B.C.’s silent collapse: Why we need a biodiversity law now! 

Without urgent action, B.C.’s most vital life-support systems — forests, waters, and wildlife — are at risk of vanishing.

The quiet disappearance

When most people think of extinction, they imagine faraway rainforests or vanishing polar bears on melting ice. But here in British Columbia — home to Canada’s richest diversity of plant and animal life — the crisis is unfolding in our own backyards. Almost 2,000 species and ecological communities in B.C. are at some risk of extinction, including birds that serenade us during nature walks, salmon that have sustained ecosystems and communities for millennia, and towering old-growth forest ecosystems that cool our air, store carbon, and regulate entire watersheds. We are losing them — not in one dramatic sweep, but incrementally, often invisibly, every day. 

The biodiversity crisis has a very real impact on our quality of life. When ecosystems collapse, so do the systems that provide us with breathable air, clean drinking water, and sustainable food sources. When we think about biodiversity, we need to think of the web of life that sustains and includes us. If it’s in crisis, so are we. 

What’s driving the crisis?

How does a province that calls itself “Super, Natural” have so many at-risk species?  

The short answer: B.C. lacks strong, enforceable environmental laws. 

B.C.’s legal framework does virtually nothing to ensure natural resource development and other human activity happens within the confines of what nature can handle. There’s no stand-alone provincial law to protect nature including endangered species. Instead, we rely on a patchwork of natural resource laws that prioritize industry with few checks and balances in place to make sure industrial development isn’t pushing species and habitat to the brink.  

This poses a major challenge because human activity — including unchecked logging and large-scale mining — is a key driver of biodiversity loss and ecological degradation across the province. The province’s legal failure has also deeply impacted Indigenous communities, who lose access to their traditional territories and ways of life as resource extraction degrades the land. 

These laws are set up to benefit major industry proponents so they can extract as much as possible to maximize profits, but communities across B.C. are paying the cost: catastrophic wildfires, landslides from degraded slopes, farmland submerged under floodwaters. Each disaster is more than a headline — it’s a symptom of ecosystems pushed past their limits. 

A promise waiting to be kept 

In 2020, there was a glimmer of hope for addressing this systemic gap in B.C.’s legal framework. The provincial government committed to implementing all 14 recommendations of the Old Growth Strategic Review. Among them: a call to legally prioritize ecosystem health and biodiversity across all sectors – a provincial biodiversity law. It was a landmark promise — one that, if fulfilled, could finally reverse the outdated model of extraction-first decision making. 

But almost four years later, we are still waiting. In late 2023, the government released a draft Biodiversity and Ecosystem Health Framework — a non-binding document that sets out policy commitments for putting the health of nature at the centre of government decision-making. However, we’ve seen no tangible progress since then.  

We need a law — not just a framework 

Words alone don’t protect watersheds or species. We need legislation that legally enshrines biodiversity and ecosystem health as the guiding priority — not a secondary consideration after major industry actors get their due. Such a law would support communities by ensuring that community interests are taken into consideration, so that projects sustain local economic interests while protecting nature. 

This law must be co-developed with First Nations, uplifting Indigenous knowledge systems, rights and governance. This is more than a political promise. It’s an opportunity to fulfill a generational responsibility. 

What’s at stake 

 We cannot separate the loss of biodiversity from the wellbeing of people. Healthy ecosystems provide the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat. When they fail, so do we. 

B.C. is still in a position to lead — to be the first Canadian province to pass a law that truly protects nature, not exploits it. But every day of delay narrows the window of what can still be saved. 

We are standing at the edge of a vanishing world. Let’s not go down in history as the generation that knew what was happening — and let it happen anyway.