The Kennebecasis River and its tributaries, which wind through southeast New Brunswick’s agricultural heartland, once ran clear and cool enough for sturgeon, salmon and trout. But human activities, global warming and climate-fuelled extreme weather have thinned out the native trees and shrubs on the river’s edges, pushing sediments into streams and raising water temperatures and flood risks.

‍
That’s not good for at-risk fish, nearby plants and animals, or surrounding communities.
‍
Enter the Kennebecasis Watershed Restoration Committee (KWRC), a community organization leading a project called the Carbon Capture Collective, with help from collaborators Hammond River Angling Association and Belleisle Watershed Coalition — and funding from WWF-Canada’s Nature and Climate Grant Program (NCGP), presented in partnership with Aviva Canada.
‍
NCGP’s second phase, spanning 24 months from 2022 to 2024, supported nature-based climate solution projects by six grantees from across Canada to restore viable habitat for biodiversity while sequestering carbon. In this case, KWRC worked with local farmers and landowners to plant thousands of native trees and shrubs along damaged shore habitats. This simple act improves biodiversity by restoring land and water habitats and mitigates the effects of climate change by absorbing more water during floods and storing atmospheric carbon in the soil, which participants then measured to ensure effectiveness.
‍
Since the program kicked off in 2021, NCGP participants have restored more than 702 hectares of degraded lands and waters, improving habitats for at least 57 local populations of at-risk species, mitigating flood risk on 26,800 hectares of land and furthering our shared goal to Regenerate Canada.

‍

Aviva Canada is the presenting partner of the Nature and Climate Grant Program.

The Wolastoq (Saint John River) watershed in New Brunswick — home to nearly 50 species at risk of going locally extinct and increasingly intense and frequent flooding — has been a focus of WWF-Canada since 2012, during which we’ve supported local organizations’ restoration efforts.

Over the past year, we’ve worked on several initiatives. To increase capacity and expertise, WWF-Canada conducted three workshops on restoration challenges and opportunities in the Wolastoq that reached over 130 restoration practitioners. In Edmundston, a 230-metre eroded channel identified as a priority for floodplain restoration — even before a June 2023 storm dumped 70 millimetres of rain in some parts of the area in under an hour — was restructured to reduce flood risk and address riverbank erosion.

And in the lower watershed, our partners engaged several landowners to cooperate in restoring degraded agricultural land near riverbanks and planted more than 17,000 trees across 14 hectares. This revegetation will mitigate flood impacts and provide critical habitat while getting us closer to our goal of planting 65,000 trees by March 2025.

This project was undertaken with the financial support of the Government of Canada through Environment and Climate Change Canada and the 2 Billion Trees program, Hewitt Foundation and Wawanesa Insurance.

What can get lost in the smoke of recent central B.C. fire seasons is the hard work of bringing these forests back. The Indigenous-led Secwepemcúl’ecw Restoration and Stewardship Society (SRSS), with financial support from WWF-Canada and our donors, planted more than 500,000 trees to restore 250 hectares of fire-impacted ecosystems over the past year, bringing the total though this partnership to 1.1 million trees across 677 hectares.

And there’s a lot more work to do. SRSS was formed by eight Secwépemc bands in the aftermath of a 2017 fire season that blazed through 192,725 hectares of Secwépemcúl’ecw territory. Promoting a collaborative approach to yecwemínem (stewardship and caretakership), their goal is to recover from fire in a way that adheres to Secwépemc values and laws.

Guided by Indigenous knowledge combined with scientific data, SRSS has been working to restore habitat for at-risk species in Secwépemc territory, as well as promote food sovereignty and access to traditional medicines. They are focused on restoring both trees and shrubs by planting a wide variety of native and adapted species. They are monitoring how their efforts sequester carbon and working to implement a native seed collection program and scale up nursery capacity, with an aim to plant one million trees annually by 2026.

This work is supported by Aviva Canada, the Government of Canada through the 2 Billion Trees program, Lowe’s, the Peter Gilgan Foundation and the Ronald S. Roadburg Foundation.

Each year, salmon swim from the Salish Sea up through the Lower Fraser River’s network of streams, creeks and tributaries to their southern B.C. spawning grounds. Katzie First Nation, whose members have stewarded these lands and waters for millennia, consider these annual salmon visitors family. But in recent decades, human-caused impacts such as landslides and logging roads have blocked their returning routes, threatening all five salmon species that use them.

After four successful summers of spawning habitat restoration across the watershed, restoration teams hit a major milestone this year with a new waterway along the floodplain’s south treeline connecting Boise Creek to a 1.2-kilometre-long side channel in need of fresh flows to support spawning salmon. The project is now providing enough clean and cold water into the channel for Upper Pitt sockeye to complete their spawning cycle and help their population numbers recover.

This project is funded by FINISH®, the H. John McDonald Foundation, MakeWay, the Real Estate Foundation of BC, Ronald S. Roadburg Foundation and W.C. Kitchen Family Foundation.

Southern Quebec is famous for its sugar bushes — the maple forest operations that produce all that beloved maple syrup. But decades spent maximizing short-term syrup production by removing non-maple trees has degraded 50 per cent of these ecosystems, threatening 17 local at-risk species like the wood thrush and spring salamander.

These now-monocultural forests are less suitable for wildlife and more vulnerable to climate change — and by allowing more wind and sun to penetrate the canopy, they also threaten syrup production by reducing the moist conditions maple forests need.

WWF-Canada’s Maple Initiative brings together sugarbush owners, maple producers, forest engineers, academic experts and environmental NGOs to help restore these forests. Last year, we set up a how-to restoration program for landowners that includes maple forest health assessment training and management guidance, such as suggested native species to plant, depending on the region. And we will continue working together to make maple forests more diverse, for all the species (and pancakes) that depend on them.

