Alberta Caribou herds could perish in 30 years with unchecked tar sands development

Rushing the permitting of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline is a bad idea and a new study on the Alberta caribou herds gives us one more reason why the Obama Administration needs to slow down and do a more thorough environmental review.  Alberta claims that it is managing the environmental impacts of tar sands production – but surely extinction of caribou in the tar sands region is not good practice.  No pipeline is worth extinction of major caribou populations.

The new study entitled “The influences of wolf predation, habitat loss, and human activity on the caribou and moose in the Alberta oil sands” indicates that tar sands development is having a major impact on caribou and could be detrimental to the caribou herd in the tar sands region. As this recent New York Times article on the study summarizes, “Humans are a much bigger problem than wolves for a caribou herd in the oil sands area of Alberta, Canada.” In other studies, scientists have indicated that if development trends continue, within 30 years the caribou herd on the east side of the Athabasca River could go extinct. While Alberta and Canada like to make claims that they are effectively managing the tar sands, Alberta’s caribou protection plans are so ineffective several Canadian environmental groups have taken the issue to court this month. Alberta’s Lower Athabasca Regional Plan is no different, only protecting 11% of caribou habitat.

Tar sands are a highly polluting, high-carbon fuel that can be extracted in Alberta, Canada. This alone ought to be enough to make the Obama administration think twice before approving the 2000 mile Keystone XL tar sands pipeline from Alberta to Texas. The utter mismanagement of the tar sands region, Boreal forest and associated species including caribou should make this decision a no-brainer.

The Alberta and Canada governments and tar sands industry groups have advocated for removing wolves as a means to bring back the caribou population, but this study – commissioned by Statoil Canada, which has leases in the tar sands – found that removing wolves would not be an effective means to deal with the problem, but could harm the ecosystem.

Of concern, despite scientists making it clear that killing wolves is not an effective way of easing pressures on caribou, the Edmonton Journal reports that “Over the past five years, the government of Alberta has spent more than $1 million poisoning wolves with strychnine and shooting them from the air. In all, more than 500 wolves in the Little Smoky River region have been killed.” While this region does not contain tar sands – rather, there has been forestry and other oil and gas development contributing to caribou decline – it is reasonable to assume that Alberta will likely soon start killing wolves in Northeastern Alberta rather than protecting habitat from industry.

Mismanagement of the tar sands and of its impacts on communities and wildlife is not a new story in Alberta. In April, I blogged about Alberta’s Draft Lower Athabasca Integrated Regional Plan, which would only protect 11% of the region’s caribou habitat. Groups from the United States and European Union are so concerned about this inadequate plan that NRDC and fifteen other groups wrote an open letter to the Government of Canada – published in the Edmonton Journal on June 17 – asking Alberta to address the serious weaknesses in the Lower Athabasca Regional Plan.

The letter states that:

The LARP fails to meet the Government of Alberta’s purported goal of healthy air, water, land and biodiversity that support healthy ecosystems and world-class conservation areas. The plan does not establish a regional disturbance limit, halt water withdrawals from the Athabasca River during periods of low flow, define limits of pollution in the Athabasca River, or adequately protect caribou habitat.

Ultimately, our groups request in the letter that the Government of Alberta and Government of Canada commission an independent panel to conduct an assessment of the LARP and recommend improvements. 

Just days after the publication of the letter, Ecojustice, on behalf of the Pembina Institute and Alberta Wilderness Association went to court for a lawsuit launched last summer, seeking a court order to force Environment Minister Peter Kent to recommend emergency protection of critical habitat for threatened caribou herds in northeastern Alberta.

In the affidavit from the Canadian Federal Government from March of this year in response to the lawsuit, the government acknowledges Alberta’s mismanagement of the caribou:

Overall, Alberta has not, to date, effectively managed the cumulative effects within caribou range and has not applied appropriate mitigation (e.g., habitat restoration, minimizing footprint) in a coordinated landscape-level approach to conserve caribou. The level of habitat disturbance is above 45% for 12 of the 13 local populations. This level of disturbance is beyond the biologically acceptable threshold for self-sustaining local populations as evidenced by the continued decline of most boreal caribou local populations in the province.

Yet they go on to argue that losing all the Alberta caribou herds is not that significant – and that they are therefore not required to enact an emergency order, essentially making a de facto decision to allow all Alberta’s caribou herds to go extinct to support maximum levels of tar sands development. We hope that the Canadian courts will make the right decision and take action to protect caribou habitat.

However, the bottom line is that Canada and Alberta are not taking environmental protection and management of the tar sands seriously. Currently, the State Department is in the process of reviewing the application for the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline that would run 2000 miles from Alberta to Texas, putting American lands, waters and people at risk. At a time when we desperately need to be transitioning to a clean energy future, it makes no sense to build a pipeline to pump nearly a million barrels per day of some of the dirtiest, most irresponsibly extracted oil in the world to the U.S. Gulf Coast. The United States should send a clear message to Canada that they need to clean up the tar sands and protect the Boreal forest and its wildlife by saying no to this dangerous pipeline. Take action to stop the Keystone XL pipeline at www.nrdc.org/NoKXL.

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