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Migratory waterfowl are important to the diets of residents in Canada’s northern communities. Contrary to recreational hunters, indigenous peoples have rights to harvest wildlife for subsistence needs without permits. As a result, migratory waterfowl are an important component of diets of Aboriginal peoples in northern Canada, substituting for expensive beef transported from the south. Wild geese and duck provide many benefits to native people, including improved nutrition and health. In this paper, scaled-down data from global climate models are used in a wildlife model to project potential migratory waterfowl abundance in the Northwest Territories for three future periods up to 2080. The models project potential future harvests of geese and ducks by Aboriginal hunters and the financial and nutritional benefits. It turns out that northern Aboriginal peoples can benefit significantly as a result of climate change that affects migratory waterfowl, but likely at the expense of hunters and recreationists in other regions of North America.

In Canada, governments have historically promoted economic development in rural regions by promoting exploitation of natural resources, particularly forests. Forest resources are an economic development driver in many of the more than 80% of native communities located in forest regions. But forests also provide aboriginal people with cultural and spiritual values, and non-timber forest amenities (e.g., biodiversity, wildlife harvests for meat and fur, etc.), that are incompatible with timber exploitation. Some cultural and other amenities can only be satisfied by maintaining a certain amount of timber in an old-growth state. In that case, resource constraints might be too onerous to satisfy development needs. We employ compromise programming and fuzzy programming to identify forest management strategies that best compromise between development and other objectives, applying our models to an aboriginal community in northern Alberta. In addition to describing how mathematical programming techniques can be applied to regional development and forest management, we conclude from the analysis that no management strategy is able to satisfy all of the technical, environmental and social/cultural constraints and, at the same time, offer aboriginal peoples forest-based economic development. Nonetheless, we demonstrate that extant forest management policies can be improved upon.

Increased conflicts between timber production and environmental protection led some analysts to advocate land-use segregation, often referred to as forest management zoning. The objective of zoning is to create ecologically desirable non-fragmented forest reserves and group timber production areas. We formulate an integer programming model of forest zoning that explicitly addresses clustering of spatial units allocated to timber production and reserve zones while also promoting separation of these zones. A tabu search algorithm is developed, implemented and tested using a case study. The case study results indicate that up to 5% of the net financial return is sacrificed with a 'satisfactory' grouping of units within each zone. A 'good' separation between the reserves and timber production zone is achieved at the cost of further decline of the net financial return up to 11% relative to the unconstrained case.

In this study, we explore whether projected socio-economic needs of the Little Red River Cree Nation (LRRCN) can be met using the natural resources to which they have access. To answer this question, we employ a dynamic optimization model to assess the capacity of the available forest base to provide for anticipated future needs of the LRRCN. Results for alternative management strategies indicate that decision-makers face significant tradeoffs in deciding an appropriate management strategy for the forestlands they control.

In this paper, we develop a multiple objective, decision-making model that focuses on forest policies that simultaneously achieve carbon uptake and maintenance of ecosystem diversity objectives. Two forest carbon measures are used - a nominal (undiscounted) net carbon uptake as a proxy for long-term carbon sequestration and discounted net carbon uptake that captures the "fast" carbon accumulation aspect. Ecosystem diversity is expressed in terms of desired structures for forest and afforested agricultural land. Economic effects of possible strategies are examined by comparing attainment of these objectives with the net discounted returns from commercial timber harvests and agricultural activities. The tradeoffs between timber and non-timber objectives are obtained by means of compromise programming. Two measures of distance between the current objective values and the ideal ones are used to assess attainment of multiple goals. We explore how the choice of a measure affects the decisions and overall performance. The model is applied to the boreal forest and accompanying marginal agricultural lands in the Peace River region of northeastern British Columbia.

To satisfy public demands for environmental values, forest companies face the prospect of reduced wood supply and increased costs. Some Canadian provincial governments have proposed intensifying silviculture in special zones dedicated to timber production as the means for pushing out the forest possibilities frontier. In this paper, we compare the traditional twozone land allocation framework, which includes ecological reserves and integrated forest management zones, with the triad (three-zone) scheme that adds a zone dedicated to intensive timber production. We compare the solutions of mixed-integer linear programs formulated under both land allocation frameworks and, through sensitivity analysis, explore the conditions under which the triad regime can offset the negative impact on timber production from increased environmental demands. Under realistic conditions characteristic of Coastal British Columbia, we show that higher environmental demands may be satisfied with the triad regime without increasing the financial burden on the industry or reducing its wood supply.

Project Report 2001-10