Research Priority Areas

Current Priority Area: 2006-2007

• Meaningful Involvement
• Strategic Environmental Assessment

Past Priority Areas 2000-2003:

• Determining the Significance of Environmental Effects
• Follow-up
• Human Impact Assessment
• Regional Environmental Effects Framework; and
• Integrating Climate Change Considerations into Environmental Assessment

Current Priority Areas

Meaningful Involvement

The involvement of stakeholders is viewed as practical and essential in EA. Finding effective ways to obtain meaningful involvement in environmental assessment processes is a concern for many stakeholders for a variety of reasons. This priority area will explore ways to engage the public, including aboriginal peoples, in a timely and predictable process that ultimately delivers high quality EAs.

The Challenge

By nature, EA is a systematic process with the capacity for providing the most appropriate means of ensuring broad and open participation from all stakeholders. A continuing challenge is to find new ways to engage the public and address their concerns while meeting a proponent’s desire for timely and predictable processes.

Each assessment has the potential to involve multiple players including but not limited to: one or more EA practitioners within federal departments & agencies; one or more provincial & territorial governments; aboriginal groups; project proponents; environmental groups; industry organizations; and members of the public. It is, therefore, no surprise that assessments can become quite complex when one considers issues such as the costs and benefits of project alternatives and design options, on which the various parties involved in the process may have diverging views.

In an effort to ensure effective, efficient and fair attention to competing interests and divergent views, meaningful public involvement is required right from the start of the process in effort to avoid unnecessary conflicts, to facilitate timely response to concerns and to seek early resolution of disagreements wherever possible. Yet, there is continuing uncertainty about the best openings and methodologies for public involvement in EA. The expected result of research in this area is better public involvement in the EA process that can improve the quality of EA work, while balancing competing interests and time constraints. This priority research area should address how effective public involvement can be achieved while ensuring a timely, predictable and efficient process. A particular focus will be placed on the benefits and challenges of engaging Aboriginal peoples in EA.

Areas of needed research on how to enhance the effectiveness of public involvement in EA in Canada include (but are not limited to) the following:

• the benefits and challenges of engaging Aboriginal peoples in EA processes in Canada;
• the effectiveness of and obstacles to the increased use of mediation and other alternative dispute resolution mechanisms in resolving disputes in EA processes with the general public, and/or in resolving outstanding issues with aboriginal peoples;
• how to integrate expert and public involvement in all stages of EA processes and identify barriers to public participation, including barriers for engaging aboriginal peoples;
• how to ensure adequate time for review and comment while ensuring a timely EA process;
• how adoption of best practice public involvement can guide efforts to coordinate and harmonize EA in Canada; and
• how public involvement can be a more effective means of enhancing EA process transparency and clarity.

Strategic Environmental Assessment

Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) has been characterized as the systematic and comprehensive process of evaluating the environmental effects of a policy, plan or program and its alternatives.

SEA is a means of ensuring that decision makers take environmental factors of proposed policies, plans and programs into account before making a final decision. This type of assessment enables decision makers to accentuate the positive and avoid or mitigate the negative effects during the development of a policy, plan or program. SEA may be applied to broad policy proposals, sectoral and regional planning initiatives and to program development. It can also guide, complement or support project level EA. Many practical questions, however, remain regarding models, procedures, methods and institutional frameworks. An effective SEA system requires political commitment and organizational support, clear guidance, appropriate methods, monitoring and compliance mechanisms and a follow-up and feedback capability.

Challenge

In Canada, and elsewhere, increasing emphasis is being placed on application of assessment tools at the strategic level (i.e. policies, plans and programs). In addition to better informed strategic choices, benefits include clearer linkages between outcomes and options in the assessment process, better management of cumulative effects, greater transparency and accountability for decision making at the strategic level, and more efficient guidance for project level planning.

Given that SEA represents a “higher-order” analysis of policy, plan and program proposals, the linkages with other forms of planning and assessment often seem elusive. At the same time, practitioners, proponents and decision makers, alike, are becoming increasingly aware of the limitations of project EA to address cumulative effects and broader policy issues in a regional context. Regional assessment is emerging as a useful tool to help bridge the higher-order, often conceptual-level assessment of broad policy and program initiatives with the more practical and technically-oriented assessment of individual projects. In this sense, SEA of policies, plans and programs, regional assessment and project EA can each be viewed as interlinked components of an EA continuum.

