A section of a new wind farm in the Charlevoix region of central Quebec is raising concerns about possible disruption of an endangered herd of woodland caribou.
Kingsey Falls, Quebec-based wind developer Boralex, which is leading the project alongside provincial power utility Hydro-Québec and gas company Énergir, says the project will have little or no impact on the Charlevoix caribou herd, CBC reports.
But Pierre-Olivier Boudreault, director of conservation at La Société pour la nature et les parcs (SNAP Québec), said 17 of the turbines would operate on land that was set aside to help the herd recover, after the provincial government promised to restore its habitat.
“The issue with wind turbines is that it’s a permanent disturbance. It’s going to be there for several decades,” Boudreault said, echoing concerns from federal and provincial wildlife experts. “Any additional disturbance, any additional human footprint on the habitat will definitely not help this population to recover.”
The Charlevoix herd has grown somewhat to a population of 39, after provincial wildlife officials captured the last 16 animals in 2022 and put them in an enclosure for their own protection. “Their habitat has been gradually disappearing for decades due to forestry and mining in the region,” CBC writes. Boudreault said the population’s recovery is still fragile.
“They don’t have any exchange with other populations,” he explained. “So their isolation makes them really threatened.”
Boralex has offered to reduce the number of turbines in the protected area by six, but says the wind farm would no longer be viable if it cancelled all 17 of the units.
“We are sensitive to the precarious situation of the caribou,” Communications Director Katheryne Coulombe told CBC in an email. But “since the territory targeted by the development of the project is already more than 98% disturbed by forestry and vacation activities, the currently proposed project would not generate additional pressure on caribou habitat.”
She added that the wind farm’s footprint “is located outside the areas targeted by the woodland caribou recovery plans developed by both the provincial and federal governments.”
Woodland caribou are considered a keystone species in the Canadian boreal forest, which is in turn an essential carbon sink in the global effort to get climate change under control. Multiple different herds have been threatened by lightly regulated forestry development and clearcutting, even as governments and industry portray Canada as a sustainable forestry leader.
“It’s the idea that we have so much territory, so many trees, and so many animals, that we can thoughtlessly take what we want from nature and get away with it,” wrote Alan Freeman, honourary senior fellow at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of International and Public Affairs, in a May, 2022 post that referred to the Val d’Or caribou, another threatened Quebec herd that had also been fenced in for its own protection.
Boudreault told CBC the problem with the Charlevoix wind farm is not its stand-alone impact, but the cumulative effects in an area that has seen decades of forestry and mining projects. “I often give the example that we kind of have a bathtub with a hole in it,” he said. “This project is making the hole bigger. Maybe it’s just slightly bigger, but it’s not the good direction in which we need to go.”
He added that the climate and biodiversity crises have to be tackled together, rather than trying to address one of the two by making the other one worse.
A spokesperson for the Canadian Renewable Energy Association said the industry is committed to wind development in Quebec that “harmonizes with land and wildlife conservation.”
“The boreal caribou situation is complex, demanding a comprehensive and multi-faceted approach,” the spokesperson told The Energy Mix in an email. “We firmly believe that with careful planning, it is possible to establish passage corridors that align with the principles of sustainable development, particularly given the minimal footprint of a wind turbine.”
