Proposals to Protect

Click the links below to learn more about the Wilderness Areas that have been proposed for protection by environmental organisations, grassroot groups and citizen scientists across Nova Scotia!

Protecting 20% by 2030

In 2021, our government committed to protecting 20% of Nova Scotia’s land and water by 2030. Achieving this goal is so important that we legislated it in the Environmental Goals and Climate Change Reduction Act.

Those are the opening sentences of the government’s Collaborative Protected Areas Strategy: An Action Plan for Achieving 20 Percent (Collaborative Strategy)

In late 2021, when this commitment was put into law, 13.45% of Nova Scotia was protected. In late 2025, that figure is 13.75%. Progress has been miniscule. We need to protect another 340,000 hectares by 2030 to meet the 20% commitment. Fortunately, there is more than enough publicly owned land to do this and still have ample crown land available for forestry and other uses. 

The Collaborative Strategy, published in December 2023 , outlines key criteria for selecting areas for protection. These include keeping “areas in a mostly natural state with relatively few human impacts compared to other lands in the surrounding landscape,” as well as providing ecological connectivity and watershed protection. “Larger areas are preferred,” as are “areas rich in biodiversity as well as rare or unique landscapes, such as old-growth forests, salt marshes, and habitats that support species at risk.” The strategy recognises that, in order to create larger protected areas, it will be necessary to include some areas that were altered from natural forest to plantations in the past.  

The Minister of Natural Resources (DNR) and the Minister of Environment and Climate Change (ECC) both signed the Collaborative Strategy. They are mandated to work together to meet the goal of protecting 20%. Unfortunately DNR appears to be in a much greater hurry to identify potential sites for High Production Forestry (clearcutting and spraying) than they are to identify the areas that should be protected, even though HPF is supposed to be implemented very gradually over 35 years, at a rate of about 5,000 hectares a year. Compare that to the 340,000 ha that still need to be identified for protection in the next 5 years.

In fact, thanks to the Canada-Nova Scotia Nature Agreement signed with the federal government on October 10, 2023, Nova Scotia has an interim target to reach by 2026. By that date we agreed to have protected 15% of our province.

If we don’t protect 69,000 more hectares by the end of 2026, Nova Scotia will have to return the $28.5 million dollars the federal government has given us.

Fortunately, citizen scientists have been hard at work proposing areas of Crown land to protect and documenting their conservation value. Protecting four of these proposed Wilderness Areas – Beals Brook, Chain Lakes, Goldsmith Lake and Ingram River – would take us halfway to meeting the 15% interim goal. ECC has already reviewed these areas. It is past time for DNR and ECC to start collaborating. We need action not obstruction.  

A note about figures: Nova Scotia covers 5,528,400 hectares. For the sake of simplicity, let’s say 5,500,000 hectares or 55,000 sq km. One percent of the province is 55,000 hectares or 550 sq km.