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Yukon Land Use Planning Council works with GeoConnections to Improve Land Use Planning
Implementing Yukon land use claims requires linking resource planning and management processes. The Yukon Land Use Planning Council is responsible for preparing landscape planning documents by compiling information on current land use activities, regional resource assessments, and likely future scenarios. The premise of this collaborative regional land use planning is that well-informed decision-makers make better decisions.
The Yukon Land Use Planning Council (YLUPC) makes recommendations to government and Yukon First Nations with respect to land use planning. The Councils mission states that the organization "advocates land use planning as a comprehensive means of addressing cultural, social, economic and environmental sustainability. The YLUPC promotes an open, fair and public process carried out by all Yukoners, as set out in Yukon First Nation Final Agreements."
GeoConnections provided the Yukon Land Use Planning Council with $70 000 to assist in the creation of a land use planning atlas. This atlas will provided a web outlet to support wider and easier distribution of land use planning documentation to all interested parties. "We were already exploring the potential of web distribution of our planning products" says Jeff Hamm of the Yukon Land Use Planning Council. "However, this GeoConnections opportunity clearly addressed a challenge for us by providing the necessary funds to develop a standards based, production ready application".
Sharing Made Simple
The Council had quickly come to recognize the importance of widely endorsed standards and what a difference they would make to ensure the broadest possible sharing of information. Integration of land use planning and landscape level resource management is an especially important issue in the Yukon, as land claims, resources, and traditional activities need to be sustainability maintained. The atlas will play an important role in implementing regional land use plans in the Yukon.
”The atlas provides an outlet for government corporate spatial warehouse contents,” says Mr. Hamm. “The atlas can provide access to land use planning information long after the lights have gone out in the planning office.”
The atlas has benefited the community in several other ways as well. Short-term benefits include:
- a decision support system in which data can be presented in a comprehensive, consistent, and concurrent framework;
- the ability to use the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure (CGDI) to leverage existing data and reduce the effort required to obtain new data; and
- a channel for accessing information on Yukon resources and cultural assets for project assessors, decision-makers, industry, and the public.
Long-term benefits include employing the system for future land use scenario modeling and for assessing the cumulative impacts on valued regional resources.
Moving Towards the Future
The North Yukon Planning Commission released a Draft Land Use Plan to the public in October 2007. This document promotes the Yukon Land Use Planning Atlas as a way to access background information on regional culture, resource-development potential, and the local ecology. “We hope to integrate the atlas into development assessment and approval processes to ensure that decision makers consider these important functions,” says Mr. Hamm. "Throughout the project, we demonstrated that small, innovative, non-governmental organizations can provide meaningful context and perspective and turn this warehouse of data into useful information".
The Yukon Land Use Planning Atlas can be found at:
http://207.189.243.180:8080/atlas/atlas.php
| GeoConnections is a national partnership initiative to evolve and expand the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure. |