The announcement on June 9, 2009, of a major expansion of Nahanni National Park Reserve is a significant success for Y2Y. Environment Minister Jim Prentice announced that the government will finalize legislation to expand the Reserve's boundary from less than 5,000 sq km to more than 30,000 sq km. The boundary expansion is possible due to an agreement with the Deh Cho First Nations and a campaign led by the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, with support from the Canadian Boreal Initiative and Mountain Equipment Co-Op.

“Thanks to the excellent work of our partners, a big chunk of the Y2Y vision has just fallen into place,” says Rob Buffler, Y2Y's Executive Director.

The Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative is a collaborative, bi-national effort to promote the coexistence of sustainable communities and healthy wildlife populations along a 3,200 km corridor stretching from Yellowstone National Park to the central Yukon Territory. Y2Y envisions a network of core protected areas between which land uses are managed to enable the migration of wildlife. Major parks already within the corridor include Yellowstone National Park in the U.S., Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park, the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks (Banff, Jasper, Kootenay and Yoho), and the Muskwa-Kechika Management Area in northeast BC, an early success of the Y2Y vision.

“This expansion increases the Nahanni park reserve by more than six times its current size to more than 7.4 million acres, making it by far the largest core protected area in the entire Y2Y system, and almost three times the size of Yellowstone National Park,” notes Buffler. He adds that traditional uses, such as hunting and trapping, will continue within the new national park.

Inspired by the long-distance movements of animals like wolves and bears and the knowledge that parks on their own cannot preserve all of biodiversity, the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative has been promoting its vision since 1997. It fosters and provides financial support to collaborations of partners who implement projects to educate communities about coexisting with wildlife, to help wildlife cross highways through over- and underpasses, to purchase or otherwise secure the conservation management of private lands in key movement corridors, and to promote land use policies on non-park lands that are favourable to wildlife movement.

“With climate change underway, plants and the animals will need to shift in order to keep up with the conditions to which they are adapted,” notes Buffler. “The Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative offers a plan for helping wildlife to move and adapt to climate change within a landscape that is more ecologically intact than almost anywhere in the world,” he adds.

Click here to read the Government of Canada's announcement.