A community-led approach for landscape planning

Background/Question/Methods

Fort McKay is an indigenous community located near the centre of Canadian oil sands mine development. Community members have experienced economic benefits from industrial development, but have also seen their ways of life and environment altered by mining activity. As industrial activities increase in Fort McKay’s traditional territory, there is a need for the community to develop a clear understanding of the wide range of benefits and liabilities associated with cumulative land-use decisions in its territory, and an approach to setting community objectives for sustainable ecological and socioeconomic conditions.

The project was initiated to provide Fort McKay community members and leadership with defensible, transparent and science-based information on the current and projected future states of the environment in the community’s traditional territory. The project approach involves community-led selection of environmental, social, and economic indicators, and application of land-use and ecological simulation modelling to generate information on the states of these indicators in pre-development, current, and probable future conditions. This approach is intended to:

• facilitate community discussions about effects of industrial development, and about economic and environmental trade-offs inherent in that development;
• allow for community identification of objectives with respect to selected indicators, and community-led development of management and mitigation strategies to achieve these objectives;
• support more informed and effective community engagement with industrial operators and government agencies on project-specific and cumulative regional effects, and on proposed strategies to address these effects; and,

• support development of community-based monitoring of current environmental states, and of effects of mitigation strategies.

Results/Conclusions

Initial results of modelling indicate current minimal declines in performance of most ecological indicators over the last 50 years of industrialization in Fort McKay’s traditional territory, but project rapid and substantial declines in these same indicators in the near future, given current resource-extraction trajectories. Fort McKay thus has a real but limited window of opportunity to develop and influence land-use management strategies in their region over approximately the next decade