OTTAWA – The country’s largest national park could be declared to be in danger by the UN’s World Heritage Committee if Canada doesn’t meet new deadlines next year to prove it is taking action to protect the park from development.
In March, the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization gave Canada 17 recommendations to help improve the status of the Wood Buffalo National Park in northern Alberta.
Now it has set a deadline of February 2018 for Canada to show its plan to meet those recommendations and another deadline of December 2018 to show progress on that plan.
UNESCO experts, who visited the park last fall at the behest of First Nations, agreed with them that the park’s ecosystem was in jeopardy because of oil sands development, hydro dam construction and climate change impacts in the region.
In a draft decision issued June 2, the World Heritage Committee expressed pleasure that Canada is taking most of the recommendations seriously but was dismayed that approval of the Site C dam project in British Columbia — which could affect water flows in the Peace Athabasca Delta within the park — won’t be revisited.
The park was designated as a world heritage site in 1983; only a handful of UNESCO sites have ever been designated “in danger,” mainly because of government breakdown and war.
