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July 31, 2009

EALT Board Ratifies Policies at Retreat

The Edmonton and Area Land Trust’s Board of Directors held a retreat in July, and worked on a number of areas:

  1. Ratifying policies for EALT
  2. Discussing an expanded Board of Directors as well as adding an Advisory Group
  3. Contributing to this year’s Work Planning priorities
  4. Taking EALT’s new information kits to distribute to interested individuals and businesses

The work the Board accomplished at this day-long event was extremely successful. Some of the significant outputs are:

EALT Policies
Although EALT has been operating on the basis of draft policies, the Board ratified the following policies. These are available below:

  • EALT Land Securement Strategy: This document discusses why regional conservation is important, how EALT decides which lands to protect, how EALT works to protect natural features, EALT priorities for project selection, project selection criteria, and rationale for not pursuing a project
  • EALT Public Members Policy: This describes various categories of member, including volunteer, supporting, honorary, and associate members
  • EALT Financial Segregation of Duties Policy: This describes how EALT has an approved process in place to deal with donations, and ensure that our fiscal responsibilities are fulfilled

Information Kits
The EALT information kits use visuals for easy review, and are available below:

  • Where do we Work: this map shows the significant natural areas in the region, considered provincially or nationally important. However, EALT understand that there are very many more sites of local or regional significance which are not identified, and that we need to secure these and to create linkages among all these areas
  • Conservation Priorities: particularly properties with lakes and rivers, prairie remnants, unique topographical features, major corridors or linkages, large woodlands, important cultural sites, or areas within or adjacent to natural core and linkage areas. However, EALT is aware that smaller patches of wild land form stepping stones between larger sites, and considers them of value
  • How Stewardship is Accomplished: via accepting funds, land donations, or conservation easements; stewarding lands with volunteers, educational outreach, and partnershipping to leverage scarce resources
  • Who is Involved: the founding partners of EALT are described, as well as the many types of partners of the land trust

Anyone interested in obtaining hard copies of these information packages may phone EALT at 780 483–7578, or pick them up at 9910–103 Street, Edmonton.

July 13, 2009

Developing a Roadmap for Stewardship & Conservation

The National Stewardship and Conservation Conference is held every three years in Canada, making it a significant event for all those interested in conservation. The 4th conference was held in Calgary this year, and the theme was “Strengthening Stewardship – Investing at Every Step”. This corresponds largely with EALT’s view of conservation – that it represents an investment in our future. Thus we were pleased to be invited to make a presentation at the conference, and to submit a poster. We were also delighted to be able to assist conference organizers by rapporteuring at various sessions.

Pam Wight of EALT, gave a presentation on “Investing in Conservation – Stewardship as a Multifaceted Safety Net”. This outlined how society is beginning to recognize the multifaceted benefits of conservation, now the value of ecosystem services are beginning to be understood. In this respect, stewarding natural areas acts as a safety net for a whole series of important values: economic, urban, infrastructural, environmental, cultural and aesthetic. Municipalities recognize the varied benefits of natural areas, and that we are overspending our natural capital. But municipalities have insufficient policy tools to conserve all the natural areas they wish, so are turning to land trusts as an important tool, since land trusts often have greater appeal to landowners wishing to donate property or conservation easements. EALT began with a strong partnership mindset, to strengthen and leverage investments, and to move from a charitable approach to one which emphasizes value-added, partnerships, and mutual benefits. Pam’s paper, and all the others can be found at: http://www.stewardship2009.ca/admin/contentx/default.cfm?PageId=10272

The EALT poster focused on how a land trust can be a tool for conserving and stewarding natural capital in an urban region. This is particularly helpful in the Edmonton region, which has grown at a tremendous pace due to rapid growth of residential, commercial and industrial developments. Along with this growth has come huge losses in natural capital, especially natural areas and rural landscapes. Alberta municipalities don’t have sufficient policy tools to conserve natural capital, particularly their forested lands, thus EALT was established to act as an additional tool to aid in conservation. Of the various components of the poster, two sections were of particular interest to attendees:

• Why be Concerned?

• What do we Conserve?

The EALT poster and others can be viewed at: http://www.stewardship2009.ca/admin/contentx/default.cfm?PageId=10268

Significant aspects of the conference included the gaps and remedial actions needed to advance environmental stewardship in Canada, and the development of 6 key recommendations. The State of Stewardship in Canada report can be found at:
http://www.stewardship2009.ca/admin/contentx/default.cfm?PageId=10722

A key outcome of this 4th national stewardship conference will be the development of a “Roadmap for Stewardship”. To support this, a one-time conference legacy grant has been developed to help implement the road map in Alberta. The funds came indirectly from conference attendees, as the costs of conference materials were reduced, and the saved funds were invested in the conference legacy grant.

This grant will be awarded to a local stewardship project that addresses one or more actions identified in the road map. Watch the Alberta Stewardship Network website for further details, at http://www.ab.stewardshipcanaca.ca.

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