By Geoff Smith (@smithco on Twitter)

Province provides funding for land conservation

Mar 27, 2017 | 12:47 PM

LETHBRIDGE – Three non-profit groups are getting provincial funding to help preserve land and water in southern Alberta.

The Alberta Land Trust Grant Program is putting nearly $9 million into six projects to protect wildlife habitats and watersheds, keeping ranchland from being developed for other uses. Each dollar the government puts in must result in two dollars in value from the applicant.

A combined 6,000 acres of working ranchland in the Castle-Crowsnest watershed and in the Bow area will be protected by the Nature Conservance of Canada, which is getting $5.1 million.

The Southern Alberta Land Trust Society is getting $3.2 million for projects in the Pekisko Valley near Longview (a nearly 4,000-acre ranch), the Porcupine Hills, and near Waterton Lakes National Park. And nearly $500,000 will protect roughly 300 acres of land northeast of Priddis through the Foothills Land Trust.

“These organizations are doing a lot with this money,” Environment minister Shannon Phillips said at a news conference in Lethbridge Monday, March 27. “Whether it’s through stewardship, outright purchase, or through legal arrangements, these projects make a real difference in southern Alberta.”

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Larry Simpson of the Nature Conservancy Canada said the landowners give up more value than any other contributors to the program. He explained ranching has worked as a sustainable model to preserve grasslands for more than a century, but it’s come under pressure in the past 15 years.

“In the last decade and a half it’s become vulnerable,” Simpson said. “The eastern slopes first become vulnerable to being unable to compete with acreage development. And now grain prices out on the prairies are having a similar impact.”

“All our water flows through the foothills,” Southern Alberta Land Trust executive dirctor Justin Thompson said, “and a lot of these foothills are privately owned. And as they get more fragmented with roads or other forms of development, water comes off the land not as clean, not as quickly, it doesn’t get stored. So when we can keep these landscapes more intact, it means the water downstream’s going to be better for everybody.”

The program will also provide funding to five other land trust groups in 2017.