Professor promotes a new approach to land use planning that is changing hearts and minds

WHITEHORSE – Dr. Fiona Schmiegelow is tired of the same old conversations. She wants to change the way people approach conservation, development, and land use planning and believes the answer lies in a more integrated, science-based approach and a process called adaptive management. 

Adaptive management provides a more holistic way of approaching land use planning that is solutions-based and can help reconcile the historic conflicts between those who support conservation and those who support development. 

“We often think of conservation and development as being competing interests, but in fact they can be complementary and are both part of achieving sustainability in our landscapes,” said Schmiegelow. “Right now we mostly talk about how much protection is enough – 30, 50, 70 per cent? But we need to flip the question. We need to talk about how much development an ecosystem can sustain without compromising the natural, cultural and economic values it currently supports.”

Schmiegelow will explain how science-based landscape planning through adaptive management works at a brown bag lunch talk at Yukon College this week.

Despite being fairly new, it is an approach that is resonating with Canadians.  Schmiegelow is the Senior Science Advisor for the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement, the world’s largest conservation initiative. She is also a science advisor for the Ontario governments’ Far North Strategy and Quebec’s Plan Nord, as well as being a consultant for the NWT governments Protected Areas Strategy – all of which are incorporating these concepts  in their land use planning.

Signed in 2010, the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement (CBFA) has brought together twenty-one forest companies and five leading environmental organizations in Canada to collaboratively integrate economic and environmental values with the goal of conserving significant areas of Canada’s vast Boreal Forest, protect threatened woodland caribou, and sustain a healthy forestry industry for the communities who rely on it.

The CBFA has set a global precedent for boreal forest conservation and forest sector competitiveness. It directly applies to more than 75 million hectares of public forests licensed to member companies across Canada and has led to companies suspending logging operations on almost 29 million hectares of boreal forest.

Schmiegelow is a University of Alberta professor based at Yukon College where she leads the Northern Environmental and Conservation Sciences (ENCS) degree program which is offered in partnership with the university. Adaptive management practices are featured in the ENCS program and Schmiegelow is hopeful that it will begin to permeate Yukon culture as her students take the model out of the classroom and into the real world.

“Initiatives like the CBFA are exciting because they present an incredible opportunity for industry, conservationists and governments to collaboratively apply leading-edge science to real, on-the-ground environmental, economic and social challenges. It also provides a model to evaluate and improve that science. The collaborative and transparent approach to decision-making involved in the CBFA allows for meaningful incorporation of the best available information, and an adaptive process that is flexible to new or improved information” said Schmiegelow.

Schmiegelow’s talk, Conservation by Design – Advancing the Science of Sustainability in the North, will take place on Thursday November 14 from 12-1 p.m. in room A2103 at Yukon College’s Ayamdigut Campus. For more information please visit www.yukoncollege.yk.ca/brownbag/.

The Yukon College brown bag lunch speaker series is broadcast online – please email bbl@yukoncollege.yk.ca to receive a web link to the live presentation.