City residents will get to help the province plan the future of Lois Hole Park next Wednesday at an open house.
Alberta Parks is holding an open house on the future of Lois Hole Centennial Provincial Park on Nov. 30 at the Enjoy Centre. The session is meant to help create a plan for the park’s development.
“We do not have in place a management plan for the park,” said Sharina Kennedy, senior parks planner with Alberta Parks. Officials started work on a plan back in 2012, but never finished it. The province has stepped up efforts to complete the plan as the park is in a fast-growing urban area.
This plan will map out where trails, signs, boardwalks and other facilities should go in the park, Kennedy said. It will also determine what activities will and won’t be allowed in it, and designate no-go areas and times to protect nesting birds.
“We want to know how are people currently using the park, what activities do they enjoy there, where do they access the park, and what suggestions do people have for how their park experience could be improved in the future.”
Miles Constable of the Big Lake Environment Support Society (BLESS) said he was glad to see the province taking this step, given that the park has been without a plan since it opened in 2005. Had it had one, the province might have been able to do something about the housing developments now planned for construction along the south shore of Big Lake.
Since the park is mostly lake, there’s probably not much more the province could add to it other than trails and boardwalks, Constable said. BLESS was interested in a more formal trail along the south side of the park (the current one has been forged illegally by ATV users) and a second observation platform.
Kennedy said she hoped to have a draft plan out for 60 days of public comment by this spring.
The open house runs from 4 to 8 p.m. in the Enjoy Centre’s Park Room. Email Kennedy at [email protected] for details.
Alberta’s demographics and natural resources make it positioned to prosper in the next decade, but climate change threatens that prosperity, says an American climate researcher.
Laurence Smith, professor of earth, planetary and space sciences and chair of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, spoke Tuesday at the University of Alberta on how the north will change in the near future. The talk was part of the U of A’s Sustainability speaker series.
Smith completed groundbreaking research on glaciers in Greenland last year and recently published The World in 2050, a book that examines how demographics, globalization, natural resource demand and climate change interact to shape our future.
“Canada is one of the fastest growing developed countries in the world,” Smith said in an interview Monday, and has a leg up on other nations with its young, growing workforce. Western Canada in particular has a wealth of hydrocarbon, metal, timber and potash resources that will be in high demand in years to come.
But climate change blunts these advantages, he continued. Warming shortens the time that winter roads around High Level are frozen enough to use, which limits access to forests, raises the risk of wildfires such as the one that devastated Fort McMurray, and allows more mountain pine beetles to survive the winter, destroying timber.
While climate models suggest that regions such as Alberta will receive slightly more precipitation under climate change, those models don’t mention that we’ll also get more droughts and extreme weather events, Smith said.
“The system is capable of decades-long droughts,” he said, and places like California may already have a structural water shortage.
Ice-dependent waters such as the North Saskatchewan River will also be at risk due to climate warming, Smith noted.
Canada’s best course of action is to bring in a carbon tax big enough to encourage non-coal energy and energy efficiency, Smith said.
