Conservation groups hope a new provincial fund will help them preserve Alberta's home and native lands.
Alberta Sustainable Resource Development Minister Mel Knight said Wednesday that he would put $5 million into the newly established Alberta Land Trust Grant Program. The program, the details of which were settled earlier this year, is meant to help land trusts preserve ecologically significant lands through conservation easements.
Alberta is growing fast, Knight says, and that's had a significant effect on the landscape.
"We have to start to make sure we have enough of these representative samples of biodiversity and landscape under protection so that they are there for future generations," the minister says.
The fund, which was established in 2010 but not funded until now, offers registered land trust organizations $1 in grants for every $2 they collect to protect lands through conservation easements. Those easements restrict future development while leaving the actual title to the land with the landowner.
The fund will be ongoing, Knight says, and will be financed through future land sales. The fund will emphasize preserving large tracts of native landscape and wildlife corridors, and will not fund land purchases.
Land trusts have needed this support for quite some time, says Grant Pearsell, chair of the Alberta Land Trust Alliance, especially since the 2008 recession caused charitable donations to dry up.
"It's going to make a difference," he said.
Easing into conservation
There are about 46,500 hectares of land in Alberta currently under conservation easements, Pearsell says, about half of which are managed by land trusts. Alberta has about 12 registered trusts.
Easements are a cost-effective way to preserve lands from development, Pearsell says. Easements let landowners hand over some aspects of a property — like development rights — to a trust while holding onto the rest of them.
"You still own your land, and you can still do your activities … but in the end you're going to conserve the natural features of that land," he says.
Many owners want to sell their land but don't want to see certain developments on it, adds Pam Wright, executive director of the Edmonton and Area Land Trust. Easements let owners put binding conditions on all future sales of the property — "No wind farms," for example — so they can preserve aspects of it even after they've sold it.
Ducks Unlimited has a conservation easement on about 24 hectares of land south of Big Lake that essentially bans new development on it, says Barry Bishop, head of wetland restoration for the group in Alberta. "You're paying for status-quo management in most cases," he says, and you usually only have to pay about a quarter of the land's price. That means the province's fund could protect a lot of land if it's properly leveraged.
But the province has to be careful about the source of that money, Bishop notes. If it gets the cash from selling off huge tracts of undisturbed land, it'll undermine the fund's purpose. Country lands are also cheaper than city ones, meaning these grants will go further in rural areas.
He also criticized the deadline. Trusts have to have their applications in by Sept. 26 to qualify for this year's grants, and easements take a lot of time to put in place.
"You're not going to do a lot of new things [that] fit this program in that period of time," he said.
Natural areas are of huge value to everyone, Wright says, as they clean our water and our air.
"Land is a finite resource, and natural areas, when lost, can't suddenly be developed again."