ALI Report 'Alternative Compensation Models for Alberta's Crown Grazing Leases'. Authors: Stacey O'Malley, Alicia Entem, Eran Kaplinsky, and Vic Adamowicz.

This report provides a rigorous examination of the background, the potential and the regulatory limitations to using market-based tools in Alberta. It charts a positive course toward the creation of a market in ecosystem service credits. Authors: David W. Poulton, Erin Sawyer,Joanne Cave, Jill Gorr-Winther & Eran S. Kaplinsky.

Under the Canadian constitution federal, provincial and territorial governments each have jurisdiction and responsibility for some components of the environment. The federal government, to name just two of the more important categories, has responsibility for coastal and inland fisheries, and for navigable waters. It also has authority over projects spanning between provinces, including many pieces of major transportation infrastructure like railways and pipelines. The provinces, on the other hand, have responsibility for natural resources, for property rights, and local undertakings. This means that each level of government is faced with the task of determining the appropriate mitigation of adverse environmental impacts in particular circumstances. Each therefore has the opportunity to consider the mitigation hierarchy and the use of offsetting for biodiversity. The hierarchy is a common prescription that impacts should first be avoided altogether, and secondly be minimized through a variety of mitigation techniques. Onsite restoration may reverse some impacts as a third measure. Offsetting and compensation are only to be employed to address the residual losses that remain after all these prior steps have been taken. This document has the very limited purpose of enumerating federal, provincial and territorial policies having a significant focus on offsetting for biodiversity. It does not attempt to take into account the voluntary offset measures that development proponents have taken at times, municipal policies and initiatives, Indigenous initiatives, or the ways in which various regulators have applied offsets, either with or without policy guidance. All of these spheres are important and the facts that they are not reviewed here should not be taken to diminish their conservation or policy value.

A plain-language backgrounder summarizing some of the findings from the Alberta Land Institute report, 'Alternative Compensation Models for Alberta's Crown Grazing Leases'.