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.