What is the purpose of environmental assessment? The Canadian Environmental Assessment Act (whose web-site http://www.ceaa.gc.ca/010/basics_e.htm includes more detail on “the basics” of environmental assessment) says: “There are two main purposes of environmental assessment: minimize or avoid adverse environmental effects before they occur, and to incorporate environmental factors into decision making.”

Decision-making requires two main sets of players—experts and the general public. They have to interact, and cooperate, as much as possible, helped (or hindered) by politicians. So another central aspect of environmental assesment, both cause and effect, is public participation. Yet a great deal of environmental assessment has to be carried out by specialists, needless to say. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), for instance.

The MA was launched by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in June 2001. It is “an international work program designed to meet the needs of decision makers and the public for scientific information concerning the consequences of ecosystem change for human well-being and options for responding to those changes.” An assessment process modeled on the MA will be repeated every 5–10 years. The MA synthesizes information from the scientific literature, datasets, and scientific models, and makes use of knowledge held by the private sector, practitioners, local communities and indigenous peoples. (The MA sees the need not to ignore local knowledge: “In response to lessons from previous international assessments and in light of unique features of ecosystems and their management, the MA was designed as a multi-scale assessment and has established mechanisms to incorporate information and knowledge from non-peer-reviewed sources including local and traditional knowledge.“)

As a multi-scale assessment, the MA consists of “inter-linked assessments undertaken at local, watershed, national, regional and global scales.” With such a range of assessments, all kinds of specialists are required, as too is peer-review, and so on. Scenario planners for example: “Ecology has many methods for developing an understanding of the future. These include prediction, forecasting, and projecting—each with unique methodologies, certainties, and guidelines for estimating probabilities. Using these methods, however, we often overlook the possibility of novel situations, surprises, and regime shifts, an oversight that can lead to costly management failures. Scenario planning can be used in this context to better inform decision-making.”

A whole range of approaches is called for, to bring together “the integrated multiscale structure” MA talks about: “Many of the most pressing needs for information identified by MA users are fundamentally holistic: How can environmental management contribute to poverty alleviation? What effect will the growing human contribution to global nitrogen cycles have on ecosystems and human well-being? Questions such as these cannot be answered by sectoral assessments and they cannot be answered at a single scale; they require an integrated multiscale structure like the MA. But as easy as it is to identify the need for such an assessment, it is another matter entirely to know how to actually conduct it.” And who is to conduct it? Much of environmental assessment must of necessity be conducted by professionals. Specialist consultants such as the Tellus Institute in Boston and its associate, the Stockholm Environment Institute, prepare studies with titles such as, for example, “Evaluation of Benchmarking as an Approach for Establishing Clean Development Mechanism Baselines”.

Other professional initiatives include, in Canada, the fruit of a partnership between the federal government’s Environment Canada and Quebec’s Ordre des Comptables Agrées. Their publication, Introductory Guide to Environmental Accounting, is addressed to “all environmental professionals : biologists, engineers, chemists, accountants or lawyers. It is a practical tool for improving environmental issues management faced by companies."

It tells them how to “make the most of your resources, calculate the impact of pollution prevention activities.” It gives examples of Canadian firms showing various aspects of environmental accounting, environmental management, life cycle and environmental performance reporting, and an assessment grid to analyse a firm's environmental balance sheet.

Business is keen to tap the growing market for consumers looking for evironmentally responsible goods and tools. To take only one example: Neenah, a subsidiary of Kimberly-Clark, helps companies in the pulp and paper sector measure their environmental performance. Their Environmental Savings Account helps ”organizations measure their efforts to reduce their environmental footprint, thanks to a useful tool from Neenah Paper. The ESA tool helps companies calculate the ecological savings — in trees, water, greenhouse gases and energy — of using recycled paper.“ It’s certified by the Forest Stewardship Council U.S, whish says that in so doing “consumers support forest management that is not only environmentally appropriate but also socially beneficial and economically viable.”

Moving to the United Kingdom, one research organization which provides environmental data on companies and sectors, in financial terms, to companies and fund managers, Trucost, plc, also does a lot of work with and for the government’s Environment Agency. Assessment is about comparison, therefore competition, and therefore finance, so this is where Trucost specialises. It provides a means for companies and other organizations “to measure, manage and communicate their overall environmental performance, using data that is already routinely collected by all economic organizations….” Trucost “takes financial accounts and divides the costs into: natural resources, human resources, manufactured resources, finance and taxation. Each category is initially assessed for any potential use of natural resources (environmental goods and services). Further assessment determines whether this use was conducted in an environmentally sustainable way. This use is then monetized, using valuation techniques determined by Trucost's international Advisory Panel of leading academics, and recombined to produce an overall Trucost Rating.”

But as one of their own major reports points out, problems remain: e.g. “by far the most striking finding was that overall reporting levels were not clearly related to the differing scale of environmental impacts across sectors….It might be more logical if the companies with the greatest environmental impact rather than the largest market capitalization disclosed more….”

More public participation required

It advises the CEC Council (of ministers of the environment) and Secretariat, headquartered in Montreal. Over the last ten years JPAC has held many meetings, made many recommendations, and produced numerous reports on the progress of environmental cooperation in North America. (It was set up through the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation (NAAEC)—a side accord to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).)

Its advisory work encompasses the management of chemicals in North America—such as the initiative that brought to an end DDT use in Mexico, effects of pollutants on children’s health, issues related to air quality, impacts from the provisions of NAFTA’s Chapter 11 on investment, considerations on the presence of transgenic maize in Mexico, and defense of the integrity of the citizen submission process established by the NAAEC, among others. More recently, JPAC wrote to the ministers of trade and environment of the three countries, urging them to hold a trilateral joint meeting of trade and environment authorities, as provided by the NAAEC. Civil society has long been calling for such a meeting, but so far the idea has met with systematic refusal from the three countries.

Through JPAC, the citizens of North America have raised the importance of access to information on the governmental agenda, as well as ways of incorporating citizens’ opinions in the CEC’s own work program. JPAC’s public comment periods provide ways to improve the CEC’s effectiveness. One on the scope of Citizen Submissions [related to NAAEC Article 14] and another on the commission’s independent expert report about transgenic corn [under Article 13] are currently of special significance to Mexicans. No other international agreement includes similar provisions for transparency and public involvement. In Mexico, these have created unprecedented space for public participation, thereby increasing the legitimacy of public participation in environmental policy.

So much more remains to be done. Returning to OECD’s environmental assessment of Mexico, it points out amongst many other problems, that “Investment in water infrastructure stands at about half of what is needed, only 25% of urban waste water is treated, and industrial discharges are largely untreated.” Nonetheless, the report goes on, “Mexico now has a solid environmental legal and institutional framework which is starting to bear positive results. “To encourage further implementation, OECD recommends that Mexico better enforces and funds these environmental policies, and integrates environmental concerns into sectoral policies….(such as agriculture, energy and transport. “

How it can do this without increased public participation seems unclear. The road ahead for environmental assessment seems to require greater involvement of the diverse publics concerned.

*Dr. Alexander Craig is a writer based in Quebec. Formerly Buenos Aires correspondent for the Guardian and other British papers, he then wrote his Ph.D., at Manchester, on the politics of development.