Hunting for habitat : the rise and fall of an Alberta proposal for the private production of ecological goods and services

Summary: Farms and ranches produce not only the familiar agricultural goods but also such ecological goods and services as healthy watersheds, wildlife habitat and wildlife. While farmers and ranchers are paid for their agricultural products, there has traditionally been no market for their ecological goods and services. This is a matter of concern when economic pressures, often rooted in urban centres, degrade the capacity of landscapes that are needed to produce ecological goods and services for those same urban centres. Several mechanisms have been devised to provide financial returns for the private production of ecological goods and services, thus ensuring that ecological costs are no longer an externality that can be ignored in market transactions. Hunting for Habitat, the name for one such mechanism recently considered in Alberta, sought to provide some market incentives to enhance the private production of wildlife habitat, with corollary benefits for other ecological goods and services, while simultaneously enhancing public access to wildlife resources on private lands. The competing interests were difficult to reconcile, especially given that it has hitherto been mostly illegal for landowners to receive any financial consideration for giving hunters access to the publicly owned wildlife upon their lands (in contradistinction to their ability to charge companies for access to publicly owned minerals beneath it). This paper analyzes the politics involved in the Hunting for Habitat proposal and compares the proposal with other ways of rewarding the private production of ecological goods and services.