A community-led approach for landscape planning

Fort McKay is an indigenous community located near the epicenter of Canadian oil sands development. Over the past four decades the community has experienced a tremendous amount of landscape change within their traditional territory resulting from mining, in-situ extraction and related development. As industrial activities continue to increase, there is a strong need for the community to define their own land-use objectives that support cultural and ecological sustainability. This presentation describes Fort McKay’s project to develop key environmental, social and economic indicators that are culturally important to the community. Using thresholds developed for each indicator, a landscape modeling tool will be applied to assess the impacts of development on these indicators and to guide the community’s understanding of cumulative development effects. The resulting information will help achieve the ultimate project goal of determining how much development (and where) the community wishes to support in their territory at any one time.