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Towards Comprehensive Conservation of Environmentally Significant Areas in the Northwest Territories of Canada
Abstract
A wide legislative base is available to conserve Environmentally Significant Areas in the vast Northwest Territories of Canada. However, existing conservation reserves have been designated in an ‘incremental’ fashion, without reference to a guiding plan. Intensive industrialization through hydrocarbon development and increased harvesting of renewable resources are threats to the integrity of many ESAs.
An anticipatory and comprehensive policy to conserve Environmentally Significant Areas (ESAs) in advance of industrialization is required, but developing such a policy will be difficult, owing to the complex political and jurisdictional ‘environments’ in northern Canada. Despite these problems, the recently announced Northern Landuse Planning Policy could be a vehicle for the implementation of a comprehensive conservation policy for ESAs, if only the institutional structures and processes that will accompany this policy are adequately designed.
The need for adaptive approaches to environmental impact assessment (EIA) has been well-argued in recent years (Holling 1978; Jacobs and Kemp 1987; Fenge 1985; Fenge and Rees 1987). Holling (1978) has advocated EIA systems which are designed and implemented in such ways that they may adapt to continual uncertainty and take advantage of surprise, thus converting problems into opportunities. Canadian EIA researchers have criticized current EIA processes for their lack of effectiveness, efficiency and fairness, the infrequency and inconsistency of their application and their lack of integration with other processes such as planning, regulation and monitoring (Gibson and Patterson 1985; Gibson et al. 1987, Gibson 1988; Fenge 1985; Fenge and Rees 1987; Lang and Armour 1981; Rees 1981). This paper is devoted mainly to exploring the potential for these, and other common shortcomings of EIA, to be addressed through more adaptive approaches.
A study of the 1978 application for permission to undertake exploratory drilling in South Davis Strait, northeastern Canada, resulted in the identification of problems with the federal Environmental Assessment and Review Process (EARP). These problems have recurred in other environmental impact assessments since 1978 in other parts of northern Canada, and some improvements have been made in approaches to them. However, further progress is needed if the EARP process is to become a more widely accepted method than at present of conducting evaluations of development impacts and the means of managing them in northern Canada.
This paper focuses on the procedural rather than the scientific aspects of EARP in northeastern Canada. Recommendations include: 1) applying environmental impact assessment to policies as well as development activities; 2) strengthening socio-economic expertise and approaches; 3) financing of interveners and support for a more balanced range of interests than was displayed in this case; 4) provision of sufficient notification and adequate information; 5) documentation of rationale for decisions; and 6) monitoring and evaluation by the Canadian Federal Environmental Assessment and Review Office (FEARO) to ensure compliance with set conditions and to facilitate the tackling of unforeseen problems.
A method is developed to evaluate the biotic diversity of candidate environmentally significant areas (ESAs) in the Northwest Territories (NWT) of Canada. The method is part of an evaluation system based on five ecological criteria and linked to analyses of cultural heritage areas, land use and potential management arrangements.Data vary in quantity and quality among ESAs, creating sampling effort bias. To remedy this, we test the use of the number of ‘conspicuous’ vertebrate species as an index of overall vertebrate faunal diversity. For the same reasons we examine the relative merits of three measures of floristic diversity—number of species, genera and families.To correct for the effect of ESA size, regression is used to estimate the expected number of taxa. The number of species greater or less than expected is calculated and used as a diversity index corrected for area. The range of values of diversity are then partitioned into high, average and low ordinal categories of diversity.The method is tested on candidate ESAs in the Great Bear Lake-Eastern Beaufort Sea region of the NWT. The technique is discussed in terms of minimising sampling effort bias, correction for area and latitudinal effects, usefulness in evaluating ESAs and its practicality.
During 1975 to 1984, a particularly divisive debate accompanied proposals to conserve Polar Bear Pass, NWT. Virtually all interests that participated in the debate supported a more comprehensive approach towards conservation of natural areas than had hitherto prevailed, and criticized the ad hoc manner in which conservation proposals were being handled by the Federal Government of Canada.
Chastened by the experience with Polar Bear Pass, and suffering land-use allocation problems in many locations, the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development responded with a Northern Land-use Planning Policy (Diand, 1981 a , 1981 b ), and is now developing a comprehensive conservation policy.
