The often-touted ‘Alberta Advantage’ will falter unless the provincial government and resource industries do more to protect forests and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, speakers told a Calgary forum on global business issues.

But Alberta’s resource sectors say they’ve recently funded a $2.5-million program aimed at co-ordinating energy and forest industry activities to reduce the overall environmental “footprint” on the landscape.

And when it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, Alberta Environment Minister Lorne Taylor argues that a “made in Canada” plan would be far less damaging to the economy than the international Kyoto accord on climate change.

Declassified satellite data now publicly available shows Alberta’s natural forest cover has been sliced and diced by seismic lines, oil and gas development and logging, Matthew Price of the Natural Resources Defense Council told the FGL Society’s Sixth open forum on global business issues, held last week.

“Alberta (has) actually one of the most fragmented forests in Canada . . . there’s really not much left” of large, intact forests, said Price, a research associate at the environmental group based in Washington, D.C.

The province hasn’t yet completed a network of protected areas that represents the ecological diversity of all Alberta’s forests, Price told about 100 forum delegates.

But Neil Shelly, director of environmental affairs for the Alberta Forest Products Association, says that under the province’s Special Places program, more than 12 per cent of Alberta’s representative landscapes are now protected in national and provincial parks, ecological reserves and other areas. The Special Places program ended last year, and the government says it has no plans to protect additional landscapes.

Most scientists and foresters believe the amount of land protected is sufficient to protect Alberta’s forest biodiversity, Shelly.

As far as resource industries co-ordinating their activities, “it is becoming a bigger and more important issue for all resource companies,” Shelly said. On the government side, Alberta Environment has hired a person to be responsible for integrated land-use-management planning.

The Alberta Chamber of Resources is spearheading the $2.5-million Integrated Landscape Management program, with the aim of combining resource development activities on the ground to significantly reduce their environmental impacts.

“We have an enormous opportunity and still have the flexibility to do things properly before it becomes too late . . . ,” Chamber president Bill Hunter said.

The program includes a 13-person steering committee, a full-time manager and the Industrial Research Chair in Integrated Landscape Management at the University of Alberta.

“Initially, we will look at activities currently under way by both the energy and forestry sectors, and research what can be done very quickly to minimize the intensity of the footprint or the duration it stays on the landscape,” said Research Chair head Stan Boutin, a University of Alberta biological sciences professor.

Oilsands firm TrueNorth Energy Inc. of Calgary and Alberta-Pacific Forest Industries (AlPac) have begun collaborating on integrated land-use policies. AlPac operates North America’s largest single-line kraft paper mill, about 200 kilometres northeast of Edmonton.

An example of the new approach involves a large timber block that AlPac had planned to harvest over the next five years. It will remain untouched. Instead, the cut has been shifted on to the proposed footprint of TrueNorth’s proposed oilsands mine site, 90 kilometres north of Fort McMurray.

In a luncheon talk to about 100 delegates at the FGL Society forum, sponsored in part by Business Edge, rural landowner Judy Huntley, from Lundbreck near Pincher Creek in southwest Alberta, said she sees very little co-ordination among companies developing natural resources on public land.

Alberta persists in expanding the use of polluting fossil fuels such as coal, instead of supporting renewable energy such as wind and solar, Huntley said. “Why are our choices so stupid and so impoverished?”

But forum speaker Joel Nodelman, EPCOR’s manager of sustainable development, noted that there is a high level of financial risk for corporations investing in renewable energies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. “I don’t know whether there’s going to be (government) regulation five years from now or not” that would compel companies to reduce emissions, he said.

The federal government is still uncertain over whether to ratify the Kyoto accord, which would compel Canada to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 200 million tonnes from 770 million by 2010.

But forum speaker David Surplus, president of B9 Energy, a renewable energy developer based in Northern Ireland, said: “I would certainly urge Canada to sign up and join with the rest of the world in this effort.”

Alberta Environment Minister Lorne Taylor says a new provincial government study shows ratifying Kyoto would cost the Canadian economy $23-$40-billion a year in costs to existing businesses and losses of potential future investments.

Given the country’s current and projected greenhouse gas emissions, Alberta’s economic review “indicates there is a much broader range of risk than has been talked about publicly by the federal government,” Taylor said.

Ottawa, in consultation with the provinces and territories, should develop a made-in-Canada response that will allow the country to manage climate change as well as the potential impact on the regional and national economies, Taylor said.

The Alberta government and the province’s resource industries favour voluntary, market-driven mechanisms – such as emissions trading and improved technologies – to gradually reduce greenhouse gases.

But Daniel Schrag, professor of earth and planetary sciences at Harvard University, told the forum that even though U.S. President George W. Bush has rejected the Kyoto accord, Canada and other developed nations should push ahead. “Ultimately, this problem isn’t going to be solved voluntarily,” Schrag said.

Web Watch:
www.globalforestwatch.org
www.acr-alberta.com