Researchers find as little as $20 million per year could help give a number of Fraser River salmon populations a decent chance of a healthy future. The window for action, however, is closing.
Nineteen stretches of critical salmon habitat on the Fraser River have less than a 50 per cent chance of thriving over the next 25 years, says a new study.
“There are numerous case studies of species that were essentially studied to death because we needed more data or we needed more time.” Much of the damage to salmon populations comes from shrinking access to freshwater habitat — whether in upriver spawning grounds or the brackish waters used to acclimate to the ocean.
To figure out what resources will be needed to rehabilitate salmon populations on the Fraser River, Chalifour and her colleagues brought together 104 experts from First Nations, federal and provincial governments, recreational and commercial fisheries, universities and NGOs. That meant looking at a collection of watersheds covering over 230,000 square kilometres, much of it in some of the most heavily urbanized areas of the province. After crunching the numbers, Chalifour and her colleagues ran all the answers through an algorithm to assess each strategy based on its likelihood of success, how much it would cost and the benefits it would provide.
But even a $20-million yearly investment would boost 14 of the 19 salmon populations above the 50 per cent threshold — a cost equivalent to $4.25 per B.C. resident. More importantly, says the researcher, there’s no framework set up to prioritize where the money goes in a strategic way. In other words, there’s no scientific or community-level accountability for how that money is spent.
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