Future conservation reserves in northern Canada are likely to be established as a result of regional land-use planning. It is important, however, that conservation of natural areas in both Territories support northern political development and devolution of resource management authority to northern governments, and settlement of landclaims made by native peoples.
A method is described of matching environmentally significant areas (ESAs) with the most appropriate form of management for each, selected from all the available forms. This involves comparing the purpose, reasons for significance, existing uses, and tenure, of each ESA, with the characteristics of agencies, protected area categories, legislation, and non-statutory arrangements for management, as well as examining agency coordination mechanisms or other means of implementation. The method was formulated for ESAs in the Northwest Territories (NWT) of Canada, but is considered to have wide applicability. It is illustrated with a test application to seven proposed ESAs in what is termed the eastern Beaufort Sea region.
A method is described of applying institutional arrangements to an individual environmentally significant area (ESA). It is assumed that an ESA has been recognized by park, wildlife, or other groups, on the basis of abiotic, biotic, and/or cultural, characteristics, as well as judgements about significance and constraints. National park, wildlife reserve, or other, institutional arrangements, may also have been suggested for the ESA. The goal is to decide whether these or other arrangements are appropriate— through analysis of relevant: (1) legislation; (2) agencies; and (3) reserve designation or land management types.
Methods for evaluating natural areas have evolved in the last couple of decades to assess the importance of natural areas for the purposes of land-use planning, environmental impact assessment, and planning protected areas. Criteria used for evaluation vary and generally fall into three categories: ecological, or abiotic and biotic; cultural; and planning and management. Abiotic and biotic criteria are reviewed here in terms of three questions for each criterion: What is it—what are the definitions used in the ecological and environmental management literature? Why use it—what are the reasons behind its use? How has it been used—what is the state-of-the-art in assessing the criterion? Cultural criteria are discussed more generally in terms of the commonly used frameworks and the concept of significance. Planning and management criteria are generally related to either the need for management action or feasibility of effective management.
Evaluating natural areas involves making measurements for a series of criteria and deciding which areas are most significant based on these measurements. We review the basic theory of measurement and its application to assessing criteria in 20 different conservation evaluation studies. Different types of models exist to assess the overall significance of natural areas based on multiple criteria. A brief description is presented of these multicriteria evaluation models and the underlying theory. The assumptions of these models are outlined as are the types of information that are appropriate to each. We then examine how a final overall ranking is derived in the 20 studies. None explicitly stated the model used and few noted the assumptions involved. Based on theory and current practice, a number of principles are presented to guide the development of evaluation methods. We conclude that evaluation methods should not be allowed to cloud important issues or conceal value judgements. Furthermore, the assumptions of any evaluation method should be clearly stated and rationalized in terms of the data and areas being compared.
The role of national parks and protected areas in National Conservation Strategies (NCS), a key element in the 1980 World Conservation Strategy, is analyzed for the nine countries of Australia, Belize, Canada, Czechoslovakia, India, Senegal, the United Kingdom, Vietnam and Zambia. These NCS responses are described, evaluated and synthesized primarily for 12 national park and protected area functions identified through a review of the recent literature. National parks and protected areas are found to be involved in the nine NCS in uneven and less than optimal ways. Furthermore, little relationship can be found among the various proposed roles of national parks and protected areas and the socio-economic and other characteristics of the nine countries under study. As a basis for improving both NCS and the role of national parks and protected areas, a better NCS information system is recommended for the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) headquarters, Gland, Switzerland. IUCN Commissions also are urged to be more active in NCS work. More research also is recommended especially on the role of national parks and protected areas in regard to regional planning and development, indigenous and local people, and comprehensive land use management. Finally, special efforts should be made by IUCN, and other related international, national, provincial and regional agencies, to ensure their personnel are knowledgeable about NCS and the range of functions that national parks and protected areas can contribute to them, and so to sustainable development globally.
