Serious Environmental Impacts

The project will likely have adverse effects on Wood Buffalo National Park. Despite being Canada’s largest National Park, it is losing some of the many attributes that have made it ecologically and culturally valuable. Degradation of the Park has been linked to industrial activities upstream on the Athabasca River, and the proposed mine would contribute to the cumulative negative impacts on the Peace-Athabasca Delta, one of the largest freshwater inland deltas. The mine, if approved, would be the closest oil sands development project to the Park, and risks causing irreversible damage on the outstanding universal values of Wood Buffalo from spills, leaks, water withdrawals, malfunctions and tailings management failures.