The North Coast Cumulative Effects Program is comprised of representatives from Gitga’at, Gitxaała, Metlakatla, Haisla, Kitselas, and Kitsumkalum Nations; the British Columbia ministries of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources and Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development; and with coordination and technical support from North Coast-Skeena First Nations Stewardship Society (NCSFNSS).
WHAT WE DO
Current areas of work under the NC CE Program
Aquatic Habitats: Estuaries
Food Security and Access to Resources
Salmon
Field Program
Data Management
Communications and Engagement
Data Governance
Contact someone at the NC CE Program to learn more
First Nations Cumulative Effects Work Crucial in the North Coast
With the North Coast of British Columbia (BC), Canada being a hub of increasing industrial activity over the past decades there is a critical need to break out of the silos of traditional approaches to addressing impacts in a case-by-case basis and instead engage collectively with Partner First Nations to understand and address the cumulative effects in the region.
First Nations are a fundamental aspect of the resource management landscape. Their perspectives and interests are formed from a reliance on the waters and lands for community sustenance, wealth, culture, and health.
Their perspectives and interests are formed from a reliance on the waters and lands for community sustenance, wealth, culture, and health.
On the North Coast of BC, First Nations have fostered opportunities such as the Marine Plan Partnership and the Environmental Stewardship Initiative to work closely in collaboration as Partners with the Province of BC to monitor, assess and manage cumulative effects on shared values
Vision and Objectives
of the North Coast Cumulative Effects Program
The primary vision of the NC CE Program is to enable resource decision-making to be tuned in and responsive to cumulative effects on core coastal and marine values, and improve the stewardship of marine ecosystems and resources and the human well-being of the coastal communities.
The process of the program is framed around implementation of the MaPP Cumulative Effects Framework (MaPP CEF). The MaPP CEF identifies nine components organized in four phases (Foundation, Assessment, Management, and Monitoring) that constitute a comprehensive cumulative effects assessment and management program for the marine and coastal environment.
Creating and Strengthening Relationships
Strengthen existing or create new relationships
to support implementation
of the MaPP CEF for core coastal and marine values.
Assessment
Cumulative effects assessment evaluates the extent to which individual actions or events (including climate change), create stress on valued components of socioeconomic and/or biophysical systems.
Management Decisions
Collaboratively identify management objectives for ecological, social and cultural values and utilize assessment results to improve decision making.
An Ecosystem-Based Management Approach
The NC CE EBM is an adaptive approach that utilizes both science and Aboriginal ecological knowledge and includes three important elements:
- Ecological integrity
- Human wellbeing
- Governance
Current Activities and Progress
An initial suite of four values were identified to tackle within the NC CE
Program: Food Security; Access to Resources; Aquatic Habitat: Estuaries; and
Salmon. The NC CE Field Program, the NC Data Management System (NC
DMS), and Data Governance are all crucial pieces to the program that
support the ongoing value-based work
Food Security and Access to Resources
Food Security and Access to Resources are core values within the North Coast CE Program. The value-based assessments underway provide an understanding of current condition and barriers impacting NC Nations Food Security and Access to Resources.
A primary goal of the program is addressing these barriers while also managing healthy ecosystems and communities.
Food Security and Access to Resources
Work to date:
The FS/AtR team has completed a Cumulative Effects Assessment report with the intentions of carrying forward management recommendations into the next steps of implementation. The team also proposed and implemented an immediate pilot project of Community Harvesting Grants to help offset barriers to food security and access to resources.
Next steps:
Work is underway to move forward on engagement with key decision- makers on management recommendations that arose from the CE Assessment.
Published works:
Aquatic Habitat: Estuaries
A significant component of the North Coast Plan Area is the Skeena River Estuary, which is part of one of the most productive and biologically diverse watersheds in Canada.
Besides the immense ecological importance of the
Skeena Estuary, the estuary also supports commercial and recreational industries, provides ecosystem services, and has high cultural and historical significance to First Nations.
Aquatic Habitat: Estuaries
The broad objective for the Aquatic Habitat: Estuaries value work is:
“Protect and restore habitat and ecosystem function for species that are highly valued for their ecological and cultural significance.”
