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Alberta’s draft plan misses the mark on protecting land and species in the Lower Athabasca
By Jennifer Grant, Pembina Institute
Thursday, April 07, 2011
Alberta released its draft plan for the Lower Athabasca Region earlier this week, and there was certainly no shortage of drama as commentators digested what it all means — with sometimes comical degrees of accuracy.
Tuesday’s breathless headlines — including reports that Alberta oilsands companies were “stunned [external link]” by the plan, and a bizarre and factually inaccurate press release by Alberta’s Wildrose Alliance [external link] Party arguing that protecting land (in an area that has virtually no oil potential) represented a “devastating assault” on the province’s economy — have since been followed by more sober assessments.
The latest reports conclude the plan will have very “little impact [external link]” on oilsands producers, given that the province has bent over backwards to ensure conservation areas do not conflict with bitumen leases. Indeed, the numbers reveal perhaps less than one per cent of Alberta’s bitumen in the Lower Athabasca region might be affected by the proposed conservation areas — which gives you some idea, perhaps, of the Government of Alberta’s idea of “balancing” conservation and economic development
A plan for the oilsands is long overdue. Alberta officially launched its work on oilsands environmental management in 1999 with its Regional Sustainable Development Strategy. Twelve years is a long time to wait for a land use plan that deals with cumulative effects, and now it looks like we will have to wait a few years more, as many of the plan’s elements are still not complete.
Less than one per cent of Alberta’s bitumen in the Lower Athabasca region might be affected by the proposed conservation areas
Less than one per cent of Alberta’s bitumen in the Lower Athabasca region might be affected by the proposed conservation areas. Photo: David Dodge, Pembina Institute.
While the need for new protected areas is a critical gap in Alberta’s land management and we are pleased this has finally been acknowledged by the provincial government, where these sites are established needs to be guided by science in order to protect the places of highest environmental value, rather than protecting the scraps that are unwanted by the forestry or petroleum sector. About 85 per cent of the protected areas identified by the Government of Alberta have no forestry or oil and gas potential at all, while most sites of conservation importance received no protection.
The Government of Alberta updated its Environmentally Significant Areas [external link] mapping in 2009, and it is clear that sites identified as significant — including the Athabasca River, McClelland Lake Fen, Lakeland and caribou ranges — deserve protection. Albertans obviously agree, given that public feedback on the “vision document [PDF]” for the Lower Athabasca Plan a year ago showed the most common response was calling for more focus on environmental protection (see figure below). In contrast, the government’s draft plan ended up going in the opposite direction, being substantially weaker than the recommendations of its own advisory group.
Keep reading this entry on the Pembina Institute website
Tagged with: pembina institute, boreal forest, alberta government, lower athabasca regional plan, environmental protection
