This memo regards the environmental assessment of the Garibaldi at Squamish project that proposes to construct a ski resort on Brohm Ridge, 15km north of Squamish on Highway99. The proposed project would include 124cski trails and 23 lifts along with housing accommodations and commercial developments. Even though the resort has the potential to bring more employment and tourism to the area, there still are some unavoidable environmental impacts and concerns to building such a large project in Brohm Ridge。
As a natural resource planer, I retained by the project proponents. First of all, I acquire some datum of this area from DataBC, including the project boundary, old growth management area, roads accessibility, fishery habitat, park boundary, ungulate winter range, contours and red listed ecosystems. Then I filtered these layers by clipping to the project boundary. By using the spatial analyst tools in ArcGIS, I also 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 is necessary to analyze the elevation of the project area, because snow is the key component in ski resort in order to operate. However, there are 29.92% of areas below 555m within the project boundary. Similarly, I also calculate the percentage of old growth forest management in this area, the percentage of red listed ecosystem, and the percentage of the project area with Mule Deer and Mountain Goat winter habitat. Finally, by using the analysis tools command buffer in ArcGIS, I create a variable width buffer of protected area around the streams, calculated the percentage of the projected area will shown within fish bearing streams.
According to my calculated result, it shows that 29.92% of project areas are below 555m, and the percentage of total environmentally projected area is around 70%. We can see clear that almost half of the land is protected for environmental conservation and one third of land in the west is unreliable for ski, and also highly risk to destroy the environment of this area. By no means, we cannot sacrifice the environment by no means, in order to create more jobs in Squamish, ad the global warming also increase the resort’s vulnerability to economic loss, once there is not enough snow to support ski.
In my personal opinion, the top two greatest environmental concerns to project development are: first, the detrimental impact of development on ecosystem conservation, especially the old growth forests areas and the fishery habitat. To mitigate the impact of development ecosystem would be un-development, however, we can also plan the ski resort and commercial and away, try to minimize the pollutants and keep the original ecological environment. Second, as I mentioned before, the warming climate might also contributes to the unreliable skiing, because of the low elevation areas. In order to avoid the risk of lower snow condition, we can use the “snow maker” to increase the snow base, this tools has been successfully used in many ski resort, such as Whistler, and some of ski resort in China.
Personal thought:
I don’t think this project should be allowed to proceed, because it do have the highly potential risks as I mentioned before, especially the warming climate, it is the result of anthropogenic activity, but it also highly unpredictable, particular in the aspect of precipitation. Besides, when we looking at the slop of the terrain, the slope grades doesn’t various very much. Moreover, the development of this land area will also threat the local environment, particularly, the wild species and the it will also cost damage to the forest.
