Industry-led imperilled species management approach falls short in delivering beneficial outcomes
Imperilled species management options range from top-down legal requirements to bottom-up voluntary approaches. The Ontario government’s Endangered Species Act came into effect in 2008 and a 2013 amendment required certain industries, such as hydropower operators, to manage their own impacts to species at risk.
This industry-driven approach placed the onus and responsibility on hydropower operators to register facilities that harm species at risk, develop and implement their own mitigation plans, and monitor the effects of their facilities and effectiveness of their mitigation actions.
Read this open access paper on the FACETS website.
Mitigation plans and monitoring reports only had to be submitted to the provincial regulator if requested. This mandatory but industry-driven approach is relatively unique in imperilled species management.
We used the American Eel, listed as Endangered under the Ontario Endangered Species Act, as a case study to evaluate the outcomes of this industry-driven approach.
American Eel are a catadromous species, which means they are born in the ocean, migrate to freshwater as juveniles to grow, then return to the ocean to spawn once they mature.
Hydropower facilities harm eels by blocking their upstream migration as juveniles, and by killing a portion of adults that swim through the turbines as they out-migrate to spawn.
We obtained mitigation plans and monitoring reports from willing industry partners and through freedom of information request to the province.
We reviewed observation and collection records to identify facilities that were likely having adverse effects on American Eel and confirmed whether each was registered.
We reviewed mitigation plans, asking whether mitigation actions followed best practices previously identified by Ontario’s hydropower industry.
We also reviewed the design of monitoring protocols to evaluate whether they were scientifically valid for quantifying the adverse effects of facilities on eels and for estimating the effectiveness of mitigation actions.
Our evaluation of this hydropower industry-driven approach revealed very limited beneficial outcomes to American Eel. Specifically, we found that less than half of the hydropower facilities harming American Eel were registered with the provincial regulator.
Monitoring programs were only designed to sample whether eels were present, not to estimate how many there were, or what proportion was harmed by the facility. Mitigation actions that followed industry-developed best management practices were only implemented for eel out-migration at three facilities.
Half of the registered facilities monitored the effectiveness of their mitigation actions, but the monitoring protocols did not follow best practices and standards from a scientific perspective. Ultimately, only two eels were documented as being saved from turbine mortality throughout the study period.
Most hydropower operators have not taken advantage of the liberties and flexibility afforded by this regulatory approach to develop robust and efficient plans to protect American Eel from harm by their facilities. At the same time, they have received little guidance from the regulator as to what level of mitigation they are expected to achieve.
To improve this emerging imperilled species management approach, regulators could reduce ambiguity and vagueness in regulation language and provide clearer, quantitative requirements for facility registration, mitigation actions, and monitoring protocols.
Hydropower operators could improve monitoring efforts to estimate species abundance and generate baseline data to measure facility effects and mitigation action effectiveness and could do more to reduce the harm caused by their facilities.
Read the paper — Assessing a proponent-driven process for endangered species threat mitigation: Ontario’s Endangered Species Act, American Eel, and hydropower by Dirk A. Algera, Kate L. Neigel, Kerri Kosziwka, Alice E.I. Abrams, Daniel M. Glassman, Joseph R. Bennett, Steven J. Cooke, and Nicolas W.R. Lapointe
