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Alberta has designated four new provincial parks in the province’s north, creating the world’s largest contiguous protected boreal forest.

About the size of New Brunswick, the 6.7-million-hectare chunk of forest builds on Wood Buffalo National Park north of Fort McMurray.

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The rejig expands the Birch Mountains park, and adds Kazan, Richardson, Dillon River and Birch River wildland provincial parks to the map.

It’s the largest addition to the Alberta Parks system in history.

The new protected areas were identified by the previous government in the Lower Athabasca Regional Plan (LARP) in 2012.

That plan had “some enormous problems to solve,” Environment Minister Shannon Phillips said at the announcement in Edmonton on Tuesday, so her government took a fresh look at it.

At the time, Syncrude, Tallcree First Nation, the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) and the federal government were already at the table.