Richard Gleeson
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Apr 15/02) - Though industrial development of the North continues apace, effects of that development on the plants, animals, people and cultures of the North remains unknown.

West Kitikmeot Slave Study chairman Ted Blondin addresses reporters the release of a newly-expanded report summarizing environmental research done on area between Yellowknife and the Arctic Coast. - Richard Gleeson/NNSL photo

One of the conclusions of a five-year $10-million research partnership is that knowledge of the environmental impacts of mining and oil and gas projects is trailing development by an even wider margin than initially thought.

"It took people in Alaska 20 years to figure out oil and gas development was having a negative effect on caribou there," said West Kitikmeot Slave Study board chair Ted Blondin. "We've only had five years."

Blondin, who is also chief negotiator for Dogrib Treaty 11, said aboriginals have serious concerns about changes in their environment that have already taken place, particularly with caribou.

He said a co-worker reported last week that a relative had shot six caribou, but had to leave three of them because they were sickly.

"We're now at the stage where we need to get into monitoring in a big way," said John McCullum, the study's executive director.

Last Thursday the WKSS released a revised edition of its State of Knowledge Report. The report draws on all of the environmental research in the Slave Geological Province.

In more than 400 pages, the report summarizes the conclusions of scientific and traditional knowledge studies done to date. The WKSS itself funded 21 projects plus 17 extensions and revisions.

The study was funded equally by the federal and territorial governments and industry. It focuses on the 300,000-square-kilometre area be-tween Yellowknife and the Arctic coast.

Blondin said that, despite the suspicions that caribou are being negatively effected by development, aboriginal groups such as Treaty 11 have supported projects because they bring a host of immediate benefits.

Those benefits include jobs, increased access to game such as caribou via winter roads and opportunities for aboriginal economic development.

A tool being developed to help better understand the effects of development is a system to assess the combined effects of development on the environment.

The cumulative effects assessment management framework, as it is known, is being developed through a partnership of the federal and territorial governments, industry and aboriginal groups.

"The bottom line is it's going to cost a lot of money for that process to do a bang-up job," Blondin said.

He said one of the last hurdles to implementing a system to monitor cumulative effects is arranging where the estimated $5 million in annual funding it requires will come from.