To protect our planet we need to re-think ‘Environmental Impact Assessments’
Too often EIAs do not do what they are supposed to do, despite what is claimed by governments and companies
The latest edition of Therya, published by the Mexican Association of Mammalogy, features an article on Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) arguing why so many often fail and providing various suggestions for how to improve them. Written by Australian-American tropical ecologist William Laurance, it defines EIAs as the “nearly universal instrument intended to limit or offset the environmental tolls of development projects.” The kind of projects Laurance has in mind include “new roads, dams, mines, housing estates, and extractive-industry developments” which, he states, are “one of the biggest drivers of environmental change” “sweeping our planet”, destroying nature and driving species extinct.
“Governments and corporations enabling these projects urge us not to be concerned, as each project is subjected to a rigorous environmental impact assessment (EIA) to ensure there is no lasting harm to nature,” Laurance writes. “Yet the alarming fact is, many EIAs are of limited value and some are virtually useless. As a frontline of environmental protection in most countries, the EIA is usually a legal requirement placed on a developer to measure the impact on nature of their proposed development. If that impact includes anything that the government has pledged to protect, such as a threatened species or rare ecosystem, then the development is halted or redesigned to avoid the impact. That is the idea, anyway. Unfortunately, many EIAs are failing to stop dangerous or otherwise ill-advised projects. Globally, one sees a growing catalog of cases where EIAs are giving green lights to developments that should never proceed — projects that are destroying irreplaceable habitat or extirpating the last living representatives of critically endangered species.”
Despite his suggestions for how to improve things, Laurance’s conclusion is cautious, to say the least. “Do not trust EIAs,” he writes. “Some are relatively strong and others are passable. But far too many are based on “boilerplate” documents (standardized text that is re-used with only minor changes) or superficial reports that fall apart on close inspection. Expect many EIAs to be full of holes, and you will not be alarmed or disappointed.”
Well, Amen to that! Over the last 15 years or so, after spending not inconsiderable time poring over dozens of EIAs for so-called “development projects” mainly in Peru and elsewhere in Latin America, that Therya article really resonated with me. Here, somewhat anecdotally, is my own list of reasons why EIAs often fail - some the same as or similar to Laurance’s, some not so:
EIAs are done too late, i.e. after a company has signed the contract for a project and when it is clearly intent on proceeding, irrespective of what the EIA might say. This makes it more like the proverbial “rubber stamp” or simply another-hoop-to-be-jumped-through, rather than a sincere attempt to assess the true potential environmental impacts which might be serious enough for the company to amend its plans, after the state has considered the EIA, or for the project to be cancelled altogether.
EIAs are done by the wrong people, i.e. by a company, often described as a “consultancy”, paid by the company intending to develop the project. Obviously this is a conflict of interest. How likely is it that the consultancy will provide an accurate assessment of the potential environmental impacts if doing so causes otherwise avoidable and unnecessary problems for its client, including countless back-and-forwards-correspondence with the state during the approval process, amendments to the planned operations, delays, more investment and possibly reputational damage? Next time the client may - or will - look elsewhere.
EIAs are sometimes or perhaps even often hopelessly superficial and replete with inaccuracies and/or outright falsehoods, contradictions and omissions. It would be impossible to convey any real sense of that here, but one example that recently came to my attention is of a Chinese oil company, Andes Petroleum, whose EIA for one part of the Ecuadorian Amazon apparently found just five tree species of “economic” or “medicinal” value, despite the fact that a year earlier indigenous Secoya and ethnobotanists had identified names and uses for more than 1,000 trees, plants, flowers, roots, resins, barks and vines in the very same area.
EIAs are sometimes copy-and-pasted, i.e. text from one assessment of one project is simply recycled verbatim into another assessment of another project. A particularly memorable example is an EIA written for an oil and gas company operating in the south-east Peruvian Amazon which mentioned pink dolphins, despite the fact that it is widely known there are no such dolphins in that watershed. The text had been lifted from another EIA written for the northern Peruvian Amazon, where there are pink dolphins.
EIAs are often not shared properly during the approval process - call this a lack of transparency. This is evident in any number of ways: the back-and-forwards-correspondence about the EIA between the state and company intending to develop the project is not made accessible or fully accessible online, or local communities who would or could be affected by the project and have no internet access are unable to obtain hard copies or understand the EIA even if they can. Sometimes public meetings about the EIA are held too far away or announced too late for local communities to attend, and sometimes people are threatened into forgoing attending such meetings and/or prohibited from entering if they do show up, as I’ve heard first-hand in Peru.
EIAs are often not written in the right language - another illustration of the lack of transparency. Yes, in countries like Peru, Ecuador and Colombia they are written in Spanish, but what about the indigenous peoples in those countries speaking their own languages whose grasp of Spanish is only average, poor or non-existent?
EIAs are sometimes approved by the wrong people, i.e. by an inappropriate state entity. For many years in Peru assessments for oil, gas and mining projects were ultimately green-lighted by the Ministry of Energy and Mines (MEM) - another obvious conflict of interest - and it was only in late 2015 that that power passed to a Ministry of Environment agency, SENACE. SENACE started approving the EIAs for roads the following year, and housing and construction projects last August.
EIAs are often approved by under-resourced people at state entities - call this weak governance. For years, again in Peru, I heard how MEM employees simply did not have enough time or expertise to properly consider the assessments, often or perhaps even usually running into the 1,000s of pages.
The process to approve EIAs is sometimes corrupted - another illustration of weak governance. A memorable example is the expansion of the Camisea gas project in the Peruvian Amazon, when a Ministry of Culture (MINCU) report identified such severe potential impacts on some of the indigenous peoples living in the region - “extinction”, “extinction” and “devastation” - that the expansion wouldn’t have been able to proceed as planned. The result? The report was “disappeared”, various MINCU personnel resigned or were fired, and external contractors were brought in to write another, not-at-all incendiary report which smoothed things over for the project to go ahead.
EIAs are not cumulative, i.e. they supposedly identify the environmental impacts of one particular project rather than the cumulative impacts of any past operation combined with the new project and/or potentially other new projects in the future. This is especially significant because many projects end up requiring numerous EIAs, yet the cumulative, total impacts - perhaps lasting decades or even longer - are never addressed.
EIAs are rarely not approved, thereby further cementing their “rubber stamp” feel. As Laurance put it in Therya: “We need to say “no” to projects far more often. Many proposed projects are simply a bad idea, with serious environmental, economic, social, and reputational risks that exceed their potential benefits” and “should be cancelled altogether rather than being allowed to proceed despite having serious flaws.”
EIAs can be undermined by how changes to projects are made after they have been approved. In Peru in 2013 a new law permitted companies in certain circumstances to modify their operations by simply requiring them to submit a “Supporting Technical Report” rather than modifying the EIA itself, which would take much longer. This is particularly useful for projects which switch ownership, and it is at the heart of the social conflict which has engulfed the Las Bambas mine in the Peruvian Andes, once owned by Glencore-Xstrata and now by China’s Mining and Metals Group.
Finally, EIAs are sometimes simply ignored, i.e. licenses are granted by the state and/or operations on a project begin before any assessment has been approved, or even submitted, written or researched. Again, it would be impossible to convey here any sense of how often that happens, but one shining example I wrote about recently is the almost 100 km road cleared through one of the remotest parts of the northern Peruvian Amazon towards the border with Brazil. An EIA should have been approved before that forest was cleared, but the Ministry of Environment knew absolutely nothing about it.