Should nature have financial value in Canada’s accounting system? What experts say
Global News
Experts say Canada cannot properly address climate change without recognizing the financial value of natural assets like forests and wetlands.
Canada is already feeling the impact of changing climate, much like the rest of the world. When a heat dome settled over British Columbia this summer, 570 people died. Last month, Hurricane Fiona wreaked havoc across the East Coast. While there may be no easy way out of this, some experts believe that adding financial value to natural assets may help in tackling climate change.
Roy Brooke, the executive director of the Municipal Natural Assets Initiative, which aims to make natural asset management a mainstream practice, said the first step in ensuring Canada has healthy biodiverse ecosystems is to recognize the value of nature in its financial and accounting systems because by doing so governments would be able to properly assess the conditions of natural assets like forests and wetlands.
This means that by keeping a financial record of natural assets, if any of the trees in a forest, for example, get a disease, governments would be able to provide maintenance that would increase the quality of its resilience.
“We cannot address climate change without also addressing nature and biodiversity. We cannot reach any climate change targets. We cannot mitigate and we cannot adapt properly without also ensuring that we have healthy, connected, biodiverse ecosystems,” said Brooke.
According to Natural Resources Canada, an infographic states that “in 2020, natural resources, directly and indirectly, accounted for 15.5% of Canada’s nominal GDP,” with the biggest natural resource being energy.
About 909 communities were also found to be “economically reliant on at least one natural resource sector.”
“Of those communities, 609 are either significantly or highly reliant on at least one of the natural resource sectors,” the government website says, with the resources being minerals and metals or forests.
Forests make up a huge portion of Canadian landscape, with Canada having nine per cent of the world’s forests, according to the government.
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