Summary - The Proposed Foothills Project
Water is the life-blood of our world. It defines our health, our economy, and our standard of living. Traditionally, North Americans have had abundant access to clean water from watersheds and aquifers, but often without consideration of how that water is captured and stored. In a watershed, both the quality and quantity of water is a direct function of the quality of the landscape where it is captured and through which it flows. While governments can directly control the factors that affect water supply on public land, this is not always the case on private land. Thus, given ever-increasing demands, our society needs innovative and effective mechanisms to better protect our valuable sources of water – our watersheds – especially in cases where the land may be privately owned.
The main objective of the Foothills Project is to investigate the feasibility of using a market-based variation on an existing mechanism, the conservation easement, to protect the ecological value, and thus watershed value, of privately held land in the foothills area of Alberta. The Foothills Project recognizes the tension that can exist between public vs. private interests. In an effort to resolve this tension and extend conservation efforts, the project is proposing to harness the power and flexibility of the market to create a win-win situation for society, the landowner, and the environment.
This is not a revolutionary idea, but rather a method of using a set of tested techniques combined in a slightly different way. The elements necessary to make this market-based concept work are either in operation now or have been the subject of experimentation in other jurisdictions
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