Restoring Quebec’s landscapes for sustainability and resilience
In a new article for the McGill Reporter, Department of Natural Resource Sciences PhD Candidate Elson Ian Nyl Galang argues that to restore Quebec’s landscapes for sustainability and resilience, we need to carefully think about which pathways of development and decision-making we prioritize.
The Province of Quebec is home to landscapes that are essential for the well-being of human and non-human communities. Wetlands control floods, sequester carbon, and help ensure water quality in communities around them. Agricultural landscapes contain natural habitats that protect farmlands from soil erosion while serving as habitats for important pollinators. Greenspaces regulate temperatures in urban areas while providing recreational spaces for urban dwellers. These are just some of the many benefits that we can obtain from these landscapes.
However, historical and present-day challenges, such as pollution and rapid development, have caused a significant decline in the quality and extent of these landscapes.
Their sustainability is further threatened by emerging issues such as climate change, which is expected to intensify droughts, heatwaves, and storms, among many others. These landscapes must be protected, restored, or rehabilitated to ensure that they can continue providing benefits in the face of these issues.
With our team of researchers from McGill University—including professors Elena Bennett, Blane Harvey, Gordon Hickey, and MSc candidate Catherine Destrempres—and Université Laval, we collaboratively worked with several leaders and thinkers in the Province to co-imagine sustainable and resilient futures for the restoration and rehabilitation of Quebec’s wetlands, agricultural landscapes, and urban greenspaces. Our recently published report presents the 12 co-imagined “storylines of the future” or scenarios that can inform us of the advantages and risks of particular future pathways to the restoration of these landscapes.
The report underscores the importance of paying attention to the kind of vision of development and decision-making we prioritize when planning for the restoration and rehabilitation of these landscapes.
Our report is just one of the key outputs from our research team at the Department of Natural Resource Sciences at McGill University that explores the environmental futures of Canada’s important landscapes. We are part of NSERC ResNet, a pan-Canada research network that studies the management, modeling, and monitoring of these landscapes. Our work on Quebec’s landscapes was also done in partnership with the Québec Centre for Biodiversity Science (QCBS) Knowledge-to-Action Initiative.
We hope that our report can help research, practice, and governance of these landscapes for sustainability and resilience.