Landmark conservation agreement reached in Nova Scotia
22 Dec 09
HALIFAX - CPAWS is pleased to announce that the Colin Stewart Forest Forum (CSFF) negotiations have concluded successfully.
For the past five years, environmentalists and several large forest companies have sat down together to recommend sites for the creation of new protected areas and a series of mitigation options to lessen potential impacts on the forest industry.
“This is a landmark agreement”, says Chris Miller, National Manager of Wilderness Conservation and Climate Change, based in Halifax. “We’ve put aside some of our differences, decided to work together and come up with solutions to protect more land. And, we’ve done that. Together, we’ve identified the highest priority lands for conservation and come up with a number of strategies to lessen potential impacts on the forest industry”.
“It’s a win-win”, adds Miller. “This is a watershed moment for conservation in Nova Scotia, with industry and environmentalists coming together to recommend a suite of conservation areas move forward for protection. A few years ago, this wouldn’t have happened”.
The Colin Stewart Forest Forum participants include CPAWS, Ecology Action Centre, Nova Scotia Nature Trust, Nature Conservancy of Canada, Bowater Mersey Paper Co., J.D. Irving Ltd., Northern Pulp (Neenah Paper), and New Page Port Hawkesbury. The Nova Forest Alliance was instrumental in ensuring these negotiations took place, and both the Department of Environment and the Department of Natural Resources provided personnel and important resources to the forest forum work.
The final CSFF report identifies a total of 269,000 hectares of land as a priority for the creation of new protected areas, on Crown land and private lands owned by the forest companies. Of this, a total of 58,000 hectares of land are recommended for protection expeditiously, as a “first slate” of high-priority conservation sites with low-impacts on the forest industry.
The province now has a clear path to achieve its target of protecting at least 12% of the province’s landmass by the year 2015. Currently, only about 8.5% of Nova Scotia is designated as legally-protected.
Several of the forest companies have agreed to place a voluntary harvesting moratorium on lands identified as a priority for conservation while the provincial government begins a broader public and stakeholder consultation for expanding the protected areas system. The report also calls on the provincial government to institute a broader development moratorium on these areas to restrict other types of industrial activities, such as resource extraction, road-building, and seismic exploration. The province must also engage in a meaningful dialogue with the Mi’kmaq with all aspects of the protected areas planning and mitigation process.
Potential impacts on the forest industry resulting from the protection of these sites can be fully mitigated for using several basic strategies. These include overlapping protected areas with lands already partially constrained to forest harvesting, increasing certain types of silviculture practices on the working landscape such as pre-commercial thinning to boost wood supply, acquiring large tracts of lands owned by the forest companies, using restoration harvests to remove wood fibre from plantations prior to designation, and accessing unallocated wood from Crown lands particularly in southwestern Nova Scotia where there is a substantial surplus of available wood supply, among others.
The CSFF participants presented the final report to the provincial government in November and are calling on the government to implement the recommendations. The province has already taken several important steps to ensure that the CSFF recommendations are implemented, including allocating $80million in new funding to acquire lands from the forest companies for conservation and advancing the legal protection of several important areas on Crown land, such as Chignecto. Previously, the provincial government also set-up the Nova Scotia Crown Share Land Legacy Trust, which provides $23 million in matching funding for land trusts for the purchase and protection of ecologically-significant private lands.
CPAWS would like to extend our sincere appreciation to all participants in the CSFF discussions for their spirit of cooperation and their solutions-orientated approach. We enjoyed working collaboratively and we look forward to a continued dialogue in the future. We also hope that the success of the Colin Stewart Forest Forum negotiations in Nova Scotia, in leading to a mutually agreeable proposal for conservation, can be replicated across the country and in neighbouring provinces.
Contact:
Chris Miller, Ph.D.
National Manager
Wilderness Conservation and Climate Change
Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society