Ecosystem-based management in the Great Bear Rainforest

Ecosystem-based management is the management system being applied to 6.4 million hectares of the coast of British Columbia, Canada, an area referred to as the Great Bear Rainforest. This approach, intended to manage for ecosystem integrity and community wellbeing, is similar in many respects to ecosystem management approaches elsewhere. However, several novel elements are involved in application of ecosystem-based management on British Columbia's coast: shifts in power that have led to increased aboriginal control and the formation of coalitions between groups that were formerly in opposition; development of explicit models relating management strategies to land-use objectives and separating knowledge from values; use of ecological thresholds and natural variability to establish management targets. Current management is based on transitional targets that differ from science-based targets. Many challenges remain in moving to full implementation of ecosystem-based management, including the difficulties involved in moving from one management model to a fundamentally different one, limited resources for implementation, dealing with complex systems, the lack of freely available multi-disciplinary data, and the difficulty of bringing concepts of uncertainty and risk into public policy discussions in a transparent manner.