An aerial view of Wood Buffalo National Park/Nick Fitzhardinge

Canada has until Feb. 1 to file an action plan to UNESCO about what it will do about serious, ongoing threats to Wood Buffalo National Park. The new deadline came when UNESCO World Heritage Committee approved a report that found that the place of Canada's largest national park on the World Heritage Site list is in danger.

At a two-week meeting in Saudi Arabia that wraps up Sept. 25, delegates voted to approve an investigation that found the Canadian park remains under environmental threats from dam construction in British Columbia, oilsands development and climate change. The remote wilderness park — five times the size of Yellowstone National Park — spans northern Alberta and southern Northwest Territories in an area where 11 Indigenous communities have long been stewards of the land and water.

Delegates voted to recommend that Canada implement 17 recommendations in the report.

The Mikisew Cree First Nation expressed concerns about the park almost a decade ago. Representatives were in Riyadh and in a Sept. 13 news release, applauded the decision of the United Nations’ committee to call on Canada to enhance efforts to save the Peace Athabasca Delta.

The decision follows a 2022 expert monitoring mission from UNESCO, the second in recent years to conclude that the Peace Athabasca Delta is facing serious, ongoing threats. It’s the largest boreal delta in the world, a RAMSAR wetland and a key biodiversity area.

For the Mikisew Cree, it is a vital cultural landscape.

“The ongoing seepage of tailings from tailings ponds and the huge risks those ponds create for our people and our waters are completely unacceptable,” Chief Billy Joe Tuccaro said in a news release. “And to be weeks away from BC Hydro starting to fill the Site C reservoir without protections of our Delta is simply wrong. This has to stop.”

A lone bison in Wood Buffalo National Park/Hans Pfaff, NWT Tourism

The UNESCO decision asked Canada to:

• Implement all 17 recommendations of the 2022 Reactive Monitoring Mission, including committing to decide on corrective actions to address the impacts to the hydrology of the Peace Athabasca Delta by 2026.

• Submit an updated action plan to the committee by February 2024.

• Complete a tailings risk assessment by December 2024.

• Invite a third reactive monitoring mission to review progress in 2026.

The 45th session of the World Heritage Committee was held in in Riyadh from Sept. 10 to 25. The committee examined the state of conservation of 260 sites already inscribed on the World Heritage List, 55 of which are also on the List of World Heritage in Danger. It also examined the nominations of sites to the World Heritage List, starting with the nominations that could not be examined last year.

Created in 1922 to protect northern Canada’s last remaining bison herds, Wood Buffalo earned its UNESCO World Heritage Site designation in 1983 for its “outstanding universal value.”