In terms of the physical capacity of northern Canada to support the activities of man, there are no limits in sight. Once there were limits, set by northern resources essen- tial for life: the ebb and flow of wildlife cycles and shifting migration routes, and the success at killing by spear and rock fence and ambush. That was before the industrial age. Then, the human population in the Canadian north was sparse, estimated at only 34 OOO, consisting of 22 500 Eskimos and 11 500 Indians (Mooney, 1928), or 50 OOO in total (Crowe, 1974), a density of only one person per 77-133 km2 (30-44 mi'). Population limits were established by the immediate environment, no different in that regard from the populations of all other species that are inter- woven as threads in the fabric of northern ecosystems. That was before northern resources expanded to in- clude oil and gas, iron ore, uranium, zinc, ivory carvings and Eskimo prints. It was before wants for these things in distant countries, or the rest of North America, spilled over to affect the north. These new resources coupled with surpluses outside the north in material goods such as food have changed a relatively closed system, in terms of basic resources to sustain human life, into an open system built upon imports and exports (Cowan, 1969). No longer are the limits either to human populations or to human activities in the north established directly, through imme- diate ecological factors; they are largely set indirectly, through distant economic factors. Supply and demand structures have replaced trophic structures, dollar flow has intervened upon caloric flow for all but a small portion of northerners. Thus, there is little apparent need to care if caribou herds or grizzly populations dwindle; they are largely irrelevant to the economic system.
This paper reviews two important administrative devices, the Territorial Land Use Regulations and the Environmental Assessment and Review Process (EARP), and finds them inadequate in advancing the various public interests in northern development. On the positive side, major new public sector planning initiatives are about to be implemented in the north. The planning profession therefore has a new opportunity and an obligation to contribute to orderly development on our northern frontier. -from Author
Two definitions of ecological stability are in use, and it is essential to keep them separate and explicitly stated. 'Type 1 stability' is the condition of non oscillation, or nearly non oscillation and steady state found in certain tropical situations, the result of continued evolution toward greater economy of energy and involving high information content and low production/biomass ratio. This type of stability is highly vulnerable to serious perturbation, to which it cannot adapt. Such systems may thus be called 'fragile' and they are found in the tropics and perhaps in certain parts of high latitude systems, such as lakes, subarctic forests and perhaps the tundra vegetation itself. 'Type 2 stability' is the condition of ability to absorb serious perturbation and return to a stable state, usually the status quo ante. This involves system oscillation, smaller information content, higher production/biomass ratios, and lesser economy of energy use. This type is found in mid and high latitudes, in which the physical environment itself oscillates considerably. In tundra environments, extreme ecosystem simplicity in the animal communities leads to extreme oscillation, and it is suggested that such oscillations can be tolerated only if the geographic scale is large, which it is in the Arctic. 'Thermokarst', or damage to tundra terrain by damage to, or removal of, the active layer, is a serious hazard which is well understood and can be easily avoided. It is upon this that the 'fragile Arctic' reputation is founded. Oil in arctic sea water constitutes a serious hazard, probably more serious than in warmer waters.
In comparison to most parts of the world, Canada has a short history of human pressure on natural resources. North America has been extensively occupied by Man for possibly as little as thirteen thousand years. The im- migrants from Asia, via Beringia, were hunters, and it has been shown (Martin, 1967) that their advent extended a process which had long been current in the Old World - the depletion of the varied large mammal faunas of the Pleistocene era. Canada's present game animals are the survivors of the process. "We must beg the question of just how and why prehistoric man obliterated his prey. We may speculate but we cannot determine how moose, elk and caribou managed to survive while horse, ground sloth, and mastodon did not" (Martin, 1967). By the time that the present, dwindling, tide of immigra- tion and colonization began in the early 1500s, the great wave of mammal extinctions had long subsided, and a more stable relationship had become established between Man and wildlife. Amerindians, however, remained hunt- ers (although some tribes practiced agriculture) and most, particularly in the North, lived in scattered, small, im- permanent camps. Some of the earliest descriptions of Canada's North vividly describe these conditions of life (e.g. Hearne, 1795).
This is a comparative study of national park and related reserve policies and institutional arrangements in three hinterland areas undergoing rising pressure from mineral projects. The areas are the Canadian Northern Territories and Alaska (where interest lies in oil and gas exploitation) and the Australian Northern Territory (where the focus is on uranium extraction). Five elements of policy and institutional arrangements—management field, comprehensive planning and management, system planning, public inquiries, and uses—have been closely studied, with the following conclusions:
1. With respect to the management field, a major problem has been division of responsibility among federal and state or territorial agencies.
2. Overall comprehensive planning has not been seriously attempted in Canada and Australia, and has not yet met with success in Alaska.
3. A system planning approach provides rationale in Alaska and Canada, but is lacking in Australia.
4. Local comprehensive planning has been undertaken in the Kakadu National Park area of Australia, and a start has been made in this direction in Canada's northern Yukon.