Talking to neighbours in person has always been the best way to learn and find common ground. But while just as true for neighbouring communities, it’s much harder when it’s 25 Nunavut communities across a couple million square kilometres.

Take Taloyoak, on the northern tip of Canada’s mainland, where the local hunters and trappers group Taloyoak Umaruliririgut Association (TUA) has been working to establish the nearly 90,000-square-kilometre Aqviqtuuq Inuit Protected and Conserved Area (IPCA) with an associated conservation-based economy that provides an alternative to resource extraction.

This story starts but does not end there, because TUA wants to support similar conservation efforts by their fellow Nunavummiut — and we want to support all of them. The best way to do so is by facilitating knowledge-sharing between far-flung neighbours in a territory where travel can be prohibitively expensive. So, we kicked off a cross-community project with funding from the WWF Global Arctic Programme’s Arctic Biodiversity Initiative and technical and administrative support from WWF-Canada staff.

First, we travelled with TUA’s Jimmy Ullikatalik and Lena Neeveacheak in 2023 for Inuktitut-language meetings and workshops in their fellow Eastern Kitikmeot region communities, Gjoa Haven and Kugaaruk. Known as Netsilikmiut, the people of the ringed seal, Inuit in this region share deep family ties and a mutual desire to collaborate on resources and opportunities.

Then last winter, we hosted a knowledge exchange summit in Iqaluit bringing together Inuit leaders from seven communities across all three regions of Nunavut, as well as Nunavik, along with territorial and federal government representatives.

The discussion focused on how best to advance local priorities like conserving country food species, creating Guardians programs and establishing Inuit-led protected areas. Beyond fostering further collaboration among these three Kitikmeot communities, it provided an opportunity for programs like Foxe Basin Kivalliq North Sapujiyiit (Guardians of the Sea) Society to share their experiences and contribute to a broader network of Inuit conservation leaders. It also built on momentum from a smaller-scale knowledge exchange event we hosted in Yellowknife in May 2023.

Then last spring, TUA and WWF-Canada staffers returned to Kugaaruk and Gjoa Haven to update leaders on Aqviqtuuq’s progress and hold public meetings so residents could learn more about Taloyoak’s efforts to protect their land, water and wildlife. WWF-Canada has been honoured to support their regional-scale protection and conservation efforts, which now include both Kugaaruk and Gjoa Haven Hunters and Trappers Associations (HTAs) deeply engaged in the benefits of an IPCA, and Kugaaruk initiating their own Guardians Program.

“It's important because it goes to our forefathers, generations back, and how they grew up before colonization, before the Church, before Hudson’s Bay, before the RCMP,” TUA treasurer Viola Neeveacheak told us after the knowledge-sharing trip. “It goes back to how we used to live — the traditional way without being interrupted — and it should still continue that way.”

This project was undertaken with the financial support of the Elpis Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Government of Canada through Environment and Climate Change Canada, and Polar Knowledge Canada.

WWF-Canada launched the Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area (IPCA) Support Fund during COP15, the landmark UN biodiversity summit in Montreal, with a commitment to provide funding of between $50,000 to $150,000 per year to support Indigenous nations and communities to consider if an IPCA is a priority for them or assist with early-stage implementation.

Defined and managed by Indigenous communities and stewarded through Indigenous laws and knowledge systems, IPCAs are critical in the fight to halt and reverse biodiversity loss and secure the climate benefits of healthy ecosystems while upholding the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Activities supported by the fund include community dialogues with Elders, youth and knowledge keepers, as well as community-owned data collection on ecosystem carbon and other activities requested by applicants to support community deliberations.

WWF-Canada subsequently received more than 130 inquiries, signalling a high level of interest, and an Indigenous advisory group was established in July 2023 to support our commitment to a relationship-based and community-centred approach to funding Indigenous-led protection. In the first round of applications, WWF-Canada welcomed more than 37 expressions of interest from Indigenous governments and organizations to access funds that would help materialize their inspiring visions for protecting lands and waters.

WWF-Canada is now in the process of disbursing $500,000 in funding to seven Indigenous-led initiatives. Guided by the Indigenous advisors and feedback from the inaugural recipients, the IPCA Support Fund will continue to grow in impact and effectiveness in the years to come.

In a win-win for communities and wildlife, last spring the International Maritime Organization (IMO) approved an emission control area (ECA) for Canadian Arctic waters covering the region’s 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone, not just the 12-nautical-mile territorial sea. This decision to address air pollution from fossil fuel-powered ships, including sulphur oxides, nitrogen oxides and particulate matter, followed more than two years of WWF-Canada efforts to build support within Canada and internationally.

We engaged with stakeholders and rightsholders, published articles, developed policy documents and staged IMO interventions. Our team brought evidence-based insight, perseverance, long-term strategy and exceptional national and international collaboration.

The ECA’s enforceable measures will reduce ocean acidification and associated negative impacts, mitigate nutrient overloading and reduce black carbon, a short-lived but potent airborne pollutant that accelerates sea-ice loss and is linked to lung cancer, cardiopulmonary disease, chronic respiratory ailments and premature mortality.

With Arctic vessel traffic doubling in the last decade, the ECA’s implementation in 2026 can’t come soon enough. But now that our international efforts have paid off, we’re pushing for stronger domestic measures, including banning scrubbers, a regulatory loophole technology that converts air pollution into water pollution, and committing to not unload increased shipping costs onto Northern communities.

This project, along with our Arctic conservation and national shipping work, is funded in part by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.