We know that impact assessment is designed to anticipate, assess and help avoid the negative impact of developments upon people and ecosystems, but what about the negative impacts of the IA process upon people? I had the opportunity to sit on the UA Master’s committee for Amy Wilson, who was supervised by my colleague John Parkins, while she explored the impacts of the IA process on the communities potentially affected by the Grassy Mountain Coal Project in southwestern Alberta. The paper from that work, Reversing the gaze: understanding how community members are negatively affected by impact assessment, was published OA this week in Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal. Three impact locations are identified and described using 49 interviews with experts and affected people: (1) risk perceptions and anticipatory impacts, (2) procedural issues, and (3) community and regional conflicts. Congratulations, Amy!
Tag: social impact assessment (Page 1 of 2)
Quick on the heels of Gardenio’s first thesis paper, below, his second paper is out today in Journal of Environmental Management: Using news coverage and community-based impact assessments to understand and track social effects using the perspectives of affected people and decisionmakers. This paper allows us to look at two of the ‘state of the art’ SIAs in recent years, for the Site C and Keeyask hydro projects. Each used a community-based approach where affected First Nations were funded to create their own impact assessment documents for consideration by the panel, yet the public discourse differs dramatically. We compared those documents with longitudinal media coverage to understand the longer term perspectives of affected people and decisionmakers in each case, a data source much more available than any formal monitoring in Canada. This allowed us to explore the potential of such datasets as suggested in this 2017 paper published about modernizing SIA.
Figure 1 in Gardenio da Silva’s 2021 ERSS paper showing that limited SIA methods means limited SIA scope.
Hot on the heels of Gardenio da Silva’s MES thesis defense, his first paper is out this morning in Energy Research & Social Science, Do methods used in social impact assessment adequately capture impacts? An exploration of the research-practice gap using hydroelectricity in Canada. Gardenio reviewed publicly available social impact assessments (SIAs) from 37 hydroelectricity projects in Canada to see what methods are being used to understand baseline conditions and anticipate impacts. Not surprisingly, the methods are dominated by open houses and census-based input/output tables, the approaches that are best able to be controlled by proponents and consultants. About half used interviews, and a quarter or less more rigorous approaches like participatory mapping or surveys, but most methods were poorly described. The range of impacts vary similarly: all SIAs looked at demographic change, infrastructure impacts and job creation, but fewer than half tackled issues such as gender, equity, crime, substance abuse, etc (see above). The number of methods employed was more correlated with the size of the project (p<0.001) than how recent it is (p<0.05). The paper makes some recommendations about improvements that could be made in SIA practice, and segues nicely to Gardenio’s second paper about monitoring, which should be coming along soon.
Supplemental figure from Jarić et al. 2020 in PLOS biology that disentangles the concepts of iEcology and Culturomics.
Thanks to writer Rob St. John for authoring a post on The Freshwater Blog about our new article in PLOS biology about iEcology and conservation culturomics for aquatic applications. I was happy to be featured in this post, and especially to have the opportunity to talk about my work with Yan Chen, former MES, current IDPhD and also paper co-author.
A re-thinking of the pre-dam Site C conceptual map from Yan Chen’s Masters thesis, as used in this paper, accompanied by Google Earth imagery of the Site C dam site near Fort St. John, BC, in 2012 and 2019 respectively.
Thanks to Ivan Jarić, from the Biology Centre of the Czech Academy of Sciences, for inviting Yan Chen and I onto this interesting new paper out in PLOS Biology today, Expanding conservation culturomics and iEcology from terrestrial to aquatic realms. This geographically and disciplinarily diverse writing team led to many rich conversations and debates as the manuscript took shape. The idea was to differentiate the emerging field of iEcology from conservation culturomics, and advocate for their application in aquatic realms which have a dearth of data. Our work on advancing social impact assessment of hydroelectricity and dyke realignment using Instagram datasets provided one of the six key areas of application outlined in this paper.
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