Prime Minister Mark Carney announced $3.8 billion in funding to protect nature on Tuesday, as the federal government moves to meet its conservation targets.

In addition to public money, the government is seeking private sector investment to fund the conservation strategy, which will involve the creation of new national parks and marine reserves.

“Creating these spaces is ambitious and requires significant funding,” Carney said during a news conference in Wakefield, Que. “We can’t do it with public money alone.”

The government is aiming to protect 30 per cent of Canada’s lands and waters by 2030. About 14 per cent of land in Canada is currently protected.

Those protection targets were stablished by the Trudeau government following the the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15) in Montreal in 2022. In recent months environmental groups have expressed concern that the government has not matched its conservation ambitions with long-term funding commitments.

The new funds would be invested across three pillars, Carney said, identifying them as “protecting nature, building Canada well and valuing nature and mobilizing capital.” 

The government will create two new conservation sites immediately, Carney said: the Wiinipaawk Indigenous Protected Area and National Marine Conservation Area in eastern James Bay off Quebec and the Seal River Watershed National Park in Manitoba.

The government will also create “other effective area-based conservation measures,” which Carney said are “sites where the land and water can be conserved while allowing some other activities.” 

Up to 14 new marine-protected and conserved areas and up to 10 new marine conservation areas would be created. Two of the marine areas in the Arctic — Sarvarjuaq and Qikiqtait — would protect populations of polar bears, walruses and beluga whales.

If created, these new protected marine areas would amount to 12 per cent of Canada’s waters, bringing the total amount of protected waters to 28 per cent.

“We’ve got work to do to close that gap, and we will close that gap,” Carney said.