Wilderness groups slam Alberta’s approach to caribou protection

By George Lee, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Alberta’s caribou face renewed habitat loss and population decline under a planning document that was supposed to protect and restore them, four organizations have charged.

The non-governmental groups jointly criticized the province for finalizing an Upper Smoky Sub-Regional Plan that fails to list caribou protection as an objective.

The plan exposes too much of the subregion’s 13,216-square-kilometre area to resource development, including logging, while undermining the province’s own environmental policy and Canada’s Species at Risk Act, they said in a news release.

“I am really quite upset and disappointed, bordering on angry,” said Tara Russell, program director with the northern Alberta chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wildlife Society, or CPAWS.

Speaking to this reporter Monday, Russell said commitments to caribou recovery have been voiced for years by the province in the lead-up to the plan’s Nov. 4 release. Yet three herds of southern mountain caribou remain “on the brink,” thanks to habitat destruction in the forested foothills they rely upon to survive winters and avalanches.

“This plan pays lip service to some pleasantries about a healthy environment, and it does absolutely nothing to back it up,” said the biologist. “So I’m really sad.”

CPAWS Northern Alberta, the Alberta Wilderness Association, Nature Alberta and the Wildlife Society’s Alberta chapter all signed off on the news release, which asserts that the plan does not properly reflect recommendations submitted in 2020 by ministerial task forces.

Two emailed statements from the office of Rebecca Schulz, the minister of environment and protected areas, say the province is taking steps to protect caribou overall and that the plan strikes a balance that accounts for the economy.

“Alberta’s government is doing more to protect and encourage caribou recovery than any other government in provincial history,” the office said.

The province has treated — the planting stage that leads to restoration — over 4,500 linear kilometres of caribou habitat in the past five years. The NDP managed just 87 km, according to the office.

The UCP has also announced $55 million in new funding this year, aimed at restoring legacy seismic lines that crisscross much of caribou country.

“We are doing this while also protecting jobs — it’s not an either/or conversation. This is our jurisdiction, and we will continue doing what’s right for Alberta and all Albertans,” said the minister’s office.

The Upper Smoky Sub-Region, one of 11 in the province, extends south from near Grande Prairie to south of Grande Cache, overlapping ranges of the Redrock-Prairie Creek and Narraway mountain woodland caribou. Nearby is the Á la Pêche range, and bordering the subregion to the east is the Little Smoky boreal woodland range.

The plan divides the subregion into three zones to reflect allowable uses. Nature First, the smallest at 3,200 square kilometres, covers parks and protected areas where almost all industrial development will remain prohibited. Its areas focus on conservation, habitat restoration, outdoor recreation and traditional land use.

The Slow Go Zone, the largest of the three at more than 5,100 square kilometres, allows some resource extraction and logging within restrictions to reduce footprints and other environmental impacts. Included in Slow Go will be a new public land-use zone near Grande Cache for sustainable recreation and tourism.

The Go Zone, at more than 4,900 square kilometres, is identified for a large range of development but with fewer restrictions on logging and resource extraction than within Slow Go. Recreation and grazing are within the mix, too.

Although caribou protection isn’t a listed objective in the plan, it is covered in a section for intended outcomes under the heading Conserve and recover caribou populations.

“Land use activities will be managed to advance Alberta’s economic interests and achieve its objectives while taking actions to conserve and recover caribou habitat,”  the subsection says.

“These immediate actions, including restoration of seismic lines and pipelines, will result in improved habitat conditions in the future. Since habitat restoration treatments will take time to fully realize their benefits other mechanisms, such as predator control, also have a significant impact on caribou herd viability,” it says.

“Beyond this plan, Alberta continues to advance other strategies and partnerships to manage populations of caribou, predators and other species that interact with caribou.”

An estimated 2,000 caribou represented in two ecotypes live in Alberta’s 15 ranges. The overall caribou population in Alberta from this century’s start isn’t known, but experts using recent rates of decline to look backwards estimate there were 3,000 to 4,000 across perhaps 17 ranges.

In the Redrock-Prairie Creek and Narraway ranges in B.C. and Alberta, the minimum count was estimated at 138 caribou in 2023. The commonly cited estimate in the early 2000s was 200 to 300 individuals.

Said the minister’s office: “The new Upper Smoky Sub-Regional Plan protects jobs and the environment. It will help increase caribou numbers in Alberta using a common-sense approach to conservation.”

Based on survey data, caribou populations in the region have stabilized and are growing under the UCP government, the office claimed. And in a news release on the reclamation of seismic lines earlier this year, the government said overall caribou populations are “finally stable or even growing.”

But the joint new release from the four parks, wildlife and wilderness groups says that an analysis by CPAWS Northern Alberta points to a troubling future.

Timber harvesting enabled under the Upper Smoky plan reveals “dramatic implications” for the mature and old forest habitat required by caribou, the analysis found. The forests won’t recover for over a century to levels that the caribou need for self-sustainability, says the release.

Russell said logging and other resource development clearly come first in the document, a pro-industry bias further demonstrated by the missed deadline for completing the plans.

Under an earlier government commitment, plans for the 11 subregions were supposed to be completed by 2025. Along with Upper Smoky, approved so far are Cold Lake in east-central Alberta and Bistcho Lake in the northwest. 

The earlier plans are lacking but better than the newest one, said Russell.

The government is making “a very clear demonstration that there is no commitment to caribou recovery in Alberta right now,” she said. “It’s like point blank. It would be absolutely tragic to lose caribou in the province, and at the rate we’re going, we will.”