While there have been many isolated efforts to integrate natural patterns into forest land management across Canada, none have tried to adopt a planning strategy that involves using natural patterns as the conceptual framework for decision-making. The difference is that the former strategy uses natural patterns as decision-making filters against value-specific foundations, while the latter uses natural patterns as the default foundation through which other value-specific objectives are filtered.
The goal of the Hwy40 North Demonstration Project is thus to demonstrate the effectiveness of using natural disturbance pattern knowledge as the foundation for effective operational-scale forest management planning, leading to sustainable forests and providing for the multitude of values associated with a defined forest area across multiple administrative jurisdictions [sic].
The study area is a 70,000 ha landscape along Hwy40 between Hinton and Grande Cache that includes parts of the Hinton Wood Products (HWP) and Alberta Newsprint Company (ANC) Forest Management Areas (FMAs), the Foothills Forest Products quota area, and the Willmore Wilderness Area. The study area is one of the largest remaining areas of (largely) intact old foothills forest, includes part of the current habitat for the A la Peche woodland caribou herd, represents high to extreme risk to both wildfire and mountain pine beetle attack, and is rich in timber and natural gas. It is also an area in which three forest management companies will be planning harvesting operations over the next ten years.
The planning was the responsibility of a multi-disciplinary team of ten people representing Hinton Wood Products, ANC, Foothills Forest Products (and before them Weyerhaeuser Canada), Alberta Sustainable Resource Development (ASRD) Forest Management, ASRD Fish and Wildlife, ASRD Forest Protection, Alberta Energy, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), Alberta Tourism Parks and Recreations (formerly Community Development), and the Foothills Research Institute (FRI) (formerly Foothills Model Forest). Over last next two and a half years, the Hwy40 Planning Team met 16 times. The details of the process and the evolution of the final disturbance plan are described in Report #1 (Andison 2008).
This report is an exploration of the insights gained through the Hwy40 experience. The Hwy40 Project Team hoped that the learning would focus on the application of disturbance patterns as a common foundation for planning. More specifically; how, or to what degree can natural patterns be used to help design a disturbance event(s) that provide robust management solutions for other social, economic, and ecological values – across jurisdictional boundaries?
Of the various challenges and conflicts that the Hwy40 Planning Team faced, few were associated with the application of natural disturbance patterns. On the contrary, the use of disturbance patterns as the neutral reference point for planning decisions proved to be well accepted and constructive. In the end, the multi-disciplinary Hwy40 Planning Team generated a disturbance event design that was not only natural in its size, shape, and residual characteristics, but also maintained the greater landscape patterns well within the historical natural range. The team also agreed that the final design optimized most of the identified critical values – a tremendous accomplishment given the nature of the study area. The output from the various decision-support models provided by the agencies involved provided objective support for this choice. Overall, there is convincing evidence that a natural disturbance pattern planning foundation has tremendous potential for creating viable management scenarios.
Other insights gained through the Hwy40 experience relate to the challenges of integrated planning in general. The introduction of any universal planning foundation tests the capacity of agencies to work together towards a common goal. The depth and breadth of integration-related challenges that the project faced were underestimated.
Jurisdictional integration was one of the highlights of the Hwy40 project. The three forest management (FM) companies involved were able and willing to create a single seamless disturbance event spanning all three jurisdictions. The fourth land partner was either unwilling or unable to support adjacent disturbance activities.
Procedural integration was accomplished to some degree between the three FM companies and Alberta Sustainable Resource Development (ASRD). However, the team was discouraged to explore any integrated planning procedures with other land partners.
Participatory integration was perhaps the biggest disappointment of the project, only because in retrospect much of it was avoidable. The Planning Team functioned more as a committee interested more in their agency’s stated values, than as a team interested in designing a holistically robust disturbance design solution.
Regulatory integration was the least successful integration element of the Hwy40 project. Since this goes directly to inter-agency regulatory policy, the Hwy40 project had little or no power to influence this.
Overall, the value of adopting a common planning foundation of natural disturbance patterns was considerable in terms of both process and outcomes. The least successful process-related elements were either a direct result of the pioneering nature of the project, or institutional integration issues beyond the control of the participants.