issues include the lack of a national protected area plan, the slow speed of establishment of new PAs, lack of monitoring for effectiveness, failure to establish research partnerships, and questions of accountability. Challenges that are emerging as key issues include external threats to PA integrity, challenges of ecosystem-based management, and declining visitation levels. Tremendous progress has been made overall in the growth and management of the PA system over the last 40 years. Nonetheless, overall environmental degradation continues apace and the number of endangered species in Canada continues to grow rapidly. Parks play a main role in protecting PA values but they are being swamped by the pace and scale of degradation outside the parks. Greater attention needs to be given to the roles of parks in mitigating wider landscape level changes in the future