Yellowknife Geoscience Forum

In the Northwest Territories (NWT), regional land use plans are the primary land management tools that guide decisions on what land use activities are permitted or prohibited and under what conditions. It is imperative that relevant and current scientific information is integrated into this multi-party decision-making process. There is a plethora of scientific information that is relevant to regional land use planning, including environmental, social, cultural, and economic research. The integration of science into land use planning decision-making is challenging given the regional scale of land use planning in the NWT and a lack of synthesized information and decision support products. This poster outlines three projects that the Government of the Northwest Territories, Department of Lands, is leading to support the integration of scientific information into land use planning decision-making in the NWT. The first is the results of an inventory and mapping project of peer-reviewed research to inform pre-planning work in the southeast NWT. The second is an ongoing project to produce community change detection maps within flood risk areas. And the third is a new project to investigate ways of integrating climate change into regional land use plans, including a preliminary jurisdictional review.