By David Ljunggren
Ottawa - Canada's 36 000-strong population of woodland caribou will shrink over the next century and those animals that live in areas heavy in energy production and logging are at greatest risk, according to a major report released on Thursday.
The Conservative government - which received the report last June but has only made it public now - angered conservationists by saying the document was not detailed enough and called for more studies.
Critics regularly accuse the Canadian government of not caring about the environment and of being too close to the energy industry.
Unlike the other more common types of caribou, which migrate across Canada's northern tundra and Arctic in huge herds numbering in the hundreds of thousands, the woodland caribou live further south in the boreal forests that stretch across the entire country. There are 57 herds in all.
The study, compiled by a group of 18 caribou experts, said 29 of the herds were not self-sustaining. Many of the herds most at risk were in the energy-producing western provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan.
"The inherent risks associated with a small population size warrant a cautious approach when considering potential resilience to any additional disturbance," it concluded.
The Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, which has long campaigned to protect the woodland caribou, said the report showed the animals were in more trouble than anyone realised.
"We are calling for an immediate pause to logging and new development activity in critical caribou habitat," said the society's Aran O'Carroll.
The federal government said the report had not identified how much environmental disturbance the caribou could tolerate.
"The information provided is inadequate to enable the identification of critical habitat," the Environment Ministry said in a written response, promising to produce a strategy in 2011 to protect the animals.
"We completely disagree with that. We think it is the most scientifically conclusive report ever produced on the species," O'Carroll told Reuters.
No one at the Environment Ministry was immediately available for comment. Environment Minister Jim Prentice would not be commenting on Thursday, a spokesman said.
In early 2007, specialists said they were worried by the falling population of barren-ground caribou in Canada's vast Northwest Territories. They blamed factors such varying climate, insect levels, the amount of food available, and the number of predators. - Reuters