5. Two uses, mining and native activities, pose special problems for national parks and related reserve policy, which is ambiguous on these issues in all cases.
6. All three systems represented by these parks in different countries are changing rapidly, and more suitable adaptive arrangements may be made for them in the coming years.
Rational use and conservation of living resources must be the active concern of all of us, rich and poor alike, if the world is to continue to develop in any reasonable degree of harmony with Nature. Accordingly it is necessary to recognize that industrial—and even some degree of demographic—development is not necessarily incompatible with environmental protection, and indeed that, in the world to come, conservation and development will have to be widely interlinked.
Cognizant of this and of the fundamental need to protect and perpetuate living, renewable resources in the face of ever-mounting and demanding human populations, and stressing the imperative of preserving a holistic approach to these problems of Man's and Nature's ‘only one Earth’, IUCN, with the support of UNEP and WWF, and the endorsement of some other bodies, launched, early in 1980, after several laborious redraftings, a ‘World Conservation Strategy’, in the manner described in the last part of this paper. It sets a policy for all to follow, taking mankind well away from the merely reactionist basis of conservation.
The central role of ecology in park planning and management is now so well recognized that the establishment of park programmes without ecological advice seems unthinkable. Yet attempts to link ecological principles and planning principles are still fraught with difficulty. Communications between interdisciplinary teams are complex.
The Authors of this paper illustrate how the principles of ecology and the practices of park management are interconnected and interdependent. The need for resource inventories as a foundation of park management is explored and emphasized as essential, as is the need for constant monitoring to ensure that conservation goals are attained. Underlying the article are basic convictions that dynamic ecosystems require dynamic management, and that management in the future will be required increasingly to attain specific conservation objectives.
At the very general level, the aim of this paper is to compare the interaction of national parks and native peoples in Northern Canada (Yukon Territory), Alaska, and the Northern Territory of Australia. Currently these areas are subject to increasing land-use pressures from mining, industrial development, the creation of national parks and related reserves, and native attempts to maintain traditional wildlife and renewable resource use. The study focuses on the interactions between national parks and native peoples on the premise that experiences can be compared and problems encountered in one area but possibly avoided in another.
The study begins by briefly describing native land-use issues, land-rights arrangements, and organizations, in the Yukon Territory, central Alaska, and Northern Australia. The national park agencies are described, compared, and shown to differ considerably in institutional character, field of management, control of land, and external links with interest groups such as native peoples. Case-studies of the national parks etc. named Kluane (Yukon), Gates of the Arctic (Alaska), and Kakadu (Northern Territory of Australia), are presented to provide more details on similarities and differences in planning, types of tenure, native subsistence activities, and other factors.
In the Yukon Territory, neither the national parks agency nor the native people are highly motivated to interact. In contrast, the park agencies and native people in Alaska and the Northern Territory of Australia recognize mutual benefits from interaction—largely as a result of legislation and policies which encourage cooperation. Native involvement officers now facilitate coordination in the Yukon and Alaska. Park agency native employment programmes are proceeding in all three ‘hinterlands’, while native people can own land on which national parks are established in Alaska and the Australian Northern Territory. Only in Australia are native people known to be directly involved in upperlevel national park management. Potential limitations on native subsistence and associated use of national parks range from moderate to severe, and are only defined clearly in Alaska. Lack of definition leads to confusion in deciding upon native use, while exceedingly precise definition precludes flexibility at the park level.
A number of aids to a more mutually satisfactory interaction can be identified. One is motivation, or recognition by both parties that there are advantages to consultation and cooperation. Another, not yet achieved in the Yukon, is a land-claims settlement, stating the legislated rights of native peoples in the ‘hinterlands’ and giving them a land-holding and bargaining status which is comparable with that of government agencies. A third aid is comprehensive systematic and regional planning efforts involving opportunities for informed input from all affected parties. Such planning would provide a forum for consideration of a variety of interests, including national parks and native peoples. Finally, satisfactory interaction on the park site could be assisted by clear yet flexible means of deciding upon acceptable native use of parkland, the conservation of wildlife, and associated economic and cultural factors.
Planning on our arctic frontier
- Rees
Critical habitat in the Northwest Territories. (Lands Directorate
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Management of forest systems north of 60° for subsistence, recreation, fish and wildlife: Towards developing a policy in Yukon
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The development and decline of northern conservation reserves
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