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Public-Private Partnership Secures $120 Million for the Great Bear Rainforest

Innovative financing package to fund conservation management and ecologically sustainable business ventures along British Columbia Coast

Over the last two years, the Conservancy and its partners raised $58 million ($60 million CAD) to help leverage matching funding from governments in Canada for conservation in the Great Bear Rainforest. In January 2007, the Canadian federal government committed $30 million (CAD) to work in the rainforest. Those funds, combined with $30 million (CAD) previously committed by the provincial government of British Columbia, complete the public funding component of the Great Bear Rainforest project.
 
Together, the commitments from the governments and the private support raised by the Conservancy and a core group of U.S. and Canadian foundations will create two public-private funds totaling $120 million to finance both conservation management and ecologically sustainable business ventures designed to transform the economies of British Columbia’s 21-million-acre Great Bear Rainforest and support land use agreements announced last February.

“The challenges of our age require innovative approaches that place a premium on a healthy environment. With today’s announcement we’re proving that conservation can attract investment and actually support jobs that won't threaten the living systems that we depend upon,” said Merran Smith, BC Coast Program Director for ForestEthics.

The agreement in the Great Bear Rainforest – and the unprecedented consensus among industry, ForestEthics, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club of Canada-BC Chapter, First Nations, governments and local communities that made it possible – marks a watershed event in modern conservation and recognizes that a sustainable economy is vital to a sustainable environment.

Those historic land use agreements will protect at least 5 million acres of the rainforest from logging and place more than 19 million acres under strict land management guidelines called ecosystem based management.

The successful development and implementation of ecosystem based management across 19 million acres over the next three years is the key to preserving the full array and health of the Great Bear Rainforest’s plant, animal and human communities. To help ensure the long-term ecological integrity of the rainforest, the Conservancy, working through partners that include the Rainforest Solutions Project, Sierra Club of British Columbia, ForestEthics and Greenpeace, is helping to provide the scientific foundation and planning for the successful implementation of ecosystem based management in the Great Bear Rainforest.

“The economic challenges facing the people of the Great Bear Rainforest are as important to address as the area’s conservation challenges,” said  Kent Wommack, Director of The Nature Conservancy's Canada Program  (was Steve McCormick, President and CEO of The Nature Conservancy) . “Protected areas are vital to the future of the Great Bear Rainforest, yet they alone are not enough to ensure the long-term survival of the rainforest and the human and natural communities within it. The establishment of this public-private fund is a global model of what conservation must become - an inherent part of economies, environments and cultures." 

About the Great Bear Rainforest

From the northern end of Vancouver Island, across Queen Charlotte Strait, and up the central coast of British Columbia to the Alaskan border, the Great Bear Rainforest stretches more than 250 miles. Encompassing 21 million acres, the Great Bear Rainforest and the islands of the Haida Gwaii are part of the largest coastal temperate rain forest left on Earth.

Today, nearly 60 percent of the world's coastal temperate rainforests have been logged or developed. The Great Bear Rainforest represents one-quarter of what remains.

A coalition of environmental non-governmental organizations — Greenpeace Canada, Forest Ethics, Sierra Club of Canada-British Columbia Chapter and the Rainforest Action Network — has engaged with a diverse range of stakeholders to work toward consensus for long-term conservation of the Great Bear Rainforest.

Help support our work in Canada to preserve places like the Great Bear Rainforest.