CALGARY—The impacts of climate change on Canada’s mountains will be more closely tracked at the University of Alberta at the school’s newest research centre.

The U of A announced Tuesday that the Canadian Mountain Network will receive $18.3 million in federal funding over the next five years to research the sustainability of mountain environments and communities across the country. The centre has been in development since 2016 before officially getting the green light this year with the funding to begin its work.

Stan Boutin, a co-research lead at the Canadian Mountain Network, said a major focus of the centre will be analyzing how a warming climate changes mountain environments, including how this affects water supplies, wildlife and vegetation.

“There’s always lots of interest in terms of how things will change given the warming we’re in fact seeing,” Boutin said.

“In particular, there are huge implications to our water sources that go well beyond the mountains, but all of the western Canadian provinces.”

Boutin said one of the changes that can already be seen is shrinking mountain glaciers, which feed into community water supplies. This glacial reduction also exposes more areas that were once covered in ice and snow, creating dust clouds that can spread out and hurt wider areas of vegetation and water.

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The network received funding through Canada’s Networks of Centres of Excellence program. It will support observation and analysis of changes to mountain environments across Canada, and train future researchers and professionals to do this work.

Another benefit of the centre is the funding it can provide to Indigenous researchers, which Boutin said has been lacking in this sector for a long time. The centre will fund research into how Indigenous protected areas may develop, and how to reconcile Indigenous community interests with other communities.

“They’re dictating what their priorities are, what the research is going to look like and how it’s going to unfold. It’s not western science coming in and doing that, it’s being led by these Indigenous leaders from square one,” Boutin said.

“The whole idea is to really develop a two-eyed seeing approach to tackling some of the challenges we’re going to face in terms of how we manage land use and the systems that are entailed in all of these mountain areas in Canada.”

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The centre will also analyze how human and wildlife interactions shape mountain areas. Boutin mentioned challenges like populations of bears, deer and elk moving through human communities, that need to be addressed.

“Human use of these mountain areas is growing immensely over time. The tourist industry continues to grow, the number of people who want to live in and use mountain areas is ever increasing,” Boutin said.

“That’s what we love so much about the mountains is to be able to have that (interaction), but it brings with it a series of challenges.”

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