Linking Mapping to Policy:
Environmentally Sensitive Areas

Environmentally Sensitive Areas (ESAs) are important ecosystems that support at-risk plant and animal species. Due to decades of intensive forest harvesting and development, especially in lower elevations along the coast and in valley bottoms, many of southwest BC’s ecological communities are at risk of being lost, particularly old forest ecosystems. Many of these ecosystems will be further imperilled by climate change.

For the Action for Adaptation Biodiversity Atlas, ESAs have been mapped from the provincial Terrestrial Ecosystem Mapping (TEM), Vegetation Resource Inventory (VRI), Sensitive Ecosystem Inventory (SEI), and the Old Growth Strategic Review (OGSR) mapping layers. These data layers provide detailed information that local governments and First Nations often have not been able to access. The Action for Adaptation project uses these data layers to extend coverage of the SEI layers generated in the 1990s, the coverage of which was restricted to coastal CDFmm and CWHxm1. The project also draws on SEI mapping completed more recently by local governments. The mapping layers produced include:

• Potential Ecological Communities at Risk
• Potential Sensitive Ecosystems
• Climate micro-refugia
• Hydroriparian areas

These mapping layers are at a 1:20,000 resolution, and will not have the same resolution as the terrestrial carbon and land cover layers.

The project team has visually reviewed the data to remove areas that have been harvested and developed as of 2025. The intent is that these layers provide a flagging tool that local governments and First Nations can provide to a Qualified Environmental Professional (QEP) hired by a developer to assess the state of the ecosystem on the ground, as a condition of a development permit.

Within municipal jurisdictions, loss of sensitive ecosystems is the result of legal and permitted activities such as urban and industrial development. ESAs are priorities for conservation and inclusion within conservation networks due to their provincial and regional scarcity, fragility or vulnerability to disturbance, and also their value to biodiversity.

This information can be used to make land use and zoning decisions that retain and enhance ecosystem services and that leverage opportunities for nature-based solutions, rather than further erode them.

To advance nature-based climate resilience and biodiversity protection, local governments should establish clear and long-term land use and environmental objectives that can be achieved through policies linked to targets and indicators. 

Recommended policy objectives: