Key Issues
Chrystal Mantyka-Pringle /WCS Canada
To help the Yukon’s wildlife and wild places adapt to a changing climate in the best ways possible, we need to think carefully about what can be done to create time and space for adaptation, to create greater ecosystem resilience in the face of climate impacts and to accommodate shifts in species distributions and habitats. We also need to think about how other impacts — mining, forestry, fires and roads — will add to pressure species and ecosystems are already experiencing due to climate change and how we can work to reduce combined impacts. We also need to think carefully about the thresholds of human activity that wildlife and wild places can tolerate in the face of a rapidly changing climate if we want to maintain the natural richness of Yukon — one of the world’s greatest intact wild places.
Mining
Mining has been a major economic activity in Yukon since the Klondike Gold Rush of 1898. Today Yukon is home to everything from small-scale “placer” mining operations to major underground and open pit hard rock mining operations. While producing short-term economic activity, mining has also produced severe environmental impacts and legacies that are an ongoing at a substantial economic cost to Yukon and Canadian society.
Currently, the Yukon government is revising the Territory’s mining legislation and governance regime. These have not been significantly reformed in close to 100 years. How and where mineral exploration may occur and mines may operate, what sorts of revenues mines generate, and ensuring mines are properly closed with lands reclaimed, are all part of these revisions.
WCS Canada provided recommendations to the Mineral Development Strategy Review that led to the current legislative revisions. Our submission to the review raised a number of concerns, including the small economic benefit that mines actually provide via the territory’s badly outdated royalty regime, the misperception that mines have “small environmental footprints,” the impact of mining on rivers and fisheries, and how mines can add cumulative pressures in an environment where wildlife may already be struggling for survival in the face of climate change and other pressures.
Land use planning would benefit from Territory-wide or sector-specific assessments of the net economic returns of different kinds of mining. Such assessments need to address the full period over which benefits and costs accrue. They also need to account for the indirect costs of mining (often called externalities), such as loss and alienation (avoidance) of habitat for valued species and long-term water pollution. Land use planning also needs to address the question of how much economic activity is enough (i.e. can be accommodated socially and ecologically in a region). Just because a resource has been identified and could be marketed does not mean that it should be developed.
Within land-use planning processes, there needs to be an effort to better understand and incorporate the tools available to reduce and mitigate the negative impacts of roads and infrastructure built to access and support mines. The commission should also look to science to determine thresholds on levels or intensity of the human footprint and activity beyond which the cumulative effects of expanding human activity puts valued species and ecosystems at irrecoverable risk.
Chrystal Mantyka-Pringle
Placer mining activities near Dawson City
Chrystal Mantyka-Pringle
A recent forest fire study site
Fire
Many climate models predict more intense, more frequent, and larger forest fires thanks to higher average temperatures, drier conditions and more intense weather systems that lead to more frequent lightning strikes.
In our land-use planning, we need to look at both sides of this trend: How to possibly reduce forest areas consumed by wildfire by suppressing forest fires and using prescribed burning practices and, on the flip side, recognizing the ecological importance of burned areas.
It can be hard to look at burned forests and see a vibrant ecosystem. But for species like beetles and woodpeckers that thrive on recently dead trees, and plants that are pioneers of open forests and disturbed soils, these areas provide vitally important habitat. And, as our report on the value of burned forests explains, these post-fire specialists open the way for numerous other species to once again take up residence and thrive in these areas. This is why we need to manage activities like salvage logging and firewood cutting carefully.
In our regional planning, we have to recognize the increasing presence of fire in our landscapes and pro-actively plan for protected and conserved areas that are large enough to ensure that some areas within them will escape the flames. And while fire is a natural part of boreal ecosystems, the greater intensity of fires may mean we need to take steps to reduce the vulnerability of some areas, especially ones with threatened or unique species or ecosystems or that function as a refuge or safe path to other habitat.
Forestry
Forestry in Yukon is relatively modest compared to what occurs in southern areas of Canada. But it is still important to understand its impacts, particularly on high-value habitats such as riverside forests and lake shore zones. Forestry is also a major creator of new roads and roads can be one of the most disruptive influences on wild areas by increasing access for predators (both human and wild), enabling further development such as mineral staking or cabin building, and creating barriers for wildlife movement.
Our work on riverine forests shows the importance of forested buffers to protect water and salmon habitat from run-off and pollution. These areas help to ensure good water quality, habitat for some birds and other wildlife, and linkages between different habitat areas. For example, WCS Canada research demonstrated that unharvested buffers as wide as 200m adjacent to streams and wetlands may be needed to protect breeding habitat for old forest songbirds.
These factors are increasingly important in the face of climate change: all rivers, lakes, and wetlands need buffers to keep waters cool and clean; wildlife will increasingly rely on these climate-resilient areas to find food and shelter; and habitat connections will be hugely important as wildlife move to adapt to changes driven by things like higher temperatures or changes in snow cover.
Forests store large amounts of carbon and continue to absorb carbon from the atmosphere at all stages in their existence. Cutting forests starts a process of putting that carbon (from the trees and the ground cover and soils) back into the atmosphere, which only makes the climate crisis worse. At this stage in the climate crisis, the most responsible approach is to minimize any forest harvesting. Large-scale harvesting for large energy projects or commercial heating is particularly problematic because it puts the wood’s carbon into the atmosphere immediately, while regrowth will take many decades. Cutting trees may be necessary to protect human communities and infrastructure from risk of fire, and to supplement individual home heating. However, the most climate-friendly approaches are to reduce timber harvesting as much as possible as a number of studies show existing forests are much more effective carbon sinks than tree planting efforts.
Hilary Cooke / WCS Canada
Forestry in Yukon is modest but expanding
Malkom Boothroyd
Black-capped chickadee
Insects
As with fire, insects are a natural part of Yukon ecosystems and provide services from pollination to being food sources for fish, woodpeckers and songbirds. But climate heating is likely to lead to changes in the frequency and intensity of insect outbreaks. We have already seen how mountain pine beetle outbreaks in southern forests have become more severe as the cold winters that kill beetles have become less common. And as with fire, responses to insect outbreaks require awareness of ecosystem values and carbon stores. We should avoid a rush to turn insect-killed trees into unsustainable biomass for energy, for example. The risk of wider and more frequent insect outbreaks may also mean we need to hedge our bets by protecting larger areas of habitat vulnerable to outbreaks, such as old forest, to ensure not all of these high-value habitats are completely wiped out by an outbreak.