OTTAWA – Last year, Canada’s progress on equity-based legislation and nature protection stalled. Current policies are falling short of national biodiversity targets, failing to address significant gaps in efforts to protect nature, oceans and people. Despite the 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework to the Convention for Biological Diversity (CBD), which includes specific targets to protect 25% of Canada’s lands, waters and oceans by 2025, Canada has missed the mark. Without real policy changes, the country remains off-track to meet its commitment to protect 30% of land and oceans by 2030. While significant gaps in data and realized change persist, they are particularly pronounced when it comes to barriers faced by Indigenous, Black, racialized, disabled and low-income communities in accessing and belonging in nature, benefiting from it and participating in collective healing.
Today, Greenpeace Canada releases Belonging in Nature: Barriers, Impacts and Pathways to Nature for All across Canada, a landmark report arguing that conservation failures go hand in hand with systemic exclusion. The report’s findings, research and data were compiled in partnership with consultants from Indigenous and Black-led organizations, disability justice advocates, and grassroots groups, including Carolynne Crawley, Demiesha Dennis, Judith Kasiama and Karen Lai.
The report reveals how Canada’s current colonial conservation model is failing both nature and historically marginalized communities. It examines belonging-first approaches for nature policy, showing how systems built on exclusion and exploitation can be reimagined to address long-standing equity challenges faced by Indigenous Peoples, Black and racialized communities, newcomers, low-income households and people living with disabilities.
Belonging in Nature emphasizes learning from Indigenous knowledge systems and the traditions of diasporic communities, highlighting how Canada can shift from extractive colonial mindsets toward relational and holistic approaches to nature policy and stewardship.
With only 13.8% of land and freshwater and 15.5% of oceans currently protected, Canada is falling nearly 11% short of its 2025 land protection goals. Failure to adequately protect the environment is a systematic failure that ripples negative effects on the health, culture and climate outcomes for Indigenous communities, Black, disabled and racialized people all across Canada, whose livelihoods, safety and ability to thrive depend on nature protection.
The report’s analysis underscores the urgency of meeting this moment by addressing inequities in access to nature and moving beyond exclusionary conservation frameworks toward an understanding of land, people and oceans as interdependent. In this vision, belonging is essential to the well-being and collective thriving of all.
Salomé Sané, Nature & Biodiversity Campaigner at Greenpeace Canada, said:
“Canada is failing its biodiversity targets because it is still clinging to a colonial model that treats nature as a commodity and people as outsiders. This report is a wake-up call that to protect nature, we must include the people who are part of her fabric. For too long, conservation in Canada has been a project of exclusion, rooted in the displacement and dispossession of Indigenous Peoples from their territories and waters. This colonial model built parks and trails on stolen land, and shaped access based on income, race and ability. To truly protect nature, we must swap the colonial “parks” model for Indigenous land governance, legislate belonging through the re-introduction of the Nature Accountability Act, scale up community-led solutions that already create vibrant outdoor communities, and close the data gaps that hide nature-based inequities.”
Demiesha Dennis, Independent Consultant (Environmental Justice, Equity and Access), said:
“This research underscores the need to dismantle institutional anti-Blackness and anti-Indigenous practices and to center community/grassroots voices and knowledge long ignored. It raises critical questions and calls on those in power to listen and learn from those with lived experience to realize a just and equitable environmental future.”
Karen Lai, Accessibility & Inclusion Consultant on the report, said:
“This report, Belonging in Nature, provides a clear framework as to why some communities are excluded, pointing out that the fundamental challenge is that being in nature is built on a system of exclusion. It does not take into consideration the various identities of people, the various ways people move around, or the different ways people must navigate in order to access nature. This report outlines the different ways certain communities are excluded from nature and provides some positive collaborations we can do to address these systematic exclusions.”
Examining the impacts on health, culture and climate, the Belonging in Nature report calls for the following solutions that will ensure nature is recognized as essential to justice and well-being:
- Land Back and Indigenous governance: Centering “Land Back” as the foundational frame for nature protection and honouring Indigenous worldviews.
- Implementation of Bill C-73: Legislating nature for all through the Nature Accountability Act to ensure belonging becomes a lived reality rather than a privilege.
- Scaling community-led and co-designed solutions: Supporting and piloting initiatives driven by the communities most impacted by nature inequity.
- Closing data gaps preventing belonging in nature: Collecting disaggregated data on identity and policy impact to maintain progress and transparency
ENDS
Note to editors:
The executive summary is available here.
The report, Belonging in Nature by Greenpeace Canada, is available here.
For more information, please contact:
Sarah Micho, Communications Campaigner, Greenpeace Canada
[email protected], +1 647 428 0603
