Guest blog by Cameron Butler, PHD candidate, York University
With the passage of the Lake Simcoe Protection Act in 2008 and the plan for its implementation, the Ontario government formally adopted an adaptive management approach for Lake Simcoe, based on incorporating up-to-date science, innovative research, and stakeholder engagement to best support the complex lake ecosystem. Over the past several years, the current government has been increasingly undermining adaptive management efforts by reducing public reporting.
What is adaptive management?
Adaptive management is an approach that deals with complex ecological dynamics through iterative processes of experimentation and adjustment. Actions are taken to improve conditions, in this case lake health, and the impacts are monitored and assessed to adapt future actions to be more effective. [1] Adaptive management is meant to involve ongoing assessment that feeds back into the action plan. The process of ongoing action and assessment allows for fine tuning actions, abandoning those that aren’t working, and adopting new actions based on unforeseen issues and updates to scientific knowledge.
It’s like the difference between following a recipe and only tasting it at the very end to see if it needs more salt versus tasting it and seasoning as you go. It’s easier to end up with a delicious dish if you’ve been assessing and adjusting throughout.
Adaptive management is particularly useful in watersheds, where there are a great deal of uncertainties because of the hydrological and ecological complexity, and the sensitivity of those hydro-ecological systems to climate change. [2] As the Lake Simcoe Coordinating Committee said in the 2021-2022 Environment Minister’s Annual Report: “Climate change continues to be a major stressor on the lake’s ecosystem and the resulting impacts on the ecosystem are poorly understood. Continued monitoring and research along with adaptive management plans and practices are essential to counteract the impacts of climate change.” From the invasive quagga mussels replacing the also invasive zebra mussels in the lake over the past 20 years, phosphorus loads massively fluctuating year-to-year based on rainfall, and cold-water fish numbers remaining stubbornly low, there are a lot of uncertainties that require monitoring, research, and most important, reporting.
Reduced reporting conflicts with adaptive management principles
Beyond the scientific level of experimentation and flexibility, a key dimension to adaptive management is stakeholder engagement. Adaptive management “must be a social as well as scientific process” because it “requires an open management process which seeks to include past, present, and future stakeholders.” [3] Adaptive management depends on a strong level of reporting and consultation to feed into the social learning dimension; the assessment of whether actions are working and what changes to make are based on a mix of both scientific data and social value judgments. Stakeholders provide the input on what is most important and what trade-offs to make.
That need for greater transparency and stakeholder engagement comes in conflict with the apparent changes in data reporting. The Lake Simcoe Protection Act (LSPA) mandates the Minister of Environment to produce an annual report on progress made in implementing the Act. However, since 2019 the Minister has opted to instead produce “annual” reports that span 2 years, meaning there was a 2019-2020 report and a 2021-2022 report. This means greater delays in the public release of information about implementation efforts.
The Lake Simcoe Science and Coordinating Committees have also changed their terms of reference, but their new terms of reference are not publicly available. As the two key bodies that are meant to inform government efforts on the implementation of the act, it is concerning that we don’t know how their objectives and aims may have changed. The fact that a well-known development lawyer, not a scientist, is the new Chair of the Lake Simcoe Science committee is not encouraging.
On the monitoring side, the Lake Simcoe Region Conservation Authority compiles its Phosphorus Loads Update reports on a three-year basis, with the last one covering the 2018 to 2020 hydrologic years (meaning June 2018 to May 2021). While this monitoring and compilation of this data takes time, the time gaps between their reports are felt more when the provincial government pulls back on their mandated reporting of implementation actions. With annual reports becoming biennial reports and the results of the Lake Simcoe Protection Plan review consultations from three years ago still not released, conversations about the future planning are based more and more on past rather than current data.
What this means for Lake Simcoe
For Lake Simcoe, this reduction in reporting and transparency means it becomes harder and slower to know if land use changes around the lake are negatively impacting it. That’s especially concerning as the provincial government has and is making big policy changes to build more suburban and urban development, quicker.
We know that the health of the watershed is strongly influenced by land use and the amount of natural cover on the landscape. Recent provincial policy changes, through Bill 185, completely eliminates the Growth Plan, which managed growth, and significantly, the amount of land used up by housing through intensification targets which have disappeared everywhere except around major transit station areas. There will be a further loss of farmland and permeable areas across the landscape as a result.
The result of the above described changes in public reporting makes it harder for the public to participate in, and evaluate decision-making around the future of Lake Simcoe and its protection. This reduction in government transparency around environmental data comes at a time when major development policy changes are being implemented that will have major and likely unexpected impacts on Lake Simcoe. It’s hard to assess whether the government is acting in the public interest, and in the interest of lake health, when more information is hidden or increasingly out of date. And it’s going to be even harder to tell if (or perhaps more accurately, how) the focus on rapid development through increasingly fragmented decision-making harms wetlands and the lake ecosystem. If the province is going to properly carry out an adaptive management approach, then the timely and open publication of data is step one.
References:
[1] Webb, Angus, Watts, Robyn, Allan, Catherine, and Andrew Warner. 2017. “Principles for monitoring, evaluation, and adaptive management of environmental water regimes.” In Water for the Environment, edited by Avril Horne, J. Angus Webb, Michael Stewardson, Brian Richter, and Mike Acreman, 599-623. London: Elsevier.
[2] Mysiak, Jaroslav, Henrikson, Hans, Sullivan, Caroline, Bromley, John, and Claudia Pahl-Wostl, eds. 2010. The Adaptive Water Resource Management Handbook. London: Earthscan.
[3] Engle, Nathan, Johns, Owen, Lemos, Maria, and Donald Nelson. 2011. “Integrated and Adaptive Management of water resources: Tensions, legacies, and the next best thing.” Ecology and Society 16 (1): 19.
[4] LSRCA. Monitoring Report – Planning and Development Applications for the Period January 1 through
December 31, 2023. Board of Directors Agenda and package. February 23, 2024.