The new KMGBF commits Canada to “identify, phase out or reform incentives, including subsidies, harmful for biodiversity…” (Target 18). This is the single biggest opportunity for catalyzing a nature positive economy.
Target 14 requires the full integration of biodiversity values into policies, planning and accounting, and aligning fiscal and financial flows with framework goals and targets.
Current spending on practices that degrade nature far outstrips spending on those that can conserve and restore it. Action is urgently needed to identify environmentally harmful subsidies (EHS) in Canada and to pursue innovations in federal subsidy and tax reform, budgeting and policymaking, and leadership in the expansion of green financial products, to improve coherence between economic and environmental policy, and reorient the flow of public capital to catalyze new nature-positive economic opportunities.
As a starting point for delivering on these targets, the Green Budget Coalition recommends that the federal government immediately develop:
- A plan to eliminate subsidies that are harmful to nature. The Government of Canada should immediately launch an initiative to identify all nature-negative subsidies, and then—by 2024—complete and commit to a plan to phase out, re-design, or re-orient nature-negative subsidies by 2027. (Target 18). [FIN, ECCC, DFO, AAFC, NRCan]
- An Integrated Climate and Nature Lens for federal policy- and budget-making. The Government of Canada’s 2020 Strengthened Climate Plan committed to creating a “climate lens” as an assessment tool for all major government decisions, including federal budgets. Biodiversity should be embedded in this tool. Further, this Integrated Climate and Nature Lens should be part of the Impacts Reports included in federal budgets. See also Climate and biodiversity conditions on federal spending, earlier in this document. [PCO, FIN, ECCC]