Linking environmental assessment to environmental regulation through adaptive management

The Wek’eezhii Land and Water Board (WLWB), the regulator for 2 large diamond mines in Canada’s Northwest Territories, has noted that there does not appear to be any standard method for applying the principles of adaptive management, as described in the academic literature, to developments such as operating mines. The WLWB has attempted to address this issue through the development of a draft document, entitled ‘‘Guidelines for Adaptive Management—a Response Framework for Aquatic Effects Monitoring’’ which, if approved, will apply to all mines under WLWB jurisdiction. These guidelines define a transparent and consistent method for responding adaptively to projectrelated environmental changes measured through environmental monitoring programs. The WLWB is unaware of similar requirements and/or guidance in other jurisdictions and therefore offers a summary of the guidelines to generate further discussion and comment. The WLWB seeks to prescribe, in regulatory permits, the principles of adaptive management by requiring proponents to develop a Response Framework specific to their project and its particular environmental setting. The Response Framework assumes that the best management actions need not be defined a priori but will be determined in response to specific changes documented by environmental monitoring programs. It provides the means to respond to all reasonable monitoring outcomes, without the need to develop specific management responses to all possible outcomes before they occur. The Response Framework is therefore a systematic approach to responding to the results of an environmental monitoring program. The Framework requires proponents to take appropriate actions upon reaching predefined levels of environmental change (or effect). These action levels are, in turn, set such that significant adverse impacts never occur. It is therefore critical that the Response Framework contains a quantitative or qualitative definition of what ‘‘significant adverse impacts’’ would be for a project in a given environment. The WLWB uses the term ‘‘significance threshold’’ to describe the threshold where an environmental change would be considered significantly adverse. Knowledge of this threshold from the environmental assessment (EA) allows the regulator to react appropriately to environmental change measured after the project has moved into the regulatory phase. To ensure that the significance threshold is never reached, the Response Framework involves 3 action levels (low, moderate, and high) corresponding to increasing levels of environmental change (Table 1). Each action level is associated with a corresponding management response. Note that the Low Action Level is pre-emptive in nature and is meant to be set by the proponent in advance of actually measuring an environmental change. The others are set within the Response Framework, in response to systematic review of monitoring results. The EA process contributes to the development of a Response Framework by documenting the predictions of environmental change that are considered significant. With a clear definition from the EA of changes to be avoided, the Response Framework can set action levels and mitigation responses designed to ensure that such changes do not occur. However, it has been noted that the EA process does not always provide a clear description of what a significant adverse effect (i.e., the significance threshold) would be for the project. It is possible that the EA determination proceeds to a reasonable and defensible conclusion of no significant adverse effect without a clear understanding of what changes would be significantly adverse. In this case all we can know is that the EA predictions can potentially fall anywhere between baseline conditions and the significance threshold. This should not normally pose a problem—the project proceeds, changes remain within predictions, and stakeholders remain confident in the outcome of the EA process. The lack of a predefined threshold for a significant adverse effect becomes a problem, however, if environmental changes exceed predictions, or if changes occur that were not predicted. Does this mean that the project now has a significant adverse effect, or does it simply reflect the uncertainty inherent in predictions? Regulators must decide what is the appropriate management response to observed project-related environmental changes. For example, if an EA prediction is exceeded during operation of a mine, should the regulator suspend the permit, require the implementation of costly mitigation measures or simply Learned Discourses— Integr Environ Assess Manag 7, 2011 2010 SETAC 301