Image: James Wheeler

The Salish Sea is one of the most biologically rich marine ecosystems in the world.

It is home to some of the planet’s most awe-inspiring creatures – orca and humpback whales, giant octopus, great blue heron and glass sponge reefs to name a few. It is a place of spectacular beauty, with soaring mountains, remote inlets, vibrant islands, and abundant watersheds, stewarded for millennia by coastal First Nations and loved and relied on by communities today.

But the Salish Sea is a region under threat. Population growth, urbanization and climate change are putting increased pressures on both ecosystems and communities.

Georgia Strait Alliance is dedicated to the protection and restoration of this place that almost nine million people and 3000 marine species call home.

The focus of many of our programs and initiatives is working toward the protection and recovery of species at risk, through legal efforts to improve the implementation of the federal Species at Risk Act (SARA), education to raise awareness of what each of us can do to protect these vulnerable species and holding governments and industry to account on their obligations to marine life, and challenge decisions that will negatively affect the Salish Sea. Our approach centres and takes its lead from communities, and reflects that we cannot achieve healthy ecosystems without also supporting healthy communities.

Protection of species at risk such as the southern resident killer whale is one of the motivators that inspired the formation of the Georgia Strait Alliance – if we protect killer whale habitat, we protect the Salish Sea.