‘The site is in danger, and now Canada and Alberta are adding threats’

A United Nations monitoring team is inspecting progress on a Parks Canada action plan to save Wood Buffalo National Park’s World Heritage Site status.

The huge park spans parts of the NWT and northern Alberta, including some of the Peace-Athabasca Delta. The inspection – called a reactive monitoring mission – is the third since the concerns of Indigenous communities in and around the park rose to the fore more than a decade ago.

UN cultural agency Unesco must decide whether the park is an endangered World Heritage Site, which would trigger calls for urgent intervention.

Parks Canada assigned $87 million to an action plan, released in 2019, to defend the park against threats ranging from climate change to industrial pollution. The actions in that initial plan expire this year. A broader federal nature strategy released earlier in 2026 commits an additional $90 million to extend work over the next five years.

Chief Melody Lepine of the Mikisew Cree First Nation says both the action plan and the Unesco inspections have yet to achieve much.

“Not a lot has changed” since the last Unesco visit in 2022, Chief Lepine said last week as the inspection was taking place. She said Unesco’s evaluations “don’t seem to go anywhere.”

The 2022 visit resulted in 17 recommendations from Unesco, whose inspectors said they were “concerned” but the park was not yet formally endangered.

At the time, the inspectors said most threats to the park identified in an initial 2016 visit “remain valid today” – pointing to tensions between governments, Indigenous peoples and industry, plus the impact of dams and oil sands and the absence of a “buffer zone” around the park.

So how have the park’s biggest challenges evolved since 2022 and how could they be fixed?

Competing interests: oil and environment

The climate crisis is a significant factor.

In the years since the last inspection, huge wildfires have burned much of the park. Those fires have had the effect of transforming large swaths of the park’s landscape while closing off some areas to communities and tourists for extended periods in the aftermath.

Meanwhile, communities like the Town of Fort Smith say their relationship with Parks Canada is worsening, accusing it of “a lot of talk, no action” on issues like the park’s economic impact and local programming.

But for Lepine and others, the largest concerns are beyond the park’s boundaries: things like dams on rivers that lead into the park, industrial tailings emptying into those rivers, and political decision-making around the safety of water.

Lepine says a required risk assessment related to the impact of Alberta oil sands tailings on the park has not been completed. She is backed up by Kaitlyn Philip, a campaign director for the northern Alberta chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, or CPAWS.

“Back in 2022, Unesco suggested a moratorium on dams on the Peace River until water flows were better. There’s also long been a call for an oil sands tailings risk assessment to see what those potential harms are,” said Philip.

“Those bigger pieces that could really change the future of the park are still outstanding. We’d like to see those critical pieces addressed as soon as possible.”

To Lepine, the recent announcement that Canada and Alberta are advancing a proposed oil pipeline from the province to the nation’s west coast was striking, given she says those two governments cannot agree on how to help the park.

“On the tailings risk assessment, Canada says ‘Alberta should do that,’ and Alberta says ‘Canada should pay for it,'” Lepine said.

“Canada and Alberta just signed this MOU relatively quickly to expand and accelerate oil sands, to announce the West Coast pipeline, carbon capture and storage to deal with greenhouse gas emissions. They seem to advance oil sands development relatively quickly, but yet they can’t seem to advance some sort of joint effort for conservation.”

Without the tailings risk assessment, Lepine said, nobody – including the inspectors – can fully understand the “pressing and uncertain” threats to the Peace-Athabasca Delta, and too little work exists to appreciate cumulative impacts over time.

Lepine wants the monitoring mission to conclude the park is endangered.

“The site is in danger,” she said, “and now Canada and Alberta are adding more threats. They’re going in reverse. Not only are they not following through on the existing commitments in the action plan, but they’re adding more problems.”

Action plan ‘reaching milestones’

The past week’s inspection was not widely publicized, unlike the 2022 mission, which was heralded by the federal government as a “collaborative effort” to address the park’s challenges.

Unesco confirmed this month’s visit was taking place but declined to make any of the mission team available for interview. In a statement, the UN agency said the mission’s findings will be presented to the World Heritage Committee in Istanbul, Türkiye, during a broader conference from June 27-July 7 next year. It’s possible a summary is released earlier, CPAWS said.

Parks Canada said none of its spokespeople were available for interview last week because they were helping the reactive monitoring mission.

In a statement, Parks Canada said its action plan had “recently reached several important milestones.” The developments that statement pointed to include:

• the opening of a new field station in the park;
• development of a Peace-Athabasca Delta research and monitoring program with Indigenous communities;
• work to advance new weirs and culverts in the park; and
• what Parks Canada called “enhanced environmental monitoring and expanded Indigenous stewardship and management throughout the park.”

Regarding tailings concerns, Parks Canada said a working group formed in 2021 – and including nine Indigenous communities – is “contributing to the effort to review options for managing the accumulation of oil sands processing water in tailings ponds.”

Parks Canada said many of the issues the park faces are “systemic in nature and involve shared responsibilities across multiple jurisdictions.”

Philip, from CPAWS, said more collaboration from Alberta, a stronger regulatory presence and above all, a change in mindset are needed to protect the park for the long term.

“Having those funds to complete the action plan is a great step. However, the threats are only growing,” Philip said, referring to climate change, oil sands development and the damming of rivers that contribute to the delta.

“Unless we’re able to actually lessen some of the threats and be more proactive, then that money will go more toward band-aid solutions than actually stopping the harm.”