PROVINCE MUST REINSTATE MONITORING PROGRAMS
Regulator’s decision puts wildlife, especially birds, in jeopardy, says Gillian Chow-fraser.
Earlier this month, the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) announced suspension of more than a dozen crucial environmental monitoring activities in the oilsands. The rationale is posed as a response to the COVID -19 pandemic.
This should be a concern to Albertans as it is yet unclear how long the select oilsands mining and in situ projects will be left without an operational tailings monitoring system, which is necessary to prevent undue harm to wildlife.
Just days before this recent decision was announced, more than 100 birds landed in a tailings area in northern Alberta, resulting in at least 50 dead birds.
It is thought the exhausted birds landed in the tailings ponds as natural waterbodies were still covered in ice. Like an unintentional trap, tailings ponds are warm enough to prevent ice cover and attract birds that might need to make emergency landings in poor weather.
Without monitoring, companies and regulators can willingly turn a blind eye to these events.
The AER’S decision ignores the heightened risk of bird landings during the migration season, a time when monitoring is critical. Millions of migratory birds are currently carrying out long-distance journeys, with a major migratory flyway directly above the oilsands region.
“This is one of the only places in North America where migratory birds converge from wintering grounds all over the continent,” says Colleen Cassady St. Clair, a conservation biologist at the University of Alberta.
For birds, there can be lethal consequences from contact with treated waters, especially bitumen.
Such contact by species-at-risk with low numbers could threaten entire populations, as well as individuals. This is exactly the case for endangered whooping cranes, whose only wild migratory population has rebounded to about 500 birds due to very aggressive recovery actions implemented over decades.
As the whooping cranes fly above the oilsands to reach their breeding grounds in Wood Buffalo National Park, they risk landing in toxic tailings areas that could severely threaten their recovery, and undo much of the hard work that has increased their numbers.
For the oil and gas industry, suspension of monitoring poses different threats. Environmental monitoring of tailings has a tumultuous history in the oilsands, with substantial changes a decade ago driven by public scrutiny.
In 2008, a mass landing and subsequent oiling of 1,600 ducks triggered the launch of a multimillion-dollar program to better monitor bird landings.
In the first three years of the robust monitoring program, it was revealed that tens of thousands of bird landings occur on the industrial ponds annually, of which hundreds appeared to die as a result.
“By 2014, the oilsands industry was poised to be a world leader with standardized, rigorous and transparent monitoring of bird landings and mortality,” says
St. Clair, who led the Research on Avian Protection Project that informed the monitoring program.
However, many of the most important aspects of the monitoring program have since been dismantled or weakened.
Now, with the additional removal of the monitoring altogether, St. Clair worries that both birds and the industry are left in the same vulnerable state as in 2008.
Why have these reporting suspensions happened?
Oil and gas companies cite safety concerns due to difficulties of maintaining physical distancing while carrying out monitoring activities.
Ironic timing though, as this week, hundreds of thousands of Albertans are following the provincial government’s guidelines and returning to work in jobs with even closer quarters, while practising precautions to keep one another safe.
We call on the government of Alberta to develop a sound COVID -19-adapted solution that provides much-needed employment and maintain environmental monitoring during this sensitive time for migratory birds.
Past events have shown that the public expects this industry to protect birds from its operations.
Carrying out a credible monitoring program — even during a pandemic — shows the sector’s commitment to that goal.