AWA’s Feedback on the Draft Upper Smoky Sub-Regional Plan

June 24, 2025

• •
• •
• •

• Caribou
• Kakwa
• Public Lands
• Rocky Mountain and Foothills Forests
• Species at Risk

The Alberta Wilderness Association has submitted detailed feedback on the Government of Alberta’s draft Upper Smoky Sub-Regional Plan. While we recognize the effort to advance sub-regional planning and appreciate the creation of new conservation areas, we are deeply concerned that the draft plan fails to deliver a credible path toward caribou recovery.

The plan prioritizes industrial development, particularly forestry, at the expense of caribou habitat. It allows continued clearcutting across nearly all of the Redrock-Prairie Creek and Narraway caribou winter ranges (see our joint report on the draft Upper Smoky Sub-Regional Plan). The proposed forestry scenario does not meet the federal Recovery Strategy’s requirements of maintaining at least 65 percent undisturbed habitat, and projects decades of further habitat degradation instead of recovery.

While the plan promises to “balance” industrial development and conservation, that balance is absent. It fails to include measurable targets for caribou recovery, allows for ongoing industrial expansion without enforceable limits, and ignores the well-documented cumulative impacts that have pushed these caribou populations to the brink of extirpation. Without significant changes, especially to how forestry is managed within caribou ranges, this plan will lead to the extirpation of two southern mountain caribou populations from the region.

AWA is calling for stronger habitat protections, a revised forestry scenario, and the inclusion of caribou recovery as a core outcome. We believe Albertans want real conservation outcomes, not continued decline disguised as balance.

AWA’s concerns and recommendations on the draft Upper Smoky Sub-Regional Plan can be read in full here.