Tag Archives: Yukon

Animals, Energy

Caribou at the crux of culture and industry

By Lawrie Crawford, Yukon News, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Reconciling industrial and environmental interests is a continual problem for the Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment Board (YESAB).

Projects have quickly become controversial when caribou are involved. BMC Minerals’ Kudz Ze Kayah project affecting the Finlayson herd is now before the courts for judicial review; Western Copper and Gold’s Casino project in Klaza caribou territory is now into its eighth year of assessment; and conditions have been recently imposed on Fireweed Zinc to mitigate effects of their drilling program on the Tay River caribou herd. Conditions for Fireweed’s project in the MacMillan Pass included that “if caribou are observable within one kilometre of active work areas, activities shall cease until the caribou have moved away on their own accord.”

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energy efficiency, Politics

BC leads in Canada’s Energy Efficiency scorecard for the fourth year in a row

Efficiency Canada has just released its 2022 Canadian Energy Efficiency scorecard and British Columbia leads the rankings for the fourth year in a row.

“BC’s updated climate plan includes several nation leading policies. Now the province needs to implement them,” it states in the report.

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Industry, Rivers & Oceans

Mining risks for Pacific Northwest salmon murky due to lack of transparent data

National Observer, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

The impact of mining on key salmon watersheds in northwestern Canada and the U.S. is impossible to gauge because of a lack of transparency and access to data.

That was one conclusion of a cross-border study involving a team of experts in salmon ecology, watershed science, mining policy that surveyed the intersection of mining risk with important salmon habitat, ranging from Montana to Alaska as well as B.C. and the Yukon.

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Cost of Climate Change

Canadian institute report details Northern vulnerability to climate change

By Lawrie Crawford, Yukon News, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

The recently released Due North report on northern infrastructure from the Canadian Institute for Climate Choices is the latest on a series of climate change reports that are progressively bringing a finer focus to the challenges Yukon will be facing as climate change impacts increase.

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Indigenous Nations, Women

Indigenous women are blazing a conservation trail

By Natasha Bulowski, Canada’s National Observer, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

There is a saying in the Kaska language: “Dene K’éh Didī Nī́ʼ Sū́géhʼīn Mā” — “woman taking care of the land.”

“It’s something that’s really well known in our community,” Gillian Staveley, a director at the Dena Kayeh Institute in British Columbia, told Canada’s National Observer, “because people acknowledge that it is women who are taking care of the land and they always have been and they always will be.”

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