West Coast Environmental Law is leading a review of Federal, Provincial and local government laws, policies, and practices to understand how these tools are used and specifically, how they manage (or fail to manage) cumulative harm from Crown-regulated human activities affecting salmon and salmon habitat across watersheds. The review will look at barriers to fish passage associated with several regulated human activities, as a case study. The analysis will help unpack the ways that Crown laws and policies lead to systemic degradation of salmon habitat, and will explore different possible remedies and also opportunities within emerging Crown law and policy tools.

This Stream will quantify how forestry activities impact streamflow and temperature—two key dimensions of salmon habitat—using a systematic review and quantitative synthesis of existing scientific studies. This synthesis will seek to develop generalizable quantitative relationships between forestry activities and streamflow and temperature, identify potential thresholds of impact and generalizable response trajectories to forestry variables (e.g. percentage clear cut), and identify key features (e.g., landscape attributes or regional contexts) that influence the strength (or direction) of responses. These results may help strengthen assessment methodologies for assessing the cumulative impacts of forestry on salmon.

This Stream will seek to identify how different people perceive the cumulative effects that impact BC’s salmon-bearing watersheds. This Stream will be co-developed in close collaboration with local experts to explore how they view the connections between human activities, climate change and outcomes for salmon. Ultimately, it is hoped that this Stream will contribute to strengthening BC watershed co-management processes and understanding how cumulative effects are conceptualized within watershed governance frameworks.

This Stream will use a decision analysis framework: Priority Threat Management, to synthesize empirical data on the cumulative threats to salmon and combine it with data elicited from salmon experts on the management actions required for salmon recovery, their benefit, cost and feasibility. Ultimately, this information produces a set of cost-effective priority management actions for the recovery of wild salmon. This Stream will focus on case studies in the Lower Fraser River and Central Coast, with the aim of scaling up its applications to the whole of BC, to serve as a blueprint for cost-effective wild salmon management across the Province. For more information, see the Conservation Decisions Lab’s website. 

WFI is contributing to several watershed-planning tools that help assess the impacts of CE and examine potential scenarios forward. These tools are in various stages of development and application.