Millions of birds at risk from tar sands

Vue Weekly - December 4, 2008, Issue #684
http://www.vueweekly.com/article.php?id=10416



Millions of birds at risk from tar sands
Boreal forest disruption, fragmentation may mean loss of up to 166 million birds
Scott Harris / scott@vueweekly.com

Millions of birds that depend on the Boreal forest could be lost over the next half-century due to planned tar sands development in northern Alberta, according to a new report.

“The Boreal forest tar sands area is incredibly important for birds as a breeding habitat and as a globally important flyway for a great adundance and diversity of wetland-dependent birds,” reads the report. “Unfortunately the rapidly expanding industrial tar sands oil extraction operations increasingly put these birds at risk.”

The report, entitled Danger in the Nursery, estimates that between six million and 166 million birds could be lost over the next 30 to 50 years due to a combination of surface mining, landings on toxic tailings ponds and habitat destruction and fragmentation from infrastructure related to in-situ operations.

“Based on our estimates that could mean 10 to 50 per cent of the forest-dependent birds of the Boreal forest of Alberta could be lost, which is a pretty astounding number,” says Jeff Wells, the report’s lead author and a senior scientist with the US-based Boreal Songbird Initiative, which produced the report along with the Pembina Institute and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The projected impacts are based on the habitat densities of breeding birds in the Boreal—estimated by the Canadian Wildlife Service at between 0.64 and 4.86 per acre—over the roughly 14 million hectares that could be developed for tar sands operations.

Surface strip-mining projects, which are projected to impact as much as 300 000 hectares over the next 30 to 50 years, will result in the loss of habitat for between 480 000 and 3.6 million adult birds.

“In addition, this loss of breeding habitat represents a loss of opportunity for continued production of young birds by future breeding adults,” reads the report, meaning an additional loss of up to 36 million young birds over a 20-year period and up to 72 million over a 40-year timeframe.

Pointing out that losses resulting from incidents like the 500 ducks which died after landing on a Syncrude tailings pond in May are likely underestimated by industry reports, Wells says an additional 8000 to 100 000 birds annually could be dying from “oiling events” related to existing tailings ponds, and a doubling in the number of ponds due to increased mining activity could bring that number to between 17 000 and 300 000 annually.

The most significant impact on bird populations, however, will come from future development of in-situ projects, which will use steam injection to recover the 80 per cent of proven reserves that are too deep for recovery through surface mining.

Despite having a smaller footprint than mining operations, in-situ operations require a network of roads, well pads and compressor stations. Current leases for in-situ operations will remove 485 000 hectares of Boreal, resulting in a loss of between 777 000 and 5.8 million birds. That number could increase to as high as 14.5 million if leases are extended to the entire tar sands region.

“The in-situ especially is the hidden cost to wildlife because it occurs over such a vast area, or is projected to eventually,” explains Wells. “What it also does is cause the habitat to be split up into small islands of forest and wetlands. The ways this fragmentation affects wildlife are many, but they include things like changes in hydrology and microclimate, which affects actually the habitat and the species that can occur there—plant and animal. It changes the predator populations. And then more recently we’ve discovered that fragmentation actually disrupts the social structure of bird populations. So there’s a whole host of ways that fragmentation can cause reductions in bird densities.”

Such fragmentation, the report says, could result in the loss of up to 76 million birds over a 30 to 50 year period.

“Taken together these estimates could mean that as many as 166 million birds may be lost if tar sands development continues without some kind of major change,” says Wells. “Amazingly, these numbers do not even include the effects of airborne and waterborne pollutants, toxins, impacts from water withdrawal, external infrastructure development including pipelines, and from global warming. We still don’t even have enough information to estimate the total losses from those.”

Brad Bellows, a spokesperson with Suncor, which currently has both surface mining and in-situ operations in northern Alberta, acknowledges that some impacts on wildlife are unavoidable, but he questions the scale of the predictions contained in the report.

“I do find in the report that the data seems to assume unconstrained and somewhat implausible scenarios,” Bellows says. “It seems to assume that all potential mining projects will go ahead nearly simultaneously, absent any parallel reclamation process, any technology improvement. So it seems like the authors were striving for such a worst-case scenario that it actually beggars belief.”

Bellows says that as part of the regulatory process for approvals in the tar sands, companies are required to report any wildlife mortality to the province, and the numbers that Suncor has tracked are nothing like the estimates in the report. He offers as an example Suncor’s reports to regulators on bird deaths from landings on tailings ponds: “We would typically have an average between 2001 and 2007 of about eight birds per year. And that’s where I’m interested in the source of some of the projections in this report. There’s some very large numbers which seem implausible.”

While he disputes the report’s estimates, Bellows says that Suncor is trying to minimize its impact on bird and other animal populations.

“For the general mined areas really the long-term mitigation is reclamation. As an example, we have an area called Crane Lake that was an area that was disturbed and has been reclaimed to a wetland and in that area we’ve had documented over 129 bird species, with 43 species taking up residency in the lake area.”

He does admit that Suncor needs to do a better job of reclaiming the 95 000 hectares the company has disturbed to date.

“Total land reclaimed from land we’ve disturbed is now about 10 per cent of total disturbance, but we’re obviously looking to accelerate the pace of reclamation,” he says.

Bellows adds that for its in-situ operations Suncor tries to mitigate the impact on birds and other wildlife through approaches such as narrow cutlines which are meandered to reduce sight lines for predators and returning removed material to cutlines as mulch to speed reclamation.
Despite challenging the numbers, Bellows says he agrees with a number of the recommendations in the report.

“I think if you strip away some of the hyperbole in the summary report, the recommendations that are in there are things that are moving along: looking at the need for a broadly coordinated approach to land-use planning, for example, that’s something that’s expected next year to the government of Alberta’s land-use framework. So I think that there’s directionally a lot of things that we would agree with.”

Other recommendations aimed at government include fully implementing national laws and international treaties aimed at protecting migratory birds, and strengthening and enforcing regulations around waste management, water withdrawals, pollution levels and habitat destruction and reclamation.

The report calls for a moratorium on new development until adequate conservation measures are in place and says that ultimately we need to move away from dependence on the tar sands through improvements in vehicle efficiency and limiting the production of high-carbon fuels, but Wells says it also points to plenty that industry can do in the meantime to minimize impacts on the Boreal.

“There’s actually a list of different ways that different groups have come up with trying to make the process itself less harmful,” Wells says. “It includes everything from thinking about ways to lower emissions to using dry tailings ponds instead of the current wet tailings to decreasing the size of corridors to trying to find real ways to reclaim habitat that’s lost, which no one’s figured out how to do right yet. So there are lots of ways to move forward but it’s going to be a slow process.

“In the meantime we think the prudent approach to having meaningful change is to think about implementing a land-use plan that includes protecting 40 per cent of northeastern Alberta and that we should have interim protection for areas that have already been identified as important and to think about opportunities like mitigation, including off-site mitigation. So there’s actually some things that could be done quickly and easily now.”




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