Protecting both nature and employment

Into the wild: biosphere reserves

Skyscrapers climb, roads get built, and around the world the human population explodes. How can we sustain the planet while still maintaining jobs and homes?

The Niagara Escarpment is one of 15 UNESCO World Biosphere Reserves in Canada. Photo: Simon Wilson

Enter biosphere reserves, a concept with impact. An idea that has been ushered along into reality since the late 1960s and 1970s by George Francis, a retired environment and resources studies professor at Waterloo.

Special areas of land combine projection, jobs

Biosphere reserves are special areas of land, or even coastal waters, that have found a way to combine environmental protection and sustainable jobs.

Here’s what they’re not: national parks, or environmental museums.

“There’s no way you can have part of the world kept natural and another part exploited to the hilt. So the only serious possibility for a future for our children is to figure out ways to have jobs and the environment at the same time. Biosphere reserves are doing that in practice,” says Robert Gibson, the environment and resources studies department’s principal investigator for its Biosphere Sustainability Project. 

Today, Waterloo professors and students are researching how these links work at Ontario’s reserves. Meanwhile, Francis will continue to visit and review Canada’s iconic landscapes from Alberta’s mountainous Waterton to B.C.’s craggy Clayoquot Sound for UNESCO.

“People are learning how to live better in their own place,” he says. “That’s important.”