The Cumulative Effects Of Development And Land Use At Prince Edward Island National Park

Prince Edward Island National Park is a narrow coastal strip on the Island's north shore, established in 1937 as a recreational seaside park. The purpose of the Park within Parks Canada's representative system plan is to protect an example of the Maritime Plain natural region, in particular the coastal barrier beaches and dune systems. The agency's ability to protect the Park's resources is being inhibited by the popularity of the beaches as recreational destinations, and the cumulative impact of visitor pressure, Park developments, and Park practices threatens the sustainability of the Park ecosystem. This study addresses the concern over cumulative environmental impacts in the Park and includes an introduction on cumulative effects assessment, an extensive literature review, and assessment of cumulative effects of previous, current, and proposed developments in the Park. The significance of the impacts on key resources is discussed and mitigation measures are suggested with regard to natural habitat, aquatic systems, flora, and fauna. Recommendations are made for preserving park habitat and establishing monitoring programs.

Natural Selections traces the history of the first four parks in Atlantic Canada through the selection, expropriation, development, and management stages. Alan MacEachern shows how the Parks Branch's preconceptions about the landscape and people of the region shaped the parks created there. In doing so he details the evolution of the park system, from the conservation movement early in the century to the rise of the ecology movement. MacEachern analyzes Parks Canada's efforts to fulfill its twin mandates of preservation and use, arguing that the agency never favoured one over the other but oscillated between more or less interventionist in ensuring both. Touching on a wide range of matters - from landscape aesthetics to tourism promotion, from DDT to Martin Luther King - Natural Selections expands our understanding of the relation between nature and culture in the twentieth century.

Cumulative effects assessment (CEA) seeks to overcome the weaknesses inherent in conventional project-focused environmental assessment by expanding the spatial and temporal boundaries of the assessment. In this study, the assessment boundaries include the six broad systems contained in Kouchibouguac National Park, New Brunswick, as well as the park as a whole and land outside but adjacent to park boundaries. The first section is a brief overview of cumulative effects, CEA, and the CEA approach used in the study. The second section introduces the park's natural and cultural resources along with the natural changes occurring within the park. The third section reviews legislation, policy, and plants guiding park management in order to identify the goals and targets critical for focusing the study and for evaluating the importance of effects. The fourth section describes past, present, and proposed projects and activities in the park and region and their environmental effects. The final section identifies important cumulative effects issues and discusses the importance of these effects.

This report proposes a framework that promotes cumulative impact assessment (CEA) as a decision-making process where information on the ecological integrity of national parks is integrated into park management planning. Research for the development of the framework includes a literature review, interviews with park managers and cumulative effects specialists, and field work in two Atlantic region parks. Two illustrations using a project from each park helped refine the framework and ensure its utility. The framework links three components: sources of cumulative environmental change, assessment of this change, and the options available to manage cumulative effects. The framework establishes a link between local effects induced by specific projects or activities and overall park ecological integrity by highlighting the relationship between project-specific environmental assessment and park planning. CEA is the bridge between these two management activities. The report focuses mainly on the assessment portion of the framework and provides a series of steps to assist in conducting CEAs. The steps are organized into three tiers of analysis that correlate with regional, park, and project site scales. The framework also directs the assessor to examine broad temporal scales.