Potential Improvements to Human Impacts and Future Prospects

In order to help reverse the effects of deforestation, reforestation of agricultural lands has been proposed to offset carbon emissions (Fitzsimmons 2002). Reforestation would require increasing the size of provincial forests or protected areas, or restoring forest cover adjacent to them which would reverse some of the degradation caused by fragmentation of forest ecosystems (Fitzsimmons 2002). One of the ways that the government of Saskatchewan is reducing the effects of deforestation is by creating new, protected ecological reserves where no new industrial developments will be allowed such as the new Pink Lake Representative Area Ecological Reserve, located 160 kilometres north of La Ronge (Nicholson 2013). As of July 2013 it is now Saskatchewan’s largest provincially-designated protected area; approximately 3,660 square kilometres (Nicholson 2013). The biofuel industry is also responsible for much of the deforestation in Saskatchewan. A proposed solution that has worked in some areas of Europe is planting fast-growing species such as the poplar and willow to burn instead of slower-growing species (Coxworth 2007). In addition, it has been proposed that converting forestry and agricultural crop residues to fuel would decrease waste and increase the total amount of biofuel produced (Coxworth 2007).

There are many ways in which to mitigate the effects on wildlife (in particular freshwater fish) of dams used to generate hydroelectric power, including changes to the structural features of the dams, operational change, predator control, and hatchery construction (FWEE, 2013). Structural improvements than can be made are centered around devices allowing fish to easily bypass the dam, including fish screens, fish-friendly turbines, surface collectors, fish ladders, spill deflectors. Operational changes to the dam affect either the rate of water flow through a dam, or how water passes through a dam. In order to minimize migration time, more water is released when juvenile fish are migrating, effectively flushing them through the dam. Alternatively, permanent drawdowns continually create a water level at the mouth of the dam that is lower than upstream, thus causing an increase in water velocity ahead of the dam. The effect of predators of fish such as predatory fish and aquatic birds can be mitigated below the dam by providing incentives to fisherman for catching predatory fish, and by installing a piano string mesh above the water, causing difficulty for birds to see fish in the river. Lastly, it is possible to reduce the diminishing effect on fish population by creating hatcheries that breed and release fish into rivers (FWEE, 2013). Since building large dams to power reservoir hydroelectric plants, future plants must be away from population centers in the northern parts of Saskatchewan and must be small-scale, run-of-the-river installations (Coxworth 2007).

One way to decrease the negative environmental impact of mines is to increase monitoring and regulations. In his 2004 report, Jarrell outlines initiatives that are being taken by the Key Lake uranium mine in Saskatchewan, Canada to treat their liquid effluent. Key Lake Mine performs a routine, semi-annual, 96-hour static acute lethality test on rainbow trout fry. If this test is failed, a Toxic Identification Evaluation (TIE) study is carried out, involving a systematic fractionation of the effluent mixture in order to characterize, isolate, and identify the toxic constituent(s) (Jarrell, 2004). Reverse osmosis membranes are used to filter trace elements such as iron ions and nickel. Currently, the Key Lake mining operation is transitioning from a water-based ecological assessment to a sediment-based ecological assessment, shown to be a more accurate measure of trace element concentration (Jarrell, 2004).