Response to and Comments on “Draft Guidelines for the Preparation of the Environmental Impact Statement for the Whites Point Quarry and Marine Terminal Project” of November 2004.
Peter Duinker, Halifax, NS - January 2005
Introduction
As an environmental impact assessment (EIA) scholar, I am taking the perspective of sound professional practice in EIA in my review of the draft EIS Guidelines (hereafter just called the Guidelines). I interpret the function of EIA as being to provide for environmental protection and sustainable development.
Purpose of the Guidelines
The Guidelines state that the document exists to “establish the issues that the Proponent must address in the EIS, how to describe and assess these issues, and how to structure the EIS”. The document also states that “The purpose of the EIS Guidelines is to provide specific guidance to the Proponent on the content of the EIS document”. While this mission must indeed be accomplished by the Guidelines, a far more important mission is to guide the Proponent on how to conduct the EIA. Providing guidance on how to prepare an EIS is not the same guidance as how to conduct an EIA. The Guidelines should do both and claim to do both. I shall point out several ways in which the Guidelines provide confusing advice and even bad advice to the Proponent on how to conduct the EIA.
Information to be Provided in the EIS
Under section 2.0, the Guidelines provide a long list of information requirements. Because the list is out of context - in other words, what is the function of the various information items, and how does each relate to the other items in the list - it provides little assistance in relation to the purpose of the Guidelines. For example, item (g) is “other undertakings in the area”. If this has anything to do with cumulative effects assessment (CEA), then the document should say so at this very point. Also, the next item speaks to CEA, and mentions “other projects and activities”. Are “undertakings” the same as “projects and activities”? This is quite confusing.
It is curious to me that, given the frequent reference later in the document to “valued environmental components” (VECs), there is no mention of VECs in this list. All in all, the list is of little value to the EIS preparers, and could well be abandoned from the Guidelines document.
Public Participation
The first sentence begins with reference to “how the EIS is to address public participation”. This is an excellent example of how the Guidelines should be helping the proponent understand what makes for good EIA, not just a good EIS. The statement above merely advises the proponent on what to write about public participation, not what to do about it. The Guidelines in section 4.1 do mention key aspects of public involvement that must be described in the EIS, and the presumption that the description would be embarrassing to the Proponent if little were accomplished in action is correct. However, I believe that the Proponent could be guided much more strongly by the Panel as to the means and qualities of public participation the Panel would find acceptable.
The last paragraph of section 4.1 is a non-sequitur. The operative concept in the first sentence is “as early as possible in the review process”. Why then does the following dependency (beginning with “therefore”) not speak to getting project information to the public as early as possible? Rather, it addresses continuity of up-to-date information, and communicating the EIS. Such logical inconsistencies do not raise a reader’s confidence in the Guidelines.
Finally, I am unable to determine what a “concordance table” might be in the context of public participation.
Valued Environmental Components (VECs)
I am most disappointed in the treatment of VECs in this document. First mention is on p. 5, with subsequent references on pp. 7, 14, 20, etc. As I’ve come to understand EIA, a VEC-based approach means that the EIA focusses attention and energy around VECs, and couches all impact discussion in terms of them. I emerge from a reading of these guidelines with a great deal of confusion as to why VECs are even mentioned at all, for their role has been trivialized.
The treatment of VECs on page 5 leads me to optimism in the Guidelines writers’ understanding of where VECs fit into EIA appropriately: (a) the Proponent is to divulge the means of identifying VECs; (b) impacts are to be predicted in terms of the Projects’s effects on VECs, and (c) interactions and relationships among VECs are to be investigated and Project effects on these interactions and relationships predicted.
Then the problems begin. The only mention of VEC in the boundaries discussion (section 6.0) is reference to the notion that “different boundaries may be appropriate for each VEC”. Thereafter, the instructions about space and time boundaries are silent on VECs, yet make reference to various and sundry other concepts. I hold that the boundaries discussion should be first and foremost a set of instructions relating to consideration of VECs (more on boundaries later).
VECs appear again under section 8.0 on the existing environment. The instruction is for the Proponent to focus the description of the existing environment on “those VECs, processes and interactions . . .” Two paragraphs later, we read that “emphasis must be on those species, communities and processes identified as VECs”. These statements are inconsistent with each other - are processes VECs or not?
In the 4th paragraph of section 8.0, the Proponent is instructed to take an ecosystem approach. How does this relate to VECs? Are “ecosystem health, social health and integrity” VECs? In the 5th paragraph, the Proponent is told to “address such issues as habitat, nutrient and chemical cycles, food chains, productivity . . . . “ Are these VECs? And who is identifying the VECs - the Proponent or the Guidelines authors? Earlier the Guidelines commit the Proponent to doing so, but the Guidelines authors seem to want this job, too.
Finally, section 8.0 continues with a long list of environmental components that the Proponent MUST (my emphasis) consider in the description of the environment. Are THESE (my emphasis) VECs? If the Proponent must identify VECs, why do the guidelines offer up a required list of environmental components to describe? It should be either one way or the other - either the Guidelines specifies the VECs, and the Proponent can add to the list on the basis of public consultation, or the Proponent creates and justifies the VEC list.