Experience with SEA (including regional assessment), in contrast to project-level EA, remains somewhat limited. To date, efforts to develop this tool have focused primarily on institutional frameworks and process. More work is required to

elaborate appropriate models for SEA through a better understanding of best practices and methodological requirements. The relationship between SEA (including regional assessment), project-level EA and other planning tools also warrants further consideration.

Priority research needed to strengthen SEA in Canada includes (but is not limited to) the following:

• analysis of the demonstrable benefits of SEA;
• options for strengthening or reinforcing linkages between SEA (including regional assessment), project-level EA and other planning tools;
• a synthesis of lessons learned from Canadian experience in the application of regional assessment;
• tools, methodologies and evaluation criteria to support good SEA practice;
• options for improving transparency, accountability, the level of rigour and quality assurance in SEA, while ensuring its continued applicability in a policy context;
• addressing cumulative effects through SEA and regional assessment; and
• the role of public participation and approaches to integrating public interests and concerns in SEA.

Past Priority Areas

Determining the Significance of Environmental Effects

For each project, the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act requires the Responsible Authority and/or the Minister of the Environment to determine whether the project is likely to cause significant adverse environmental effects after the implementation of appropriate mitigation measures.

Although such determinations often involve balancing various factors, environmental assessment practitioners and decision makers would benefit from greater clarity in the criteria used to determine the significance of environmental effects. Preference will be given to research that examines potential criteria and procedures for determining the significance of environmental effects.

Follow-up

Follow-up programs are critical to improving the effectiveness of environmental assessments by allowing proponents, practitioners and regulators to learn from their experience. According to the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, a follow-up program involves:

• verifying the accuracy of environmental assessments of projects and
• determining the effectiveness of any measures to mitigate the adverse environmental effects of projects.

Proposals may focus on one or both aspects of follow-up described above. In verifying the accuracy of predictions and/or the effectiveness of mitigation measures, proposals may focus on a single project or sector.

Human Impact Assessment

Human impact assessment, which includes socio-economic, cultural and health issues, represents one of the principal means of supporting decision making consistent with sustainable development. Although there are several examples of environmental assessments (EA) which have examined the direct human impacts of the project in question, there is no generally accepted way of doing so.

Determining the appropriate approaches and methods for assessing the human impacts of a project presents challenges to EA practitioners, and in particular those associated with the area of human health. This area has been identified as warranting special attention, in particular methods for identifying and scoping health issues and approaches for early and ongoing public participation on health issues in EA.

Regional Environmental Effects Framework

Experience has shown that the environmental assessment (EA) of proposed projects, particularly in area location with little prior development, may require the proponent to address a wide range of regional development issues that have not been subjected to systematic scrutiny. This may place an unfair burden on the project assessment due to the need to collect data which may not be readily available, particularly in cases where other projects are waiting in the wings. Working at the regional scale can provide proponents, government decision makers and affected publics with a better understanding of a project's environmental effects, especially the cumulative effects. Such an approach can also result in the assessment cost being shared more equitably.

Although there are a number of examples of regionally-based environmental framework studies (such as the Northern Rivers Basin Study), not many have been done in the context of EA, and some have evolved as a result of an environmental assessment on a specific project. Often, these studies have been developed for environmental management purposes and applied differently. This results in a variety of models for such studies. The long-term goal is to develop models for regional environmental effects frameworks that will be relevant to environmental assessments of specific projects planned for the region.

Integrating Climate Change Considerations into Environmental Assessment

Some environmental assessments under the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act address the project's direct impacts due to greenhouse gas emissions.

Related but different considerations are the biophysical and social changes brought about by climate change and their impact on development. Predictions made in environmental assessments are usually based on historical data. Large-scale climate change phenomena may invalidate these predictions. The effects of long-term climate change may exceed those associated with an individual project, and may have to be taken into account in making predictions on environmental effects and proposing mitigation measures in environmental assessments of individual projects.

Canada, and especially the north, is predicted to be significantly affected by global climate change phenomena. Research in this area will help practitioners better address these changes in preparing environmental assessments.