TDC Conservation Areas

Location and Siting

Choosing where your TDC Conservation Area is going to be is a mix of conservation planning and community engagement. In other words, neither one of these alone will lead to TDC Conservation Areas that support the program goal. Conservation planning is required to understand if a given parcel is of high conservation value. Community engagement is required because the conservation value of a parcel says nothing about its owner’s willingness to conserve it.

The layout characteristics of the TDC Conservation Area parcels are open decisions. You can choose one contiguous block of TDC Conservation Area parcels, or several dispersed blocks. You can choose to have the TDC Conservation Area adjacent to the TDC Development Area, or near by, or at a significant distance. Two significant considerations are 1) community members tend to want to see their TDC Conservation Areas and TDC Development Areas within relatively close proximity, and 2) credits from a given TDC Conservation Area can only be transferred to the TDC Development Areas to which they are programmatically connected from the outset.

There are several different models employed by communities using TDC programs in the United States to outline which parcels are to be considered the Sending Areas, or as we say, TDC Conservation Areas. However, all of these more or less fall into two categories: spatially based and criteria based. Simply put, spatially-based approaches draw lines on the map in the planning stages, while criteria-based approaches outline what characteristics the parcel must have to be considered part of a TDC Conservation Area. Actual approaches often employ a mix.

The Alberta Land Stewardship Act requires TDC programs to provide for the identification of the TDC Conservation Areas, but the approach used is up to the municipality.