Ontario's Biodiversity Strategy: "Protecting What Sustains Us”

This strategy was developed with the help of many Ontario individuals and organizations in the hope of reversing the trend towards the loss of biodiversity in Ontario. The strategy helps Ontario do its part in relation to the Canadian Biodiversity Strategy and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity.

It briefly describes Ontario's biodiversity, sets out goals and a vision for Ontario's biodiversity, discusses threats and opportunities and lists 37 actions that, taken together, will enable Ontario to achieve its biodiversity conservation goals. The OBS actions are grouped according to the following strategic directions:

Engage Ontarians — Our success will depend on the values that guide how Ontarians behave. We must build a broad public understanding of and a commitment to biodiversity. We must develop a variety of ways that people can participate in maintaining our natural heritage.

Promote Stewardship — Private landowners, farmers and non-farmers alike, have a key role to play in the stewardship of the biological resources of this province. Stewardship must also involve entire business sectors in pursuing biodiversity conservation and sustainable use. We can promote stewardship through effective education, tools and support for landowners including incentives. Increasingly, business and institutions are promoting and demonstrating stewardship practices through environmental certification and management systems.

Work Together — Organisations and society can accomplish a lot more working together as partners than we can by going it alone. Partnerships are and should be used in many ways for many purposes – in education, research, policy development, technology development, information management, conservation projects, monitoring and compliance. The OBS supports and encourages partnerships to make us more effective in protecting biodiversity and ensuring the sustainable uses of biological assets . This strategic direction overlaps all the others.

Integrate Biodiversity Conservation into Land Use Planning — We need to plan growth carefully in Ontario in order to maintain biodiversity and the ecological services that help make our communities healthy and liveable. There is an urgent need to recognize in our planning rules the importance of green spaces and conserving biodiversity.

Prevention — Reducing threats now will be more effective and less expensive than trying to recover what we have lost. There are many threats to biodiversity and action must be taken on a number of fronts. Where there is a threatened imminent loss of biodiversity, we should act, even if our knowledge is not complete.

Improve Understanding — We must make use of expanding scientific knowledge and new mapping and other technologies. But knowledge is not always about the “new”. Traditional knowledge from Aboriginal cultures and rural communities should be valued and integrated into decision-making.