Alberta’s new Upper Smoky land-use plan draws criticism over endangered caribou habitat

A new land-use plan that Alberta’s government has for the province’s Upper Smoky region is drawing criticism from environmentalists who say they believe it lacks sufficient environmental safeguards, which poses a significant threat to the endangered southern woodland caribou. 

Effective Jan. 1, 2026, the Upper Smoky Sub-Regional Plan will guide industrial activity on the 13,000-square-kilometre area between Grande Prairie and Grande Cache. The plan attempts to carry out two mandates: protect and recover critical caribou habitat to federal standards, and support the province's goal to double oil and gas production.

Tara Russell, a program director with the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS), has provided recommendations for the plan to advocate for caribou habitat protection since 2019. She said she worries that under the new framework, the sub-region’s critical habitat for the Narraway and Redrock-Prairie Creek wildland caribou herds will be left with less than half of their original habitat over the next century.

“It's quite catastrophic and I don't think either of these populations will survive that amount of habitat loss,” she said.

Caribou populations in Alberta have been in steep decline for decades due to habitat loss and predation. 

The sub-regional plan is intended to support an agreement signed in 2020 between Alberta and Ottawa to safeguard caribou habitats, and to try to avoid the potential for legal action being taken by the federal government under the Species at Risk Act, which the woodland caribou have been listed on since 2002. That agreement ended in October.

In 2024, a provincial report showed that little progress had been made towards federal benchmarks, and several environmental groups argue the Upper Smoky Sub-Regional Plan does not reverse this trend.

The plan divides the region into three zones with varying degrees of industry restrictions. 

The “nature first” zone is directly north of Willmore Wilderness Park and Kakwa Wildland Provincial Park in the southern end of the subregion. The new protected areas bar new industrial projects, but honour existing contracts for resource extraction. This high-elevation, mountainous terrain is used by caribou during the summer months.

The “slow-go" zone encompasses two caribou ranges and three other sensitive areas in the central-western and eastern parts of the subregion. Industry is still fully permitted in this zone. The “slow” part refers to access management restrictions like sharing roads and restoration requirements, but does not ban logging or drilling. The lower elevation forested foothills are where caribou rely on shelter and foraging in the winter.

The “go" zone promises business as usual and encompasses the majority of the eastern foothills. It includes the area that is not considered caribou habitat.

The new zones do not alter current coal policies, including in the designated protected areas.

The final plan also shifts forestry operations. As stated in the plan, current approved forestry practices create dispersed harvesting areas, which involves disturbing smaller land plots, and require more roads to be built. This approach fragments the land as more plots are disturbed, but in smaller sections.

The new approach requires logging companies to adopt an aggregate harvesting approach which will see that larger areas are logged on each harvest, but will reduce the fragmentation of the landscape, reduce the number of temporary roads and decrease construction and maintenance costs for logging companies.