Boundaries
Time and space boundaries demand attention to both extent and resolution (Duinker and Baskerville 1986). These Guidelines totally miss the concept of resolution. Also, there is a mismatch in that for space (section 6.1), boundaries and scale are mentioned, but not so for time (section 6.2), which mentions only boundaries (what is the difference according to the Guidelines authors?). Besides the lack of connections of VECs in any of the discussions for either space or time, I find the lack of attention to any discussion of ecology in section 6.2 on time to be quite discouraging. In all, there is much more the boundary-setting than these Guidelines betray.
Environmental Protection Plan
If EIA has the main purpose of protecting the environment, how is it that an environmental protection plan (EPP) can be included in an a priori description of the project? Ultimately this should be the case, thus obviating the need for an EIA in the first place (in the perfect world where environmental considerations are built into project design from the beginning), but it seems reasonable to me that the EIA process should be informing the creation of the EPP. If this is true, then perhaps a DRAFT EPP could be included with the project description (I presume that such a document would include description of an commitments to actions and measures determined at this time to be best practices with respect to mitigation of impacts known from previous EIS), and a redrafting included in the EIS to take account of impacts unforseen prior to the EIA process.
Existing Environment
I have already pointed out the inconsistencies between a VEC-centred approach to EIA and the approach taken in these Guidelines. Furthermore, I am disturbed by a statement in the second-to-last paragraph that” . . . The Proponent must present a sufficient time-depth of data and information to establish norms, trends, and extremes, TO THE EXTENT THAT SUCH INFORMATION IS AVAILABLE (my emphasis)”. I thought this was a Panel review, a level of EIA where the Proponent is expected to undertake original research - at whatever level is necessary - to predict environmental impacts with sufficiently low uncertainty for the Panel to come to reasoned and supported decisions about environmental impacts? The Proponent must NOT be given the opportunity to avoid presenting information required for impact assessment just because that information is not already available.
In section 8.2.1, there is no rationale given for the choice of 0.5, 1.0, 1.5 and 2.0 km as radii for areas around the Project’s footprint within which to count up the residences. These look fully arbitrary.
An example of how rather uncarefully this document has been prepared is in the discussion under section 8.2.7 on human health. This section should cover existing environment. However, the section ends with a statement about identifying potential effects on human health.
Effects Prediction
Again, in section 9.0 the Guidelines allude to the need for the Proponent to focus effects prediction on VECs, but then muddies this with all kinds of other instructions like:
(a) “An analysis of the Project’s effects on the VECs must consider and demonstrate linkages between predicted physical and biological changes resulting from the project” - are the entities associated with the physical and biological changes not VECs themselves? And if not, how could the Proponent possibly undertake credible effects prediction without doing this?
(b) “The Proponent must explain how the VECs were chosen” - this instruction was already given, with the confusion that the Guidelines pretty much already determine what the VECs are.
(c) “This section must . . . Identify what physical, biological and socio-economic changes may be expected . . . Assess these effects . . . “ - where are the VECs, and where is prediction of impacts on VECs
(d) “The EIS must provide a comprehensive analysis of the short and long term effects of the project on the environment and indicate the sensitivity of the function, integrity and health of the environment to these predicted effects” - this is gobbledegook! The EIS must provide properly bounded predictions, with uncertainty assessments, of the Project’s effects on VECs!
Why does each of the sections 9.1.1, 9.1.2, etc., refer to effects monitoring when this topic is taken up later in section 10?
Socio-Economic Effects
The literature is clear about there being two approaches to social impact statement (SIA); (a) a technical approach, where social scientists make effects predictions; and (b) a participatory approach, where social scientists assist affected individuals and communities to make the effects predictions. I would have thought that good guidance for the Proponent would be the Panel’s expectations on what balance of these two approaches would be best in this EIA.
In section 9.2.2, why is there another reference to the need for an environmental protection plan?
Monitoring
In my view, the presentation of monitoring in an EIS should represent two things: (a) a commitment on the part of the Proponent to engage in monitoring, and not just a set of proposals that the Proponent might consider if the project goes ahead; and (b) a detailed plan of what variables will be monitored, and how the results will be analyzed and used to check impact predictions and the models used to make the predictions. Monitoring must be closely tied to the modelling process of making impact predictions, for the very purpose of monitoring in EIA is to reduce uncertainty in predicting impacts (Duinker, 1989).
Conclusions
Preparing good EIS Guidelines is doubtless a difficult task. I believe that these Guidelines can be fixed up to become strong with two things: (a) a thorough edit to remove redundancies and inconsistencies; and (b) attention to EIA process elements of the kinds I have drawn attention to above. The Guidelines need to be consistent, and not at odds one section to another, and as well give firm, unequivocal and clear guidance to the Proponent, while still allowing the Proponent suitable levels of flexibility to make some of the decisions on how the EIA is done and what it focuses on. There is time to do this, and the Proponent and interveners in the process deserve such high-quality Guidelines. I eagerly anticipate reading the improved final Guidelines, and wish the Panel the clearest of thinking to create them.