April 23, 2025

Canada’s 2025 Election: A Pivotal Moment for Biodiversity Goals and Indigenous-Led Conservation

by Youth Advisory Council (2024-2025 Cohort)

We, the Jane Goodall Institute of Canada’s Youth Advisory Council, have been working with Indigenous communities to spotlight IPCAs – now we’re calling on the next government to strengthen support for Indigenous-led conservation.

At the beginning of March, we – the Youth Advisory Council at the Jane Goodall Institute of Canada – began an online campaign to raise awareness about Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs) across the country.

The initiative was as personal as it was professional. Many of us on the council are involved in climate action, researching and learning about Indigenous-led climate stewardship in school, or working in organizations that are supporting Indigenous communities in this work.

Spread out across the country, we’re all living on Indigenous lands, ceded and some unceded, some of us in communities where local Indigenous governments are working to establish the IPCAs we were hoping to shed light on through our campaign.

Raising awareness about and supporting local Indigenous-led climate stewardship initiatives is embedded into other work at the Jane Goodall Institute of Canada (JGIC) as well. Supporting the integration of Indigenous Knowledge in schools and classrooms is part of this.

Through Roots & Shoots, JGIC funds projects that include, but are not limited to, building medicine gardens, pollinator gardens, nutrient farms, and waste management systems. Many of these projects are in schools that serve Indigenous students or are in partnership with Indigenous communities. Most involve building young people’s understanding around the interconnectedness of local biodiversity, Indigenous history, and Traditional Knowledge of the environment.

For the online campaign, our council wanted to share the information that was most important to the Indigenous organizations and communities directly involved in the establishment of the IPCAs. We also wanted to ensure that local governments and communities were equal partners in the process. They collaborated with us, approved all the campaign materials we posted on JGIC’s platforms, and were compensated for their knowledge sharing throughout the process.

The response from the governments and communities we worked with has been eye-opening: the groups we talked to during this campaign continually emphasized how for them, this work is bigger than the land they are protecting, it is their way of fulfilling their inherent responsibilities.

As sməlqmíx voices like councillor Janet Terbasket have stated, “We have an obligation to protect, an obligation to do whatever means are necessary to make sure that our generations have clean water.”

They also expressed their openness to working with non-Indigenous communities and provincial and federal governments, yet emphasized that they are not waiting for external recognition.

Meanwhile, the response to our campaign from the Institute’s larger community has also been overwhelming. Through posts spotlighting IPCAs on our Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Threads, and Bluesky every Wednesday, we’ve reached over 30,000 people in the first four weeks alone. The posts have been liked by over 600 people on Instagram and reshared across platforms over 60 times.

It hasn’t stopped there – our campaign has resonated so strongly that the global Jane Goodall Institute team was inspired to amplify the message further by sharing the posts through their larger international accounts.

This success has shown us the importance of sharing information around IPCAs, and we’re learning this is significant ahead of the upcoming federal election as well.

With Canadians going to the polls on April 28, engagement with our campaign has helped initiate conversations about how this election holds a lot of weight for the future of biodiversity protection.

This federal election may be Canada’s most significant before 2030 – the year we’ve committed to protecting 30% of our lands and waters.

The “30 by 30” target is one of the main commitments from the Kunming-Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework that Canada adopted in 2022. Yet as of 2023, Canada had only conserved 13.7 per cent of terrestrial areas (land and freshwater) and just 6 per cent of marine areas, with much of that success being thanks to the hard work of IPCAs and Indigenous leaders.

The truth is we’re running out of time to live up to key climate targets that impact the lives of all Canadians. We know this election is a key factor in how successfully we meet our goals. We also know that Indigenous-led conservation can help us get there.

Establishing IPCAs in partnership with Indigenous governments and communities is one of the most powerful and proven ways to achieve our biodiversity protection commitment as well as advancing the vital work of decolonization.

Our campaign suggests that Canadians support this, too – there is an interest in stories about IPCAs across the country and an appetite for more of them to be collaboratively established over the next five years.

Supporting IPCAs isn’t just a policy choice. It’s a responsibility – one that reflects Canada’s international commitments, and one that honours Indigenous rights, knowledge, and sovereignty.

The next government must recognize IPCAs as central to Canada’s conservation strategy – and back that recognition with real support, funding, and partnerships rooted in respect.