The monarch butterfly, an elegant moth with white-spotted orange wings known for its long migrations of more than 4,000 kilometers across the entire American continent, entered the “red list” of threatened species of the International Union for conservation (IUCN), in the category “endangered”.
Monarch populations have indeed collapsed in recent years in North America. The eastern population, which migrates in particular to Quebec to reproduce there in June, has declined by 85% since 1996, under the effect of climate change and the weakening of its habitat.
In November 2022, the Canadian government announced its intention to include the monarch in its “Species at Risk Act” in order to save him from an announced disappearance.
“Protection efforts will have to go beyond Canadian borders, extending into the United States and Mexico, to take into account the complex cycle of the butterfly, which migrates from south to north”, already warns Alain Branchaud, director of the Society for Nature and Parks of Quebec. Such a classification will at least have the merit of involving the development of a Canadian recovery plan and the designation of its “critical habitat” to ensure its survival.
Case of conscience
But even before having acquired this status “protected species”, the monarch poses a matter of conscience in Ottawa. To the north of the Pierre-Elliott-Trudeau international airport in Montreal, the Aéroport de Montréal company in fact razed in 2021, without government authorization, the vegetation of the “field of monarchs”, a huge green space where the milkweed is found, a plant essential to the life cycle of this butterfly. Since then, a group of volunteer citizens, gathered within the Technoparc Oiseaux, has continued to demand the protection of these lands, which are also places of passage or nesting of more than 150 species of birds.
On the eve of the opening of COP15 on biodiversity, the Canadian Minister of Transport was still saying his powerlessness to undertake the protection of this land given ” long term lease signed in 1992 with the tenant company of these federal lands. But on Friday, December 9, his environment and climate change colleague, Steven Guilbeault, took the opposite view of this wait-and-see attitude. “Adding the monarch to our endangered species list will give us a hand in protecting its habitat, and yes, certainly, I have every intention of protecting this land”, he affirmed in a categorical tone. Without a doubt ” butterfly Effect “ of the UN conference on biological diversity taking place in Montreal from December 7 to 19.