ID: 1716
Presenting Author: Mandy Olsgard
Session: 703 - Health Impact Assessment to Tackle Misinformation and Foster Participation
Status: pending
When HHRA minimizes human–environment relationships due to economic priorities, integrating community knowledge and cumulative exposure pathways improves predictions, decision-making, and monitoring.
Human health risk assessments (HHRAs) are central to environmental impact evaluations, yet conventional frameworks often inadequately characterize risks to Indigenous communities. Standard HHRA practice typically relies on simplified exposure models, single-media assessments, and surrogate consumption rates that do not reflect the depth and diversity of Indigenous relationships with land, water, and traditional foods. These limitations are frequently reinforced by project evaluation processes that prioritize corporate economic benefits and timelines, resulting in narrow scoping, constrained data collection, and reduced consideration of cultural and cumulative health impacts. Drawing on applied experience supporting First Nation and Métis communities, this presentation outlines critical gaps in current HHRA/IA approaches and demonstrates how these gaps can lead to underestimated health risks for land users. A retrospective comparison of EIA predictions with post-development environmental monitoring and reporting highlights instances where contaminants exceeded predicted values or absences of data. In several cases, risk assessments had minimized pathways deemed “unlikely,” despite their relevance, leading to insufficient mitigation and weak long-term monitoring. To address these issues, we propose a reframed HHRA/IA approach grounded in: Human Health and Indigenous-defined land use, assessment of cumulative effects; and transparent evaluation of how economic drivers influence methodological choices and uncertainty in IA.
Mandy is a senior toxicologist focused on health risk assessment, exposure modelling, and community based monitoring with 17 years of regulatory and consulting experience.