THUNDER BAY — Climate disaster is already disrupting the Canadian economy.
This summer’s Toronto flooding caused insured damage of $940 million, and the fire in Jasper National Park that scorched the town cost $880 million.
Anishnawbe Business Professional Association president Jason Rasevych contextualizes those costs to Toronto and Jasper by pointing out that planting a tree has a $6.50 value on Canada’s GDP.
The development expert from Ginoogaming First Nation near Thunder Bay foresees Northern Ontario First Nations leading land stewardship projects in the fight against climate change. He believes the value of intact natural systems is an untapped market – and he’s courting investors.
“When we think of nature, we have to think about it as an infrastructure that provides services to the economy,” Rasevych says.
“If the economy continues to impact nature, we won’t have that infrastructure, and we’ll continue to see catastrophic events like floods and wildfires.”
Instead of interpreting the environment as an externality, the rapidly-expanding conservation approach known as Nature-based Climate Solutions (NCS) lends formal value to the benefit these “ecosystem services” provide the economy.
NCS is going mainstream on every continent as an economic strategy to reduce CO2 emissions, with measures as diverse as a stormwater diversion to carbon sequestration, under organizations from the World Wildlife Fund to the World Bank.
A new joint study from Nature United and the Smart Prosperity Institute released on October 1 suggests Indigenous communities have a “critical” role in “unlocking the economic potential of NCS in Canada,” which those groups foresee providing a 20-fold return on investment.
Rasevych took that case to Climate Week, the world’s largest climate conference in New York this month. He appealed to investors and philanthropists alike: Canada cannot meet its carbon reduction targets without Indigenous communities; likewise, Indigenous communities cannot incur the up-front conservation costs without external investment.
“The major call to action was for private investment support and developing a stronger economic or business case for valuing nature as an ecosystem services provider to the economy,” he said.
If Canada pivots to NCS solutions by 2030, the country could reduce emissions by 11 per cent (78 megatonnes of carbon dioxide annually), according to a landmark study that 17 research institutions conducted in 2021.
Despite the federal government having invested over $1.3 billion to advance Indigenous-led conservation efforts, Rasevych believes government grants for climate solutions will prove insufficient, too slow, and prone to partisanship.
He joins those calling for a “blended” financing model, wherein Indigenous communities would supplement public grants with philanthropic donations and private investment.
As Canada moves to implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), he believes Indigenous people and communities can have tools and protections to confidently develop relationships with the charitable and for-profit sectors, while helping to meet Canada’s climate goals by 2030.
“We’ve got a commitment from the government,” he says.
“What we need is more capacity dollars. We need more, better access to data, and we need to be able to develop the right type of accounting models for natural resources, so the investors could identify what the opportunities are here, and that they’re properly compensated for their investment.”
He sees tribes in the United States as leading a variety of solutions, where regulations are becoming friendlier to combine public conservation dollars with philanthropic commitments and private sector investments, to reinforce the inherent value of intact natural ecosystems.
Even if Natural Resources Canada spent 20 per cent of the $5-billion infrastructure loan guarantee it commits to resource extractive industries like mining or forestry, Rasevych argues, it could ignite this type of blended financing model with market confidence.
“If these dollars are going to be used to advance the government’s agenda related to pipelines out west or related to extraction sectors, then some of it should be counterbalanced to invest in these climate action initiatives,” he says.
Some examples:
- In Washington, DC, a stormwater retention credit trade has incentivized green infrastructure construction that its architects estimate has captured more than 40 million gallons of runoff over the past decade.
- In California, a $1.5-million investment from the Yuba Water Agency in upriver reforestation and forest fire prevention leveraged $4 million in private capital. That, in turn, unlocked more interest-free state loans. The Yuba Forest Resilience Bond partnership advertises the arrangement sped up the project by six years, while making a second, larger project possible, estimated at $25-million.
- In Kitaskino Nuwenëné Wildland Park in Alberta, the Mikisew Cree First Nation, the province of Alberta, and industrial interests including Imperial Oil, have invested $5.3 million in preserving bison and caribou protection habitat, while developing ecotourism
- A 2009 agreement between the Coastal First Nations and British Columbia formed the Great Bear Carbon Credit Limited Partnership, one of the first and largest carbon offset projects in the world. Under the Atmospheric Benefit Sharing Agreement, the First Nations receive 80 per cent of carbon credit sales revenue, which spares one of the world’s most carbon-productive, old growth forests from logging.
The Hudson Bay lowland, north of Rasevych’s home community of Ginoogaming First Nation, is storing between 30 and 40 billion tonnes of carbon.
