Summary: Pacific salmon suffer from a myriad of cuts, laws, and jurisdictions

Pacific salmon are central to the cultures, ecosystems, and economies of the Pacific coast, yet many populations are in serious decline. A big reason is that salmon face “a thousand cuts”—multiple, overlapping impacts from human activities and climate change that add up over time. Forest harvesting, mining, farming, dams, pollution, urban development, fishing, and warming waters all chip away at salmon survival. Even small changes, repeated across watersheds and generations, can have major consequences.

We undertook this study because most policies and laws only look at individual projects or activities in isolation. This piecemeal approach misses the bigger picture of how different impacts accumulate and interact. We wanted to explore how cumulative effects on salmon are linked to human activities, and how laws and governance either help or hinder their survival.

To do this, we reviewed the major stressors affecting salmon at each stage of their life cycle—spawning in rivers, rearing in lakes and streams, migrating through estuaries, and feeding in the open ocean. For each habitat, we traced connections between human activities, their impacts, and the laws that regulate them. We then examined how overlapping jurisdictions within Crown governance (i.e., federal, provincial, and local) affect salmon ecosystems, informed by the expertise and perspectives of our co-author team.

What we found is both troubling and hopeful. On one hand, salmon habitats continue to be eroded by scarce monitoring, narrow assessments, isolated decision-making, and laws that allow incremental harm to add up. Crown governments frequently authorize activities that degrade rivers and coasts, while climate change intensifies the risks. On the other hand, we found underused tools and opportunities that could make a real difference. These include collaborative monitoring, regional approaches to assessment, support of Indigenous-led governance, and laws that already exist but are not fully applied.

The story of Pacific salmon in British Columbia illustrates how complex governance systems can either perpetuate decline or foster recovery. To safeguard salmon, a shift is needed from narrow, project-by-project regulation to coordinated, precautionary, and inclusive management that truly addresses cumulative effects.

This study was the result of a collaborative project involving 14 experts in science and policy from institutions that included Simon Fraser University, University of British Columbia, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, West Coast Environmental Law, Central Coast Indigenous Resource Alliance, and POLIS Project of Ecological Governance of University of Victoria as part of the Watershed Futures Initiative.