Work to date:
Work on the Estuary value has included the completion of a current condition assessment that integrated desktop research and five years of NC CE field program data. The Project Team has also developed a suite of initial management recommendations.
Next steps:
Work is underway to finalize the current condition report and a protocol for future assessments and to carry forward the management recommendations into the next stages of stakeholder engagement and implementation.
Published works:
Salmon
The Skeena Estuary supports some of the largest fish populations on the coast, including juvenile and adult salmon, that are ecologically, economically, and culturally important to First Nations on the North Coast.
Multiple and increasing pressures result in significant impacts on salmon as well as the vulnerable but essential ecosystems within the Skeena watershed. Understanding cumulative effects in the North Coast is key for supporting not only healthy salmon populations, but also for addressing First Nation Food Security and Access to Resources and protecting the health of the Skeena Estuary.
Salmon
The broad objective for the Salmon value work is:
“Protect, restore and foster healthy salmon habitats and diverse populations
to support healthy ecosystems, cultural values, and sustainable harvest, and
meet the needs of First Nations and local communities, now and in the
future.”
Work to date:
Next steps:
Work is underway that will build on the results of the Estuary CE Current Condition assessment to engage partners and key decision-makers to develop a Skeena Estuary Habitat Management and Protection Plan and implement two priority salmon habitat restoration projects.
Published works:
NC CE Field Program
Monitoring is critical for the North Coast as it provides information on the
current status of values through the measurement of indicators, assists with
the identification of new environmental concerns, the prioritization of issues
and development of management decisions, and the evaluation of trends
over time. Monitoring data also can provide the information and evidence
needed to determine what is working and what is not, so that policies and
management actions can be adapted if necessary.
Having the communities that are most dependent on values involved in the
monitoring process offers a way in which to build a situational awareness.
This in turn, can lead to receiving important feedback on the values
foundation, which can lead to continuous improvement of the monitoring
itself and also the capacity to make appropriate decisions that have the
greatest impact.
Each field season (summer) technicians from partner Nations conduct field
sampling to collect data throughout the North Coast. The 2021 summer
season marked the 5th year of the field program and resulted in the
collection of monitoring data across 12 sites in the Skeena Estuary that
included eelgrass, soft bottom, and kelp habitats.
Monitoring data has been collected for the NC CE program since 2017 on the following indicators:
Water Quality
Sediment Chemistry
Bivalve Tissue Chemistry
Benthic Meiofauna
Fish communities in eelgrass
Eelgrass condition and extent
Kelp condition and extent
DEVELOPING LOCAL EXPERTISE
Warren Bolton, a Kitsumkalum band member, GIS
technician, and drone operator, undertakes eelgrass survey work near Ridley Island on the
North Coast. Bolton’s involvement with MaPP’s CE project dovetailed perfectly with formal
studies in the sciences.
COLLABORATING ON CUMULATIVE EFFECTS MONITORING
Field teams involved in North Coast CE work often bring together members of several First Nations and communities, as well as people from the North Coast Environmental Stewardship Initiative (ESI).
NC Data Management System
To facilitate the assessment and management of cumulative effects in the
North Coast, and improve and coordinate data collection and management, a
comprehensive, integrated, user-friendly North Coast Data Management System (NC DMS)
was built to support this diverse group of partners that includes First Nations
and government.
The North Coast Data Management Portal (accessible to Partners) provides:
Technology for managing, analyzing, and displaying data
A metadata catalogue that describes data and information
Secure data storage with a full dataset inventory with sensitive metadata accessed only by subsets of user groups
The collection and capture of field data
A flexible system to allow integration of other application tools eg. GIS
Communications and Engagement
Ongoing North Coast Communications and Engagement focuses on reporting on the progress, process and accomplishments of the NC CE Program. Consistent ongoing communications and engagement activities support the successful implementation of the North Coast Marine Plan, including: public and stakeholder communication and engagement, media relations, and the use of updates, success stories, newsletters, annual reports, and performance reporting to communicate the progress, process and achievements of the NC CE Program.
