Renewable
Resources
This cluster group will be asked to look at
two areas of renewable natural resources - fisheries and forests.
The two broad categories of renewable resources are being
taken up by a single cluster group to build on similarities
and complementarities between the two sectors (e.g. similar
population models for resource stocks). Within these broad
resource categories, the group will consider general aspects
of ecosystem health, along with stock quantity and quality.
This group may work in two sub-sections for part of the time,
each devoted to one of the resource categories.
Fisheries and Aquatic Resources: The
group will be asked to:
- Examine the feasibility of developing a national
indicator of marine ecosystem health, particularly related
to biodiversity and other ecosystem factors (e.g. the availability
of spawning habitat, and water or habitat quality), and
- Examine the feasibility of determining stock
estimates and indicators of commercially exploited marine
species.
Forests: The group will be asked to:
- Develop a stock estimate and indicators of
commercially exploitable forest resources and determine
what additional information will be needed to determine
whether this stock is being used in a sustainable fashion.
Stock estimates may be derived from the Statistics Canada
timber account and other sources of data. As with the non-renewable
resource cluster group, this group will be asked to examine
whether to include indicators of economically exploitable
stocks, or those related to the total resource base of timber
in Canada, a broader definition that includes all land suitable
for timber production and where timber harvesting is allowed,
- Examine the feasibility of determining an
indicator of the quality of timber stocks (e.g. productivity),
and
- Develop a national indicator that best represents
the health of all forest ecosystems (not necessarily ecosystems
containing timber stock), particularly related to biological
diversity and to the environmental services that forests
provide.
The group will be asked to consider how to incorporate
a spatial dimension into the data underlying the recommended
indicators.
For both fisheries and forests, the group will
be asked to recommend no more than three indicators, and to
designate one preferred indicator to the Steering Committee.
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