Expansion of Existing Natural World Heritage Sites
Proposals for expansion of World Heritage site boundaries are dealt with regularly at the annual meetings of the World Heritage Committee. Where the size of an existing site is to be increased by more than 10%, the revised Operational Guidelines now in preparation will require a renomination of the entire property. At present, State Parties are not required to register proposals for expansions on their Tentative Lists, but, as this guideline may change, it is prescient to identify the cases where expansion of Canadian sites have been suggested.
Nahanni National Park Reserve WHS (1978; N ii, iii) [now vii, ix]
Nahanni National Park Reserve of Canada was officially proclaimed under the National Parks Act in 1976 as a “national park reserve”, subject to settlement of land titles and interest of people of native origin. In 1978 Nahanni was one of the first group of natural sites to be inscribed on the World Heritage List. That same year the then National Parks Branch recommended Nahanni’s boundaries be modified to include three additions: an area of mountains in the Ragged Range; the unique geomorphic features of the Nahanni Karst Belt; and parts of the Tlogotsho Range, which contains key habitat for Dalls Sheep. In the mid-1980s the park management planning process resulted in formalizing these three extension proposals.
Over the past few years, the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society has been campaigning in support of Parks Canada’s long-term goal of enlarging the park. The Deh Cho First Nations have also proposed that Nahanni be expanded to include the entire South Nahanni watershed. In November 2001, Parks Canada tabled a report on “Areas of High Conservation Value Adjacent to Nahanni” with the Deh Cho Lands Working Group. Park expansion discussions are continuing as part of the land claim settlement process.
Should further protection measures be taken around Nahanni, it is clear that important natural features of the Nahanni karst region as well as enhanced wildlife habitat viability would reinforce the features for which the park was inscribed. As Nahanni’s nomination was submitted in the first year of the operation of the Convention, a restatement of significance and renomination to include any additions would be timely and justified.
Wood Buffalo National Park WHS (1983; N ii, iii, iv) [now vii, ix, x]
In July 2001, the Government of Alberta established the Caribou Mountains Wildland Park adjacent to Wood Buffalo National Park of Canada. The Caribou Mountains are southern extensions of the Arctic and Subarctic boreal zones where extensive permafrost prevails. The park contains a number of distinctive features such as floating palsas, patterned fens, and a number of rare plants such as the northern ground cone. The park’s undisturbed and lichen-rich forests are favored habitat for woodland caribou, with a third of Alberta’s population of this threatened species dependent on this new park. At 591,000 ha, the new Caribou Mountains Park would be a substantial addition to the Wood Buffalo WHS. It would add to the diversity of the site as well as to the integrity of Wood Buffalo WHS. However, as the park is in its early stages of management and as the category of designation (Wildland Park) may give rise to integrity concerns, it may be premature to consider proposing to add it to the existing WHS at this time.
Waterton--Glacier International Peace Park WHS (1995; N ii, iii) [now vii and ix]
When this site was inscribed after some years of discussion in 1995, the IUCN technical evaluation noted the desirability of eventually extending the Canadian portion of the site to incorporate the contiguous and newly created Akamina-Kishinena Provincial Park (10, 921 ha) in British Columbia. This additional area was seen as a key component of the “Crown of the Continent” region and a logical part of the site. More recently there has been a major initiative to extend the boundary further westwards to include parts of the Canadian portion of the Flathead valley adjacent to Glacier National Park (Montana, USA). Should this be approved, the size and conservation values of Waterton Lakes National Park of Canada would be effectively doubled, clearly justifying consideration for expansion of the World Heritage boundaries.
Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks WHS (1984, 1990; N i, ii, iii) [now vii, viii and ix]
This seven-park WHS, inscribed in 1984 and then further extended in 1990, has a number of protected areas adjacent to it with high and complementary natural values. Several of these would not add significant values to the site but perform an effective buffer function. Six others, however, contain equally outstanding alpine values that could justify all three natural World Heritage criteria for which the original site was inscribed. For example, adjacent to the southern end of Banff National Park of Canada in British Columbia are the Elk Lakes (17, 245 ha) and Height of the Rockies (54, 208 ha) Provincial Parks. Both these parks contain a wide range of natural values and incorporate the Royal Group and the French Military Group of peaks which are some of the most spectacular in the Rockies.
Four other contiguous protected areas on the Alberta side would also merit consideration in a re-nomination of this site. These include the Ghost River and White Goat Wilderness’s (IUCN category I), Peter Lougheed Provincial Park, and the Willmore Wilderness Park. All of these offer high quality habitat, equivalent and complementary in value to the existing World Heritage site. The inclusion of these six additional contiguous provincial protected areas would result in a 13-park World Heritage complex and an approximate 25% size increase.
Prospects for extending the existing Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks WHS to the northern Rockies have been informally discussed by the consultant after inquiries from collegues in British Columbia. The specific areas mentioned are the Kakwa Provincial Park and the core protected areas of the Muskwa-Kechika Management Area. These areas are several hundreds of kilometres removed from the main site, so a serial nomination would be required. It is likely that a case could be made for inscription under criterion iv (the existing Rockies site was inscribed using criteria i, ii, and iii) because of the high wildlife values of the northern Rockies parks. Such a scenario may be premature at this point but the potential should be noted.