COVID-19 and Impact Assessment: Can we turn this crisis into an opportunity?
For many of us, the pandemic was an abrupt shift in reality, and yet we had every confidence that “soon things will get back to normal,” and took the opportunity to discover the rewarding--and not-so-rewarding--features of breadmaking and online shopping. Now, nearly two years in, many of us are beginning to question if this departure from normalcy will end, if ever, and to question what ‘normal’ means anyway, and if we really want to go back there after all. We will, we hope, eventually be able to take our masks off, and COVID-19 will recede from our news headlines. Some of the changes that emerged during the pandemic will be permanent, however. Many of us have lost loved ones, and permanent ideological rifts have emerged in some families and communities. And we are all well-equipped, if not excited about, engaging in virtual meetings, creating potentially permanent shifts in how we work. Many of us have also found our priorities shifting, both intentionally and unintentionally, as COVID revealed to us, like so many other crises do, what really matters and what doesn’t, what is working and what isn’t.
What about Impact Assessment? What changed in this sphere during COVID-19? The need for impact assessment certainly did not diminish. Applications for new development continued apace across Canada, including some very contentious applications for coal mining in my own province. But our ability to deliver robust assessments of the impacts of natural resource-based development, by many measures, did diminish, and precipitously. In a recent webinar hosted by NEDIA (you can view the recording here: https://www.nedia.ca/nedia-events), panelists made several worrying observations.
First, as noted by University of Calgary’s Associate Professor of Law Martin Olszynski, since the emergence of the pandemic over 100 rules governing environmental regulation across Canada were weakened or suspended, on the premise of ensuring health and safety standards in the face of COVID-19. Many of these acts included no end-dates, however, so we are left wondering whether these new rules will be among the permanent changes brought on by the pandemic. The vast majority are specifically related to monitoring and reporting requirements in the oil and gas industry, and, by virtue of this fact, over half were also enacted by the Province of Alberta, while some other provinces and territories saw few or no changes at all.
Other, more subtle but no less consequential, changes can be observed in impact assessment practices, as described two other panelists, Jackie Lerner, Director of EIA and Community Engagement at SNC-Lavelin, and Cheryl Chetkiewicz, Conservation Scientist with the Wildlife Conservation Society of Canada. Lerner and Chetkiewicz both described how pandemic-related social distancing requirements fundamentally compromised the ability of IA practitioners to pursue meaningful deliberative public and community engagement during this period, an essential pillar of effective impact assessment. While virtual meeting platforms have allowed for some degree of accessible interaction, they do not fully replicate the value of in-person interactions, and many important participants, particularly in remote, Indigenous communities, were hampered from participating at all by technological accessibility. The timing of the pandemic was particularly compromising to impact assessment in Canada, noted panelists, as it came directly on the heels of enactment of the new federal Impact Assessment Act, legislating substantial changes to impact assessment processes, including in particular higher expectations for public involvement, and the inclusion of Indigenous knowledge. At such a time, the ability to build relationships and support venues for meaningful deliberation would have been more important than ever, to ensure successful implementation.
What will impact assessment in Canada look like going forward? Panelist Peter Croal, Canadian international and environmental development advisor, worries that further rule changes may yet be on the horizon, as we can expect economically-suffering companies and jurisdictions to seek rapid revenue generation post-pandemic, and impact assessment processes may be further sacrificed as they tend to be viewed as barriers to rapid development, rather than as essential pillars of sustainable development.
On the other hand, as Croal asked webinar attendees, do we really want to go back to pre-Covid IA? Or do we want to grasp this moment as an opportunity to critically examine the challenges facing impact assessment in Canada today, the tools and processes in place to address those challenges, and potentially change course? How should the IA community, for example, prepare for the next pandemic-like disruption to routines? How do we accommodate the increasingly urgent calls for rapid decarbonization in our assessments of proposed new industrial developments, calls which are coming not only from the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, the climate science community at large, and the now global climate justice movement, but also from the International Energy Agency, previously the harbinger of growth in future energy production and consumption? How should the escalating climate-related extreme events be factored into assessment processes?
As the pandemic has encouraged reflection in so many other domains, perhaps this crisis is an opportunity for the impact assessment community to examine what role we can play in ensuring sustainability in our socio-ecological systems in these uncertain times. What really matters and what doesn’t; what is working and what isn’t?
View our webinar on this topic HERE
