The Nature Conservancy - The Last Stand

Natural gas piped through the Mackenzie Valley will be used to extract oil from tar sands found in the south. The Syncrude plant in Alberta uses natural gas to heat up tar sands to release the crude oil trapped inside.
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The Boreal Forest in Canada
Stretching across 1.6 billion acres, the North American boreal forest is one of the few largely unspoiled ecosystems remaining on Earth.

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This partnership works to advance responsible forest management practices, high-impact conservation transactions and public policies that protect, restore and manage the world’s forests.

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Singing from the Same Songbook

The Canadian Boreal Initiative, which is at the helm of the boreal’s conservation framework, is all about taking an unusually collaborative approach to landscape-scale planning. Its members include not just environmental groups and First Nations but also industrial giants like Suncor Energy and huge paper companies like Tembec, which manages 40 million acres of forest.

“It’s not often that the First Nations, industry and environmental groups are singing from the same songbook,” Innes says. “Government takes notice when three very different groups walk in and say, ‘We’re all in agreement on this issue.’”

In the mid-1990s, the government came under pressure to protect culturally and ecologically important areas when diamonds were discovered in the Northwest Terri-tories. The federal and territorial governments crafted an unprecedented protected areas strategy mandating the participation of local communities, regional groups and First Nations to determine which lands to protect.

“There are two major goals in the Northwest Territories protected areas strategy,” says the Conservancy’s Witten. “One is to protect areas important to the community, whether it’s cultural, spiritual or important for subsistence, and to protect ecologically representative areas within each ecoregion of the Northwest Territories. The other organizations involved in the process — including Ducks Unlimited, the World Wildlife Fund, and the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society — have focused on both goals, especially the first, but what the Conservancy has brought is our conservation science expertise and experience, which really helps with the second.”

The economic pros and cons of the gas pipeline are still being debated, especially in recent months. Questions are being raised about its profitability after cost projections doubled to U.S. $14 billion in March.

It’s harder to quantify the ecological benefits of protecting an ecosystem like the boreal, but a 2005 study by Innes’ group, the Canadian Boreal Initiative, estimates that the Mackenzie Valley’s “natural capital” — ecological services such as clean water, pest control by birds and absorption of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide — was worth about U.S.$378 billion a year. That’s roughly 10 times the annual gross domestic product generated by extractive industries working in the Mackenzie.

“For many people, the real ‘Aha!’ moment is when you talk about the natural capital of the boreal,” Innes says. “That’s especially true of governments, many of which have shifted to the right in Canada. If you don’t internalize both the benefits and the costs, then you continue to make economic decisions in the dark.”

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