Inconsistent,downplayed, and pathologized: How mining's gendered impacts are considered in BC environmental assessment

To what extent do mining environmental assessments in British Columbia (BC) consider gendered impacts? How are they considered? And how are these considerations shaped during the environmental assessment process? To answer these questions we undertook a systematic review of all completed BC mining environmental assessments between 1995 and 2019 (n = 37). Through a careful reading of documentation archived in the BC Environmental Assessment Office registry, we found that 60% of projects did not consider the gendered impacts of mining development; the remaining 40% of projects inconsistently assessed gendered impacts. While noting an increase in gender considerations in environmental assessments since 1995, also quantified in our results is what has not changed. Even where gender is considered, the assessments often collapse this concern into one of “women's issues,” obscuring intersectional impacts and downplaying violence along racialized and gender diverse lines, including those experienced by Indigenous women, children, two-spirit, trans, queer and non-binary people. Environmental assessment is a regulatory tool designed to adjudicate the impacts of mining projects, yet our results lead us to conclude that it is also a tool of environmental injustice, compounding and further sedimenting heteropatriarchal and racialized patterns produced through generations of settler colonial resource extraction in BC.     

Exploring the context and elements of local environmental stewardship: An embedded case study of the Niagara Region,Canada

Environmental stewardship—a concept that describes the relationships between humans and the environment—is gaining increased attention as an approach that can address planetary sustainability issues. In-depth empirical investigations of local environmental stewardship are needed to understand how social-ecological context influences stewardship, as well as the arrangement of conceptual elements in applied settings. This study addresses these needs by conducting an in-depth exploration of environmental stewardship in the Niagara Region of Canada. A single embedded case study design is employed, with environmental stewardship initiatives constituting the individual units of analysis with the case. Analysis of the spatial arrangement of a total of 89 initiatives indicated that initiatives tended to cluster closer to the Niagara River and in more populous municipalities. The significance of collaboration, tensions between the environment and economic development, and concerns about political impacts emerged as themes across contextual factors. The configuration of stewardship elements reveals interesting discrepancies between initiatives and previous stewardship research focused on larger scales, individuals, and organizations. Further analysis is encouraged to illuminate environmental stewardship in other settings as well as advance relational understanding of conceptual elements.     

L'identification des zones calmes et un diagnostic d’équité environnementale à Montréal

Quiet urban areas are places with low noise levels that can help people to support physical and mental wellness. This paper has two objectives: to identify quiet urban areas in Montreal and to check for the presence of environmental inequities in access to such areas for vulnerable groups (children, older people, low‐income individuals, and visible minorities). Using a GIS‐based methodology, 2,282 quiet urban areas were identified in Montreal. The results of a mixed effects logistic regression model analysis showed that there are no major inequities in access to quiet urban areas for the population groups studied. The analysis did, however, revealed substantial spatial disparities in terms of the distribution of quiet urban areas across the boroughs and municipalities examined.     

Producing consent: How environmental assessment enabled oil and gas extraction in the Qikiqtani region of Nunavut

There is now an extensive body of academic literature examining how the environmental movement contributed to the colonization of Indigenous peoples and development of capitalism in northern Canada. This paper contributes to these discussions by considering how environmental assessment (EA) helped enable hydrocarbon extraction in the Qikiqtani (Baffin Island) region of Nunavut in the 1970s and 1980s. When exploration activities began to threaten the Inuit harvesting economy, communities protested with letters and petitions. The federal government responded to Inuit resistance by referring proposed exploratory drilling and extraction to its new EA process. While Inuit won significant victories during some assessments of proposed exploratory drilling and extraction, federal EA ultimately helped create the conditions for Inuit to consent to oil extraction. EA helped impose material compromises between Inuit and hydrocarbon industries, including preferential hiring of Inuit, a reduction in the scope of proposed extraction, and the rejection of especially controversial proposals for offshore drilling. These concessions, combined with a collapse in the market for sealskins due to international boycotts, persuaded several Qikiqtani communities to support oil extraction in the 1980s. The ensuing extraction and export of oil from the High Arctic accelerated processes of colonial dispossession and reinforced colonial political dynamics.     

