How much disturbance can the environment tolerate before it risks collapsing?
Cumulative effects is the topic this month, and part 3 in a series about critical minerals. Part 1 looked at mining pressures in the North and part 2 discussed the potential cessation of free-entry mining exploration in Canada through recent court rulings regarding Indigenous Duty to Consult.
The term ‘cumulative effects’ refers to the “combined effects from past, present, and reasonably foreseeable future activities and natural processes.” Impacts to the environment often appear negligible when looked at individually, but collectively they can be significant.
Look no further than the domain of ‘impact assessment’ (IA) to see how this concept of cumulative effects comes into play in the modern rush for critical minerals.
Impact assessment
IA (also known as ‘environmental assessment’) is the regulatory process that large development projects in Canada go through prior to construction. In a nutshell – a proponent (i.e., a company) will send an application for their proposed project to a provincial, territorial, and/or federal government IA agency. This application will include an assessment of the anticipated positive and negative effects (e.g., environmental, economic, social, health) of the project.
Then, the governing agency is tasked with reviewing the application and deciding whether the project should be approved. Project proposals are rarely rejected. In fact, 95% of projects that complete federal IA in Canada are given a green light.
Indeed, IA is a requirement for many types of developments including (but not limited to) highways, wind farms, ports, pipelines, paper mills, and – you guessed it – mines.
Cumulative effects of mining
Cumulative effects caused by multiple mining projects in a region, or mines combined with other activities (pipelines, clearcut logging, urban sprawl), can impact ecosystem resilience and human health or well-being.
Environmental harms can also occur well outside of the footprint of a mine. For example, toxic contaminants and altered river flow can extend for kilometres downstream from where a mine is operating. Wildlife will change their migration patterns to avoid interacting with noise and light pollution from mine infrastructure and haul routes, potentially resulting in the use of poorer quality habitat and lower fitness of those animals.
The development paradox
Now, when companies are tasked with writing an IA application to get a new mining project approved – is it in their best interest to account for other current or potential future disturbances on the lands and waters in a particular region? No, it is not.
A paradox exists where most IA regulators are legally required to ‘consider’ cumulative effects in decision-making of whether a project gets approved, but proponents (who fund the IA application) have no interest in mitigating other environmental or social effects that they did not cause in the first place. The result of decades of narrowly scoped project-by-project IAs is that cumulative effects on people and the environment in Canada have been ignored.
What needs to change
Mineral exploration licenses are exploding as critical minerals forecast mining growth in Canada. Claims to explore the subsurface increased by 1200% in Nova Scotia in the past 10 years. So, with this anticipated rush in new mines subject to IA, what do we do about cumulative effects?
‘Regional assessment’ is a different approach to IA that zooms out to the big picture. Two examples are going on right now for offshore wind development in Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland and Labrador. Here, rather than waiting for wind developers to propose offshore projects all throughout the Atlantic, IA regulators are proactively assessing scenarios for cumulative effects and engaging stakeholders like Indigenous groups and commercial fisheries.
‘Strategic assessment’ has also been shown to effectively mitigate cumulative effects – again, stepping back to look at the sector more wholistically. Both regional and strategic approaches require government funding and capacity because the development paradox is likely here to stay.
For the first time ever, IA regulators within the Province of British Columbia recently rejected a proposed coal mine on the premise that adverse cumulative effects on grizzly bears, caribou, and Treaty 8 First Nations rights could not be justified. This may be an indication that, when the evidence is clear, a political will does in fact exist to say ‘no’ to a project in an area where cumulative effects are already severe.
The Province of Nova Scotia has committed to adding cumulative effects as a factor to include in a ‘revitalized’ IA regulation to be released later this year. The degree to which cumulative effects is incorporated in the new provincial IA regime, using expert feedback from their public engagement period, remains to be seen.
Photo by Sebastian Pichler on Unsplash
