| Alberta’s iconic foothills landscape is under threat from various competing land uses, and if no plan is put into place to protect the area it risks losing grizzlies, fescue grasslands and current water quality, says land use ecologist Brad Stelfox.
Stelfox recently completed a cumulative impact study on 1.2 million hectares of land along the southeastern slopes of the Rockies in which he projected future impacts on the landscape if current development trends continue. Stelfox’s study was funded by landowner and environmental groups, municipal districts, the Town of Nanton and two oil and gas companies.
He looked at the impact of all land use activities including oil and gas development, forestry, agriculture, acreage developments and recreational uses including off-road vehicles.
Stelfox says the province has been "marching on" with various developments in the area "without any meaningful discussion about what it’s going to look like or what its ecological capacity will be."
He says that’s a problem because the southern foothills are so important to Albertans and images of the area are what the Alberta government largely uses to promote and advertise the province.
"We seem to gravitate to photographs of southwestern Alberta as the archetypal signature landscapes that define our province. That tells me esthetics are very important and we Albertans associate ourselves, we think of ourselves, as being part of that landscape," says Stelfox.
Stelfox predicts that the number of linear features on the landscape, or human-caused disturbances, will double by 2055. If that happens he says grizzlies will cease to roam the foothills and the area will lose almost 60,000 hectares of native grasslands. Water quality will also be negatively impacted.
The oil and gas footprint is predicted to rapidly expand in the southern foothills. There are currently 160 natural gas wells and 44 conventional wells in the study area. By 2055 Stelfox estimates there will be 150 oil wells, 450 gas wells and 900 coalbed methane wells. Pipelines and seismic lines will also grow in area. There are currently 400 kilometres of pipelines and 6,900 kilometres of seismic lines in the study area and that’s predicted to increase to 6,000 kilometres of pipelines and 10,672 kilometres of seismic lines. Stelfox’s predictions factor in reclamation of abandoned wells, seismic lines and pipelines.
Recreational use on the landscape will also increase because people will use new oil and gas access roads to get to new parts of the landscape. He says even if oil and gas companies make every effort to reclaim seismic lines, access roads and well sites, "once people have established access they don’t like to lose it," especially the off-road vehicle users.
Meanwhile, the number of individual acreages in the study area is predicted to increase from the current 500 to 1,400 and demand for water is predicted to increase by two per cent every year. Stelfox says people should be increasingly concerned about how much groundwater there is in the southern foothills. Groundwater is the source of acreage owners’ water.
"It strikes me as immensely foolhardy that we’re basing land uses increasingly on groundwater, yet essentially we have no good idea how much water is there," says Stelfox.
Alan Gardner, executive director of the Southern Alberta Land Trust Society, one of the funders of the study, says Stelfox’s research shows the need for a new land use plan for the southern foothills.
"We’re losing a lot of the things that make this country special so the question that everybody has to ask themselves is at what point do we say wait a minute, time out, hold on? We need to do some planning here. We need to define some limits," says Gardner. "I don’t think anybody really wants to destroy this area… all we’re saying is let’s not destroy it by accident."
The Alberta government has promised to create a new provincial land use framework. It plans to hold public consultations on the plan in early 2007. |
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