ID: 1640
Presenting Author: Robert Gibson
Session: 592 - Streamlining IA in an era of global uncertainty
Status: pending
The presentation considers the gap between a Canadian federal assessment streamlining initiative and imperatives to reverse unsustainable trajectories and respect complexity.
Impact assessment mostly ignores obligations to reverse our slide into ever deeper unsustainability. It also mostly fails to recognize complex and interlinked social/biophysical systems and focus on interactive cumulative effects.
In Canada, only a handful of exceptional project assessments have aimed for net positive contributions to sustainability. And while more notable efforts have focused on interactive cumulative effects, few have been in or tied effectively to project assessments.
Recent trends are in the opposite direction. Federally and in many provinces, minimally ambitious current assessment demands have been declared unduly onerous and are being eliminated or streamlined.
The federal government’s current national interest projects initiative is one example. The basic notion is attractive, as is the associated aim to combine the otherwise fragmented federal and provincial assessment responsibilities. However, identified national interest projects are to be pre-approved. The expedited assessments are to determine only the conditions of approval. And the national interest is equated with spurring more resource extraction and trade capacity in response to geopolitical uncertainties and economic fears.
The neglected key question is how to re-conceive the agenda so such projects and assessments would also help reverse degradation of ecosystem/climate services and deepening inequities, including by embracing complexity, understanding how impacts interact and accumulate and designing projects for more beneficial feedbacks.
Robert B. Gibson is a professor at the University of Waterloo. His work centres on sustainability and complexity applications, including through next generation impact assessment.