The Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) has just released its State of Ontario’s Protected Areas Report on the Environmental Registry.  Protected areas are a critical tool to conserve biodiversity in Ontario.  This report lays out:

• a brief historical perspective of the protected area system;
• legislative and strategic direction for the protected area system;
• an overview of protected area selection, planning and management;
• information on the ecological, geological and cultural heritage features within the system of protected areas;
• known pressures on ecological integrity, and responses to those pressures; and,
• social and economic aspects associated with protected areas.

The Environmental Commissioner of Ontario (ECO) first talked about the need to report on the over-all ecological health of our system of provincial parks and conservation reserves in our 2006/2007 Annual Report.

In our 2008/2009 Annual Report, the ECO wrote that it is extremely important that this report provide a frank assessment of the state of Ontario’s protected areas. This report should hopefully be used by MNR to focus its resources on key systemic issues, be they common threats to ecological integrity or the need to expand government policy to adequately address a developing issue.