This memo is related an environmental assessment of the Garibaldi at

Squamish project. This project is a proposed year-round destination mountain resort

on Brohm Ridge, 15km north of Squamish on Highway99. In addition, this project

also includes 124 ski trails and 23 lifts, plus resort accommodation and commercial

developments. This projection will provide almost 900 construction jobs and 3000

seasonal jobs. However, this projection also makes some environmental problems.

I am a natural resource planner who has been retained by the project

proponents. I first acquire some datum of this area from DataBC, including the

project boundary, fishery habitat, roads, park boundary, ungulate winter range, old

growth management area, contours and red listed ecosystems. Then I clip these

layers to the project boundary. In addition, I reclassify the digital elevation map to

show the areas below 555m and convert this raster to a polygon. Then I calculate the

percentage of the area below 555m in total project area. It shows that there are

29.92% of areas below 555m in the project boundary. Moreover, I also calculate the

percentage of the project area with Mule Deer and Mountain Goat winter habitat,

the percentage of old growth forest in this area, and the percentage of red listed

species. Next I create a variable width buffer of protected area around the streams

by using the analysis tools command buffer in ArcGIS to calculate the percentage of

this project area will fall within fish bearing streams. To estimate the total affected

area easily, I use the overlay analysis command union to union four layers (old

growth management area, fish habitat, ungulate winter range and red listed

ecosystems).

According to my calculated result, it shows that 29.92% of project areas are

below 555m and there are 69.65% of total areas that will be affected directly. Thus,

it is clear to see that almost one third of land in the west is not suitable for ski, and

high risk to destroy the environment of this area. This project is not environmental

friendly; it can not be approved.

In my opinion, there are two greatest environmental concerns to project

development. One is the old growth forests areas; another one is the fishery habitat.

To mitigate the old growth forests areas and the fishery habitat, we can plan the ski

resort and commercial land away them to reduce the pollution and keep the original

ecological environment. In addition, to make these places more quiet, the

government can issue notice to limit people’s path to these areas and offer jobs for

manager to supervise.

Finally, related to these environmental problems, I do not suggest to continue this project.

Accomplishment Statement:

Gained knowledge to perform data visualization: search, collect, parsed, filtered, represented, and transform to spatial data to assess the environmental impact of a project.