ENVIRON IMPACT ASSESS REV 1988;8:197-199 197

VIEWPOINT

OUR COMMON FUTURE: RESHAPING CANADA'S EIA PROCESS

TERESA H I L L

The Brundtland Report (World Commission on Environment and Development. 1987. Our Common Future. New York: Oxford University Press) states that a major challenge is achieving sustainable development is to "give the central economic and sectoral ministries the responsibility for the quality of those parts of the human environment affected by their decisions, and to give the environ- mental agencies more power to cope with the effects of unsustainable devel- opment." Environmental impact assessment (EIA) has been an essential inves- tigative tool in discovering, in the last two decades, how development activities in both the developed and developing world can degrade the environment. EIA is, by the same token, a major tool by which programs and projects can be evaluated in the context of policies for sustainable development among those nations that choose to adopt them. Canadian environmental authorities are taking steps to reshape their EIA processes to reflect many of the key recommendations of the Brundtland Report. We hope other nations will take similar steps to structure EIA processes to meet this challenge.

The Brundtiand Commission visited Canada in 1986 in the course of its 3- year investigation approaches to environment and development. In response, the Canadian Council of Resource and Environmental Ministers (CCREM) formed a National Task Force on Environment and Economy. Composed of environment ministers, senior industry executives, and representatives from environmental organizations and academia, the Task Force was given a mandate to promote environmentally sound economic development. In September 1987, 6 months following the publication of the Brundtland Report, the Task Force released its own report on environment and economy (CCREM. 1987. Report of the National Task Force on Environment and Economy). The Meeting of First Ministers in

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Toronto unanimously endorsed the principles of the Task Force report in No- vember 1987.

The Task Force response endorsed implementation of conservation strategies as a basis for development that will utilize resources in ways that do not com- promise their maintenance or improvement in the future. Most importantly, the report calls for a shift in approach to issues in the integration of environmental and economic concerns from a remedial, reactive posture to an anticipatory, prevention-oriented stance. A major recommendation of the Task Force was that Canada's environment ministers work through the CCREM to streamline the key processes, such as EIA.

The report also recommended that "all Ministers must become directly re- sponsible and accountable for the environmental and economic consequences of their policies, legislation, and programs." Several mechanisms were suggested for assigning accountability, including:

• ensuring that all government processes for screening, review, and evaluation of economic development projects include both socioeconomic and envi- ronmental criteria;

• ensuring that every major report on economic development and every related Cabinet document demonstrates that the proposal or activity is economically and environmentally sound;

• ensuring that all government programs which give funding or loan guarantees to industry are conditional on meeting environmental standards;

• taking specific steps to open environmental, resource, and economic de- velopment policy-making and planning to greater public input;

• including methods for incorporating environmental assessment in all federal- provincial economic development agreements.

The Task Force also recommended the establishment of consulting groups, Round Tables on Environment and Economy, through which representatives of gov- ernment, industry, environmental groups, labor, academia, and aboriginal peo- ples could make recommendations on government-economy issues to first min- isters of their jurisdiction and report directly to the public. The Round Tables were designed to "exert influence, founded on their credibility, their indepen- dence and their access to view of important sectors and levels of society."

Concurrent to the issuance of the Task Force report, a seminar on EIA was sponsored by the Senior Advisers to ECE Governments on Environmental Prob- lems at which 17 countries, including Canada, contributed to framing a number of draft recommendations. The outcome of the September 1987 meeting clearly reflects that EIA should be implemented through legislation and should be in- tegrated into planning and decision making to promote sustainable development (ECE/SAEP. 1987. Seminar on Environmental Impact Assessment).

The participants agreed that legislation should apply to individual projects,

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regional development, and general policies. EIA should be applied continuously to projects from the planing through decommissioning stages, and should include public involvement early in the process. EIA documentation should include the potential environmental impact of projects, and also the socioeconomic conse- quences of environmental changes the project might cause.

The Canadian Environmental Advisory Research Council (CEARC), The Ca- nadian Environmental Advisory Council (CEAC), and the Federal Environmental Assessment Review Office (FEARO) are working toward the implementation of EIA processes that incorporate the principles of sustainable development first articulated in the Brundtland Report and explored in subsequent meetings in Canada and internationally. A CEAC report issued February 1988, Preparing for the 1990s: Environmental Assessment as an Integral Part of Decision Making, urges a fundamental restructuring of the Environmental Assessment and Review Process (EARP). The report includes many recommendations, with an emphasis on legislative mandate, public involvement, collaborative and interjurisdictional planning at many levels, and concern for possible global environmental degra- dation.

The editors of EIA Review invite contributors to use this space to report to our international readership other national initiatives responding to the World Commission on Environment and Development Report. EIA is a fundamental tool in achieving sustainable development, defined by the Brundtland Commis- sion as "development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." We look forward to your thoughtful commentary on this new direction which will surely be a major influence on the evolution of theory and practice in EIA in the decade to come.