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Part of Environment and land use planning

Upper Smoky Sub-regional Plan

The Upper Smoky Sub-regional Plan and regulatory details has been established under the Alberta Land Stewardship Act in November 2025.

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Environment and land use planning

Overview

The Upper Smoky Sub-Regional Plan guides how Alberta’s public land in the area is used and managed. It supports a resilient working landscape by balancing resource development with environmental stewardship, Indigenous traditional land uses, recreation and habitat conservation.

The Upper Smoky sub-region is located in northwestern Alberta, south of Grande Prairie, within the Upper Peace region. It supports a wide range of land uses and natural values, including petroleum and natural gas development, forestry, coal and mineral resources, rangelands, and recreation opportunities. The area is also ecologically significant, as it contains important habitat for wildlife, including 2 of Alberta’s remaining southern mountain caribou populations on provincially managed lands.

The plan

The plan identifies policy direction and requirements for activities within the sub-region. It outlines:

  • coordinated access management
  • support for energy and forestry development
  • restoration of industrial footprints
  • conservation and recovery of caribou habitat
  • wildfire risk mitigation
  • expansion of recreation and tourism opportunities
  • the establishment of new conservation areas
  • a long-term monitoring and adaptive management framework

The plan guides economic opportunities in energy, forestry and tourism while managing the overall impact of development on the landscape in the sub-region. It does not apply to private land, municipal land or federal land.

Read the Upper Smoky Sub-Regional Plan.

Key elements of the plan

  • Indigenous knowledge and traditional land uses

    The plan supports Indigenous access to land and resources, inclusion in implementation and monitoring. It also supports habitat restoration informed by Indigenous values and opportunities for Indigenous economic development and tourism.

  • Access management

    A coordinated road-management approach is introduced to reduce unnecessary disturbance while maintaining access for resource development. Roads are classified as either primary or transitional, with restoration requirements tied to new road construction.

  • Resource development

    The plan supports continued development of:

    • Oil and natural gas
    • Forestry
    • Coal
    • Surface materials (sand and gravel)
    • Grazing
    • Peat
    • Metallic and industrial minerals

    The objective is to provide investor certainty while reducing cumulative environmental impacts.

  • Human footprint reduction and restoration

    A major focus is restoring inactive industrial footprints, including roads, well sites, pipelines, transmission corridors, and legacy seismic lines. Restoration targets and timelines are established to improve habitat quality and create room for future development.

  • Caribou conservation

    The sub-region contains the Narraway and Redrock-Prairie Creek southern mountain caribou ranges. The plan introduces management zones, habitat restoration requirements, seismic-line restoration and development controls intended to support caribou recovery while allowing continued economic activity.

  • Wildfire risk mitigation

    The plan recognizes wildfire as a major threat to communities, infrastructure, forests and caribou habitat. It requires a wildfire mitigation strategy focused on high-risk areas and integrating monitoring, fuel management and suppression planning.

  • Recreation and tourism

    The plan identifies opportunities to expand recreation and tourism, including trail planning, Indigenous-led tourism, commercial recreation and potential all-season tourism developments near areas such as Grande Cache and Kakwa.

  • New conservation areas

    Two proposed conservation areas are identified in the "nature-first" zone. These areas are intended to protect important wildlife habitat, traditional land-use areas, alpine environments and recreation opportunities while honouring certain existing resource tenures.

  • Monitoring and adaptive management

    The plan establishes an implementation committee and a monitoring framework that tracks indicators such as caribou habitat, landscape connectivity, wildfire risk, stream connectivity and restoration progress. The entire plan will be reviewed every 10 years and can be adjusted if environmental or economic conditions change.

Land use zones

The plan outlines policy objectives and management approaches for land uses to enable responsible development of Alberta’s resources for generations to come.

The land use zones established by the plan set the foundation for the policy direction in the sub-region, identifying where higher and lower land use intensities are supported by the management approaches defined in this plan.

Nature-first zone

Prioritizes conservation and ecosystem services with opportunities for outdoor recreation, habitat restoration and habitat enhancement. 

Slow-go zone

Includes two caribou ranges and three other sensitive areas in the sub-region and enables a diversity of land uses with some restrictions. 

Go zone

Provides for a full range of development opportunities, following existing policy and requirements in the province.

Spatial data

Download the spatial data for the Upper Smoky plan : Upper Smoky Sub-Regional Plan Spatial Data - Open Government

Map

Loading map

Click anywhere on the map to see which zones and layers apply at that point. Use the legend control in the map's bottom-right corner to identify colors and patterns.

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