Canada:Canada's government has set aside 25 million acres of wilderness - almost 1.5 times the size of Ireland - for conservation, a move environmentalists called one of North America's most important acts of nature preservation.
The land in Canada's Northwest Territories is in three huge tracts that will be used to create a national park, a national wilderness area and a conservation area administered by native groups.
The areas are wild, scenic and remote. They have been eyed with increasing interest by diamond, uranium, oil and gas developers, and the action on Wednesday by Canada's ministries of environment and Indian affairs will prevent mining, drilling and most lumbering.
Environmentalists hailed the action as adding protection to parts of the boreal forest, the broad swathe of green that circles a northern tier of the globe from Canada to Siberia. The boreal forest is said to be the largest land-based store of carbon - carbon that could be released by development to exacerbate global warming. It also is the summer home to millions of North America's migrating songbirds.
"We're very happy with this," said Chief Adeline Jonasson, who leads a community of the Lutsel K'e Dene native tribe on part of the proposed park. "This area is the one our ancestors chose for us to live in. This will preserve it for generations to come."
Native groups, environmentalists and others have been working to designate the land for years.
People working to set aside parts of Canada's vast wilderness from encroaching oil wells and diamond and uranium mining had initially considered the conservative government of Stephen Harper hostile. But now "the government is actually delivering on their promises, and delivering much more quickly than we are used to", said Larry Innes, head of the Canadian Boreal Initiative.
The 6.5-million-acre park will be created on the eastern edge of Great Slave Lake, a pristine, glacier-carved body of water prowled by grizzlies and caribou and frozen eight months a year.
Farther west a 3.7-million-acre national wildlife area will be created in a region called the Ramparts, where towering stone cliffs line the Mackenzie river and key wetlands border the Ramparts river. Buffering Great Slave Park will be a 15-million-acre conservation area administered by the Akaitcho native tribe.
The land designated "isn't just Canada. This is a global resource and a worldwide treasure", said Steven Kallick, the Seattle-based manager of the International Boreal Conservation Campaign for the Pew Environment Group.
"It's the largest largely intact forest left in the planet. It rivals the Amazon and Siberia in size. It's one of the few places left in the world like it."
- (Washington Post)