woodland caribou and other wildlife of alberta’s boreal forest find their habitat dwindling as pit
mining and in situ oil sands development continue to spread. The massive scale of extraction
is apparent at mines like this one north of ft. mcmurray, alberta. open-pit mines alone have
already disturbed 230 square miles of forest, often scraping it clean down to 300 feet.
Credit: wayne lynch
Credit: David Dodge, The pembina institute
the past 15 years (Alberta Caribou Committee).
Furthermore, caribou ranges in northeastern
Alberta are now largely slated for in situ oil sands
development, a plan that will likely end up in court
under Canada’s Species at Risk Act.
Stan Boutin, a biological sciences professor at the
University of Alberta in Edmonton, has studied caribou in Alberta for almost two decades and is frank
about their fate: “Levels of industrial activity are so
high that no industry best practices are going to be
able to conserve caribou,” he cautions. “I don’t see
any potential for caribou conservation without establishing large tracts of land with very low levels of
development. We need a completely new approach
[to caribou conservation], which involves picking
which caribou herds are winners and losers.”
While woodland caribou are emblematic of species
sensitive to current impacts, future impacts projected for other wildlife are also sobering. In 2008
the Boreal Songbird Initiative, in partnership with
the Natural Resources Defense Council and the
Pembina Institute, published Danger in the Nursery, a report that synthesized existing information
and gave the first serious estimate of the potential
cumulative impact of oil sands development on
boreal birds (Wells et al. 2008). The authors found
that over the next 30 to 50 years, full development
of the oil sands could result in the loss of over 160
million birds through habitat loss and fragmentation, tailings pond deaths, loss of wetlands, toxin
accumulations, and impacts from climate change.
Although open-pit mines and tailings lakes are more
visible in terms of habitat loss and mortality for
boreal birds, it is the projected growth and fragmentation associated with in situ oil sands development
that poses the greatest risk, based on the much larger
area this development could encompass. In fact, the
area occupied by these deeper deposits is 30 times
greater than the area available for open-pit mining.
Ironically, Alberta has some of the most intact
and undisturbed ecosystems in North America—
albeit ones that have now been leased for oil sands
development. The Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring
Institute (ABMI) validates the global significance
of Alberta’s forests, where biodiversity is 95 percent intact and a full suite of wildlife—black bears,
wolves, moose, and boreal songbirds—is still
present. With this knowledge of a relatively intact
ecological system comes immense stewardship responsibility. The University of Alberta’s Boutin, who
is a science advisor to ABMI, notes that “impacts
are inevitable; the challenge is determining what is
an acceptable target for losses in biodiversity.”
Are There Solutions?
Concerned about the impending impacts of oil
sands development on wildlife and biodiversity, the
Government of Alberta recently began a process of
comprehensive land-use planning (Government of
Alberta 2009a). Because resource development has
been underway for decades, however, existing industrial commitments may conflict with the goals of
