Celebrations held to mark UNESCO designation

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Pacific Rim National Park Reserve was the site of a celebration May 5, as Clayoquot Sound was formally dedicated as a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Biosphere Reserve.

Politicians representing all levels of government attended the event, as well as First Nations leaders from across the province and dignitaries from around the world, but the celebration was still designed to be very much a community event,

"It's actually going to be a big celebration for the locals. The whole community is invited to the Wickaninnish Centre in the national park where the ceremony will be held," said Tom Esakin, executive director of the Clayoquot Biosphere Trust during an interview before the big day.

The designation, approved by UNESCO in January, is the first such designation in the province.

The event also marked the formal recognition of the Clayoquot Biosphere Trust, with a presentation of a cheque from the federal government to establish the Trust.

According to Ross McMillan, acting chair of the Biosphere Transition Committee and the Nomination Working Group, the trust is a new endowment that will partner First Nations and local communities to support research, education and training in the biosphere, calling the trust "a permanent legacy for the area."

The Clayoquot Sound biosphere reserve covers an area of about 350,000 hectares.

According to information on the UNESCO website, biosphere reserves are "areas of terrestrial and coastal/marine ecosystems, where, through appropriate zoning patterns and management mechanisms, the conservation of ecosystems and their biodiversity is combined with the sustainable use of natural resources for the benefit of local communities, including relevant research, monitoring, education and training activities."

Esakin put in into simpler terms.

"What they really are is that they're global laboratories," Esakin said. "They're opportunities for working with local communities in areas where there is a diversity or a biodiversity that in part needs protecting, and part where you have locals who want to at least utilize the local resources for sustainable purposes. So an organization like ours, one has to differentiate it from the actual reserve."

"The reserve itself has three main areas. There's a core protected area, which in this case is national park lands and some other areas. They have what they call buffer areas, where there is less than three per cent human activity in them, and then there is the transitional areas where you have the human interaction, so to speak. Our trust, what one of our main purposes is, is to fund research, education, training and monitoring within the reserve, and for the ends of trying to come up with healthy local communities and to create sustainable development within those communities, " Esakin said.

"So a biosphere reserve isn't about creating a big park. It, in a nut shell, is about creating sustainable development. But looking at the protected areas and comparing it to the buffer and transition areas, and seeing how humans interact in their environment. Long term, the goal is to create successful sustainable development opportunities in this community that can be exported abroad and utilized around the world. So that's it in a nutshell. It's not like a microscopic laboratory, but it is an opportunity for locals to look at the big picture, and locally find ways of creating sustainable development that they then can help export to other communities to help other communities around the world create sustainable development."

"There's a lot of hope in the community for the UNESCO biosphere designation," Esakin said. "There's a hope that this could help resolve some of the tensions that have existed in the community in the past. And there's a hope that this can help create sustainable development in this community. To get the designation, it requires unanimous local support, and it hadhat. So parties that in the past may have had some differences have actually come together to make sure that this region received that designation. So it was really a community-driven initiative. It wasn?t a government-driven initiative. So the community has a lot of hope in this designation."

According to McMillan, the new biosphere designation fits perfectly with another initiative already ongoing within the Clayoquot Sound area.

In October 1999, the B.C. Minister of Forests approved the transfer of the Clayoquot Sound portion of MacMillan Bloedel's tree farm licence 44 to Iisaak Forest Resources, a company set up by the Nuu-chah-nulth Central Region and owned 51 per cent by Ma Mook Natural Resources and 49 per cent by Weyerhaeuser, the company that now owns MacMillan Bloedel's assets.

"The way we put together the nomination, it is designed so that it fully recognizes First Nations rights and titles in the area, and acknowledges that treaty negotiations are underway," McMillan said. "And the designation will be adjusted, if needed, in accordance with the outcome of treaty negotiations. So the First Nations? interests have been front and centre in terms of actually how it was put together."

"The basic designation is supposed to be about a balance between protecting environmental considerations, and supporting sustainable economic development. We've got lots of parks and protected areas in the reserve. The real challenge is promoting sustainable development, truly sustainable development. And Iisaak ...is really trying to develop a model for sustainable development through the forest company that's not just focused on timber, but that focuses on other activities in the forest, that can become a model around the world. So, as far as part of the broader First Nations strategy, the two fit hand in hand."