In the News!
Frequently Asked Questions
Cumulative effects (CE) are the impacts that occur from present, past, and reasonably
foreseeable human actions or natural events that result in changes to environmental,
social, economic, health and cultural values (MaPP, 2016). Cumulative effects
assessment evaluates the extent to which individual actions or events (including climate
change), create stress on valued components of socioeconomic and/or biophysical
systems. These assessments are important because even though the effects of
individual actions may be considered insignificant upon assessment, the incremental
and combined effects of individual actions or events may be significant.
Communities in the North Coast are already dealing with the impacts and changes that
occur as a result of cumulative effects. Some of these changes include: degradation of
food harvest areas; barriers to harvest, negative interactions between industry and
culturally important places and resources, and negative changes to the health of
community members.
In 2017, the Marine Plan Partnership (MaPP) joined the North Coast Environmental Stewardship Initiative (ESI) to form the North Coast Cumulative Effects (NC CE)
Program. The merging of these two initiatives arose from a shared goal of developing and fully implementing a cumulative effects framework to continuously monitor, assess, and manage the impacts of industrial and non-industrial development in the North Coast.
Welcome 2018
The North Coast Plan Area includes the area from Portland Inlet to the south end of Aristazabal Island, including the communities of Prince Rupert, Terrace and Kitimat and the land and marine territories of the six partner Nations. Other Nations also have territories in the North Coast Plan Area including Lax Kw’alaams, Heiltsuk, Kitasoo, and Nisga’a Nations but are not participating directly in the NC CE Program. See North Coast Plan Area
The North Coast is subject to development pressure from numerous small to large scale industrial activities and proposed projects are assessed project by project, essentially negating to account for any possible compounding effects that may occur as a result of these ongoing projects. Cumulative effects on core coastal and marine values are not well understood nor consistently addressed through monitoring, assessment, or management programs
The assessment phase involves working to gain an understanding of current conditions, historical trends, and future scenarios in the NC.>br>
Management recommendations are developed with the intention to inform decisions and develop assessment recommendations, which are based on the assessment results, and in order to manage the values and mitigate cumulative effects.
The monitoring phase includes monitoring of the indicators themselves and also monitoring the effectiveness of management actions. The process is iterative and adaptive, meaning that management pathways may be further revised with each iteration over time to create a more complete picture of the NC
EBM is an adaptive approach to managing human activities that seeks to ensure the coexistence of healthy, fully functioning ecosystems and human communities
Long-term environmental monitoring, evaluation, and reporting are fundamental to
understanding and documenting environmental changes, and assessing the
effectiveness of management actions. Monitoring of data can assist with the
identification of new environmental concerns, the prioritization of issues and
development of management decisions, and the evaluation of trends over time.
Monitoring data also can provide the information and evidence needed to determine
what is working and what is not, so that policies and management actions can be
adapted if necessary.
The NC DMS was developed to enable project team members to contribute, house,
aggregate, analyze, and visualize a wide range of regional monitoring data. A key intent
of this tool is to improve technical collaboration on cumulative effects and the
accessibility of collaboratively-generated data and assessments for decision-makers.
This will facilitate evaluation of project proposals and management of cumulative effects
on the North Coast
The NC DMS was developed to enable project team members to contribute, house,
aggregate, analyze, and visualize a wide range of regional monitoring data. A key intent
of this tool is to improve technical collaboration on cumulative effects and the
accessibility of collaboratively-generated data and assessments for decision-makers.
This will facilitate evaluation of project proposals and management of cumulative effects
on the North Coas
- The North Coast Data Management Portal provides:
- Technology for managing, analyzing, and displaying data
- A metadata catalogue that describes data and information
- Secure data storage with a full dataset inventory with sensitive metadata
accessed only by subsets of user groups - The collection and capture of field data
- A flexible system to allow integration of other application tools eg. GIS
selected also were: representative of critical habitat components or were indicators of habitat quality for organisms that use the estuary; responsive to potential impacts that were identified for the estuary; assessed previously in studies so that baseline data existed already; cost-effective to monitor; and representative of First Nations values in the regions
