Mackenzie basin under threat: study

Gary Park

For Petroleum News

Further oil sands production in Alberta, along with other resource development, climate change and inadequate science and piecemeal management combined to pose a threat to Canada’s vast Mackenzie River basin, says a report from a United States environmental think-tank.

The basin, one of the world’s largest intact ecosystems, covers the nearly 20 percent of Canada drained by the Mackenzie River.

It includes the oil sands, British Columbia hydroelectric projects along with the hunting and trapping grounds for thousands of Dene and Inuvialuit extending through to the Beaufort Sea.

The Rosenberg International Forum on Water Policy at the University of California has urged that control of the area should come under a single agency instead of seven governments and many aboriginal communities.

“There really is an urgency,” said Henry Vaux, the lead author of the report.

“The big concern is that the evolution of climate change and its impacts on the basin will make it less resilient to the sorts of pressures that will be put on by expanding economic development.”

Among the concerns is leaks from tailings ponds at the oil sands, especially during the winter when leaks get under ice and are impossible to remediate, he said.

The report, like earlier findings in other studies, says the oil sands have destroyed at least temporarily thousands of acres of wetlands and created small but growing levels of toxins in rivers.

Wildlife species such as woodland caribou face extinction as their habitat becomes fragmented.

Other controversial issues include the industrial use of water from the Athabasca River during low flow periods and massive hydro dams in British Columbia that disrupt river flows, drying out large river deltas.

The report said those problems are likely to increase as the oil sands grow and energy and mineral exploration accelerates in the Northwest Territories.

Meanwhile, the region is experiencing some of the world’s fastest rates of climate change, melting permafrost that underlies much of the landscape.