Report details how industry, climate change could ‘eat up’ the Mackenzie River Basin and its vital ecological services.
The Mackenzie River Basin, which occupies and protects one-fifth of Canada’s fresh water, could be severely destabilized by climate change as well as unbridled resource extraction, including hydraulic fracturing, hydro dams and oil sands mining.
That’s the uncomfortable conclusion of a new report by the prestigious University of California-based Rosenberg International Forum on Water Policy on what it calls “Canada’s northern Amazon.”
The scientific report, based, in part, on extensive input from First Nation elders, strongly recommends better environmental monitoring as well as industrial performance bonds for mining operations. It also calls for economic limits to development that give “due consideration” to the basin’s essential water-making and carbon saving ecological services.
The Mackenzie River, the longest flowing northern river on the continent, meanders through an expansive northern boreal forest and muskeg. The storied basin, the scene of gold rushes and oil booms, occupies parts of three provinces and two territories — an area three times the size of France.
In addition to being a globally important carbon sink, fish maker (53 species), climate regulator and home to many First Nations, including the Dene, the basin performs essential ecological services that make it globally significant, adds the report.
The report describes the fabled region as “a lynch-pin holding the ice-water-weather-climate nexus of the continent together.”
Treated with ‘frontier mentality’
As a freshwater maker and manager, the Mackenzie supports some of Canada’s largest lakes and several celebrated rivers, such as the Peace, Laird, Slave and Athabasca. As such the basin influences ocean currents in the Arctic, which, in turn, moderate global climate patterns.
“I was surprised if not alarmed by the loss of ice and permafrost in the region,” Rosenberg chair and report author, Henry J. Vaux Jr., told The Tyee.
“It takes 100,000 years to make permafrost and now we are prepared to let that disappear in decades?” asked the well-known resource economist.
“We have to manage this system in an integral and adaptive way.”
That’s what First Nations in the region want but that’s not the Canadian way, says aquatic scientist and report contributor, David Schindler. The celebrated scientist has spent much of his life studying northern waters.
“We are still treating the region with a peculiar Canadian frontier mentality. We’ve used up everything in the south and now we think we can go over the horizon and mine the basin. That’s not what First Nations support. They believe in the precautionary principle,” Schindler told The Tyee.
“In the long term, economic development and climate change could eat up the entire system.”
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