October 19, 2021 East Coast Environmental Law has released a new update to our report Protected on Paper Only: An Evaluation of Nova Scotia's Legal Obligations under the Endangered Species Act. Biodiversity is declining at an alarming rate around the world, including in Atlantic Canada. Our governments have tools they can use to stop and reverse biodiversity loss, and those tools include laws to protect species at risk. Nova Scotia's Endangered Species Act ("the ESA") is one such law, and it can protect species at risk in Nova Scotia in meaningful ways. But laws like the ESA won't make a difference if the governments that create them don't implement them fully. In 2015, East Coast Environmental Law published a report called Protected on Paper Only: An Evaluation of Nova Scotia's Legal Obligations under the Endangered Species Act. In it, we assessed what the ESA requires the Government of Nova Scotia to do to protect species at risk in the province, and we analyzed to what extent the government was meeting its obligations. Ultimately, the report found that the government had failed to meet several of its legal obligations under the Act. We published an updated version of Protected on Paper Only in 2019, soon after a group of Nova Scotians (ourselves included) asked the Nova Scotia Supreme Court to…