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What’s in Place

GNWT Plans and Policies

Plans and Strategies

GNWT has a number of plans and strategies in place that relate to environmental and resource management. These plans and strategies often involve some sort of public engagement (for example, meetings, discussion papers, on-line surveys) and once developed, form the basis for departments to get specific funding through their budgets.  Specific action plans may be developed to implement plans and strategies and these may involve further public engagement

NWT has a number of plans and strategies in place that relate to environmental and resource management.. For example:

Policies

Policies represent a commitment to follow an action or course of action in pursuit of approved objectives.  A policy may also be an unwritten way of doing things or deciding on issues. 

In the context of GNWT, there are policies that have been approved by individual Ministers and other approved by Cabinet.  Some of these policies are directly related to environmental and resource management.  For example:

Each Department also has a Cabinet-approved establishment policy that sets out its mandate, principles, authorities and accountability.  Here is the establishment policy for the Department of Environment and Climate Change.  All of these policies may be helpful in ensuring accountability and consistency with legislative, regulatory and other policy initiatives.

Cabinet and Departments may also have other policies in place. For example, GNWT’s Statement of Environmental Values required under the Environmental Rights Act.

Healthy Land, Healthy People

Healthy Land, Healthy People: GNWT Priorities for Advancement of Conservation Network Planning 2023-2028 is a guide for protected areas and conservation planning in the Northwest Territories. 

This conservation plan recognizes that “it is more efficient to preserve land now than [to] try to restore land later.” 

The five-year work plan calls for the Government of the Northwest Territories (GNWT) to collaborate with Indigenous government organizations on conservation planning, setting out two main priorities. 

The first priority is to conclude planning and decision-making for eight protected area candidates that existed when the document was released in 2016. 

Healthy Land, Healthy People set a goal of having a final decision on whether or not to establish these protected areas by 2021. By spring 2022, only two of the eight protected areas had been established. Ts’udé Nilįné Tuyeta and portions of Thaidene Nëné are protected areas under the Protected Areas Act, which came into force in June 2019, at the end of the 18th Legislative Assembly. (Most of Thaidene Nëné is a National Park Reserve.)

The second priority of Healthy Land, Healthy People is to develop an updated approach to conservation planning that gets communities and Indigenous government organizations more involved in creating and managing protected areas. 

This new strategy would also include ecological representation planning, which means not only protecting specific natural areas but also ensuring the health of surrounding wildlife, water, and land systems to conserve the integrity of the entire ecosystem.

The GNWT’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources sought input from the public in 2021 as it renews and updates Healthy Land, Healthy People. In December 2021, it released a draft of the plan, inviting the public to comment on it. As of January 2023, the department was reviewing the public input and revising the plan.

The GNWT’s Traditional Knowledge Policy ensures traditional knowledge from Indigenous residents of the Northwest Territories is taken into consideration in all of the government’s environmental management actions and decisions.

-GNWT Traditional Knowledge Policy

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