ID: 1544
Presenting Author: George Hegmann
Session: 594 - Communicating Truths: EA Practitioner Professional Ethics and Roles
Status: pending
This panel session explores consulting practitioner’s opportunities to speak truths in a contested and complex world.
Regulatory project environmental assessment is the global dominant and most contentious form of impact assessment. Consulting practitioners are a foremost generator of such assessments. Implications of assessment outcomes and its regulatory process can be highly consequential to the fate of multiple globally shared values and objectives.
Challenges however continue regarding trust, acceptability, adequacy and veracity of outcomes for consulting practitioners contracted by proponents to complete such assessments. Such views are fuelled by critiques of inferior quality, practice neglect and ultimately perception of bias and malfeasance.
Unfortunately, the voices of such practitioners have largely been absent in offering their views. Such views, built on decades of front-line experience, are essential to recalibrate the dialogue on the nature of assessments and the manner of their preparation. Practitioners constitute experts, many with accredited professional and advanced academic credentials by experience, presenting an unparalleled degree of expertise and insight into how assessments actually are prepared and defended.
This panel session will assemble senior (plus-20 year) practitioners from various consultancies across Canada to speak about their experiences, lessons learned and how their roles are shaped as practitioners. In essence, the reality of doing environmental assessment that, notwithstanding limitations, gaps, unknowns and uncertainties, strive to communicate truths towards building a future informed by professional practice but shaped by professional passion.
George Hegmann is a Stantec VP Environment Services Canada. He has 30 years experience as a consulting environmental assessment practitioner.