The Government of Alberta lacks the regulatory ability to manage the cumulative environmental impacts of the industrial development and other human activities now occurring across Alberta's landscapes. A new approach to environmental decision-making is needed to avoid continued decline in key indicators of environmental quality and depletion of Alberta's natural capital.

A series of strategic government initiatives launched in response to growing environmental concerns clearly signal that Alberta's existing decision-making processes need more than a simple fine-tuning in order to address current environmental challenges. The Water for Life strategy, the first of these government initiatives, was launched in 2003 in response to growing evidence of the need to plan for secure water supplies and to manage the encroaching impacts on Alberta's watersheds. The Land-Use Framework initiative is also presented as a call to action in light of growing land-use pressures and cumulative effects. A third initiative, Alberta Environment's proposed regulatory framework for managing cumulative effects, describes the "need for action" in terms of significant risks to the environment and to the economy. The same types of concerns are behind the government's clean air and energy strategies that are also under development. This report argues that the Alberta government's inability to manage cumulative impacts can be traced to the lack of integration in decision-making.

This report identifies the symptoms of the problem, provides the diagnosis, and concludes that the solution to this problem is the convergence of the government's strategic initiatives around a single system of integrated regional planning for Alberta.

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