Bruit aérien et équité environnementale dans les quatre plus grandes métropoles canadiennes

Previous environmental equity studies have examined the spatial distribution of aircraft noise across cities. Their findings show that, in several cities, visible minorities and low-income populations are most affected by aircraft noise. In contrast, one study concludes that well-off populations are the most affected. These contradictory findings support the use of a comparative approach for several cities. The aim of this study is twofold. First, we want to identify if there are groups in the population that are in a situation of inequity to aircraft noise exposure in Toronto, Montréal, Vancouver, and Calgary. Then, we want to check if the exposure to the aircraft noise of the different groups varies significantly from one metropolis to another. We use the recommended noise exposure contour maps in Canada: the Noise Exposure Forecasts. Next, four variables are extracted from the 2016 Statistics Canada census at a fine-scale level (dissemination areas): that is, the percentages of low-income, visible minorities, 0- to 15-year-old, and 65-year-old and over populations. The results of a mixed effects logistic regression model show that environmental inequities in terms of exposure to aircraft noise for the four population groups are not consistent from city to city.     

Wetland assessment and impact mitigation decision support framework for linear development projects: The Louis Riel Trail,Highway 11 North project,Saskatchewan, Canada

Next to agriculture, road development is one of the most significant sources of stress to wetlands in Prairie Canada. However, there currently exists limited guidance for incorporating direct, indirect, and induced effects to wetlands in impact assessment and mitigation planning for small and often routine developments, including access roads or highway improvement initiatives. Based on the Louis Riel Trail, Highway 11 North twinning project in Saskatchewan, Canada, this article demonstrates a methodological approach and decision support framework for assessing and managing direct, indirect, and induced effects to wetlands from linear developments. No regulatory‐based environmental assessment was required for the highway project; effects were deemed to be insignificant under current wetland mitigation practices. However, our results show that 1115 ha of potentially affected wetlands are located within a 500 m impact zone on either side of the proposed highway. More than 50 percent of these wetlands are seasonal, less than 1 ha in size, and typically not included in mitigation planning. An expert‐based multi‐criteria evaluation of impact and mitigation options for wetlands in the study area indicated “no net loss” as a planning priority, and a preference for a spatially ambitious mitigation plan focused on direct, indirect, and potentially induced impacts. In practice, however, mitigation is often restrictive, focused on mitigating only direct impacts within the project's right‐of‐way, in this case less than 50 ha of wetlands, resulting in the potential for significant net loss of wetland habitat and function. If the risk to wetlands is to be given due consideration in project planning and development for roads and road improvement initiatives, then structured assessment methods and decision support frameworks should be sensitive to the time and resource constraints of small projects and screening‐type assessments. This requires also that wetland mitigation policies are developed and implementation plans formulated as part of project planning and assessment initiatives for linear developments.     

Environmental health and vulnerable populations in Canada: mapping an integrated equity‐focused research agenda

The uneven distribution of environmental hazards across space and in vulnerable populations reflects underlying societal inequities. Fragmented research has led to gaps in comprehensive understanding of and action on environmental health inequities in Canada and there is a need to gain a better picture of the research landscape in order to integrate future research. This paper provides an initial assessment of the state of the environmental health research field as specifically focused on vulnerable populations in Canada. We present a meta‐narrative literature review to identify under‐integrated areas of knowledge across disciplinary fields. Through systematic searching and categorization, we assess the abstracts of a total of 308 studies focused on the past 30 years of Canadian environmental health inequity research in order to describe temporal, geographical, contextual and epistemological patterns. The results reveal that there has been significant growth in Canadian research documenting the uneven distributions and impacts of environmental hazards across locations and populations since the 1990s, but its focus has been uneven. Notably, there is a lack of research aimed at integrating evidence‐based and policy‐relevant evaluation of environmental health inequities and how they are created and sustained. Areas for future research are recommended including more interdisciplinary, multimethod and preventive approaches to resolve the environmental burden placed on vulnerable populations and to promote environmental health equity.