Our Impact

The Fish, Wildlife & Habitat Coalition (FWHBC) of British Columbia is a massive, unified advocacy collective that has significantly shifted the landscape of conservation and resource management in BC.
The impact of the Fish, Wildlife & Habitat Coalition of British Columbia
The Fish, Wildlife and Habitat Coalition of British Columbia meeting with government representatives in 2024.

We are a Unified Voice for BC’s Wild Spaces.

We are a powerhouse of 28 organizations, over 300,000 British Columbians and 1,000 businesses, standing shoulder-to-shoulder to defend our province’s natural heritage.

Historically, our network was divided. Today, we bridge 28 traditionally distinct and often conflicting groups. By uniting conservationists, hunters, anglers, eco-tourism operators, and naturalists under one banner, we have transformed fragmented advocacy into an unstoppable movement.

Together, we ensure that the health of British Columbia’s fish, wildlife, and habitats can no longer be ignored, sidelined, or compromised. We are no longer just asking for change; we are driving it.

The Bottom Line: Our primary impact has been converting fragmented, localized environmental anxiety into a massive, organized, and politically potent force. We are successfully compelling the BC. government to legally and financially prioritize the province’s ecosystems before it is too late.

With our collective scale, provincial lawmakers must listen. We are actively pressuring the B.C. government to shift its priorities away from decades of raw resource extraction and toward long-term ecological health.

  • We lobby for overarching, outcome-based legislation that places ecosystem preservation on equal footing with industry.
  • We are heavily involved in shaping B.C.’s commitment to the 30×30 goal (protecting 30% of B.C.’s land and water by 2030), ensuring that land securement targets high-value, at-risk habitats.

For too long, B.C.’s conservation budgets have been subject to the changing political whims of annual Treasury Board allocations. We are altering this narrative by fighting for legislated, dedicated long-term funding. We are pushing the province to establish permanent endowments and demanding that 100% of hunting and angling license fees, alongside wildlife violation fines, go directly back into conservation rather than disappearing into general government revenue.

Resource management in B.C. was frequently plagued by conflict between different user groups. We are bridging these social divides around a core philosophy: abundant wildlife benefits everyone. By championing the massive economic footprint of our sustainable outdoor economy, we demonstrate that healthy ecosystems directly protect tourism, local jobs, and community food security.

We explicitly integrate the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) into our framework. We foster collaborative partnerships between First Nations and non-First Nations communities, ensuring that conservation policy is guided jointly by Western science and Traditional Ecological Knowledge.