About the Conference
Impact & Environmental Assessment:
It’s a Lot & We Can Get Great Things Done
A Recipe for Meaningful Assessments in a Time of Innovation, Modernization & Uncertainty
Environmental Assessment (EA) and Impact Assessment (IA) practitioners are pulled in a lot of directions during the course of IA/EAs, with the goal of ensuring the process remains efficient, meaningful, informed, transparent, and inclusive. By prioritizing and focusing, we can strike the correct balance ensuring robust, high-quality, and meaningful IA/EAs. So, while IA/EAs have become a catchall of ideas and aspirations, we can get great things done.
The conference will explore the notion of working in a time of innovation and modernization, ensuring that the vision and principles for assessments are maintained all while not losing focus on the bigger picture questions.
Practitioners need to be well positioned to collect the right information and conduct analysis with a view to maximizing outcomes and minimize impacts on Indigenous culture and traditions, health and socio-economic conditions, as well as archaeology, paleontology and the biophysical environment. With a vision to engage earlier and more effectively to build trusted relationships so that assessments can respond to the pertinent questions from participants at the onset rather than collecting information for information’s sake. Without questioning the bigger picture, we leave ourselves with the unsophisticated notion that IA/EAs are simply too resource intensive.
Practitioners must also learn from Indigenous communities, respecting Indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing as it should be and harmonizing this knowledge with western scientific methods in the assessment processes.
The complexity of information available to practitioners can seem daunting, and this conference is intended to aid practitioners to stay focused on the vision and not feel swung in different directions between streamlined processes, prioritizing information, and new technologies. The vision is for practitioners to learn to balance this wealth of information along with the emergence of new technology tools, mapping and database tools, and artificial intelligence. Are some practices more useful in certain circumstances? What does meaningful engagement look like on your project? Where is the sweet spot and how does the practitioner decide on it for different projects in different contexts?