The area has the second-highest concentration of peat on Earth, next to the Congo.
The only reason Northern Ontario First Nations aren’t in the same economic position to benefit from ecological protection as the nine Coastal First Nations in B.C., he says, is political will.
“When I talk about the treaties, we didn’t have discussions on any ‘atmospheric benefit sharing agreements’ back then.
But you would assume the land, the air, the water, the ecosystem is a consideration that was discussed around exercising treaty rights and the inherent responsibility of Indigenous peoples to be stewards of the land; caretakers for what’s used in the western ways – the scientific way – as biodiversity.”
The global movement to assess ecological values is occurring simultaneously with a constitutional shift in Northern Ontario.
In July, the 17 First Nations signatory to the Robinson-Huron Treaty won a unanimous Supreme Court ruling in a case about withheld annuities that holds deep implications for valuing both extracted and intact natural resources.
Restoule v. Canada not only resolved that the First Nations located between Sault Ste. Marie, North Bay, and Parry Sound did not cede the land in signing the treaty but also interpreted the four-dollar annuities the Crown pays each member to be subject to resource-sharing benefits.
Members of Robinson-Huron and their westward neighbours Robinson-Superior hadn’t received an increase to those annuities since 1875.
“For well over a century, the Crown has shown itself to be a patently unreliable and untrustworthy treaty partner in relation to the augmentation promise,” Justice Mahmud Jamal wrote in his ruling.
A negotiating process led Canada and Ontario to contribute $5 billion each for Robinson-Huron communities, while Robinson-Superior Anishinabek continues to seek $126 billion.
The quantification of resource values is game-changing according to ecological economist Mark Anielski, whose firm studies the relationship between economic indicators and the well-being of individuals in First Nations.
Anielski is working with Robinson-Huron First Nations to quantify resource and natural values in northeastern Ontario.
He says that if the provinces aren’t valuing resources enough to count them on their balance sheets, First Nations are entitled to calculate those values themselves to seek economic partners, whether that be for development, protecting carbon sinks, or restoring caribou habitat.
“Right now, the provinces don’t account for the liabilities of the environment at all, so that means your credit rating as a province or as a country is not accurate. It changes the whole position and perspective of the so-called international investment world and markets have been blind to. We’re playing chess where we were playing poker with the cards face-up.”
Jesse Cardinal is the executive director of Keepers of the Water, an Indigenous-led environmental protection group working in the Arctic Ocean Drainage Basin.
She’s seen what she describes as partisan efforts in Alberta that are camouflaging fossil fuel subsidies as both green energy and opportunities for First Nations.
During the NDP’s single term governing Alberta between 2015 and 2019, the province launched the Alberta Indigenous Opportunities Corporation (AIOC), a program to match public partnership funds with First Nations looking to benefit from a diversifying energy mix.
When the UCP was elected in 2019, those programs reverted to favouring fossil fuel partnerships.
“It just got really messy really quickly because all it did was incentivize First Nations to further entrench themselves in fossil fuel extraction instead of supporting the path and the vision a lot of communities have of getting away from fossil fuel extraction and diversifying the economy.”
Between the province directly enabling coal, oil, and gas expansion, unreasonable ambitions for carbon sequestration, and the federal government encouraging extractive processes to develop nuclear energy, Cardinal says the cost of public support for Indigenous-led conservation efforts can be used to repackage the status quo.
“Canada is implicated in these false solutions or nature-based solutions that are really just linked directly to industry, to continue to have industry, to continue with business as usual, while subsidizing their business as usual,” she says.
Cardinal says Indigenous self-governance and autonomy over land management are the only paths that will lead to sustainable ecology.
When Rasevych spoke at Climate Week in New York, investors and philanthropists also heard from Asubpeeschoseewagong Anishinabek (Grassy Narrows First Nation) elder and decorated human rights activist Judy Da Silva.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, staff of the pulp and paper mill in Dryden dumped nearly 10 tonnes of mercury into the English-Wabigoon River system. New studies earlier this year revealed the effluent that the mill is still dumping into the river is exacerbating the methylmercury effects on the aquaculture.
Da Silva says the need to do business differently is urgent.
“Indigenous people are the first contact for industrial devastation. We have no time to be wasting, the way the earth is going, we need to stop industry right now. We in Grassy Narrows face mercury poisoning. The people are sick, and I’m getting sick.
"The mercury symptoms are getting stronger on me. We need to do this change now for the children that are not born yet. That’s the frame of mind we need to have.”
Ricochet / Local Journalism Initiative
