Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Resource development is a driver of local and international economies and has resulted in extraordinary advances for modern society. As the global thirst for lumber, minerals and energy grows, an increasing amount of stress is placed on the land and its ability to sustain life. With multiple industries now operating adjacent to one another, the cumulative impacts of diverse land-use has become a significant area of scientific inquiry, and it is increasingly recognized that project-based environmental assessment (EA) is limited in its ability to capture the impacts of multiple land-uses. Moreover, significant data is produced in EA processes, but community stakeholders have voiced concerns that there is little digestable `information' that adequately accounts for community perspectives of cumulative impacts and regional changes to environments and communities. This research reports on the state of the art of cumulative impact assessment in relation to policy developments in British Columbia, Canada, with a specific focus on Aboriginal efforts to more holistically appraise the cumulative impacts of resource development. The paper goes on to discuss a new research tool developed by the Cumulative Impacts Research Consortium in collaboration with rural, remote and Aboriginal communities with long and storied histories of resource development. The tool is explicitly designed to address shortcomings in the environmental assessment process; to improve third-party monitoring initiatives at the regional level by integrating environmental, community and health data into a historical understanding of cumulative impacts, while bolstering capacity for independent analysis of the impacts of resource development without creating an additional data collection burden for communities. Implications for utilizing data across scales and enhancing population and Aboriginal health and its determinants as related to resource development are discussed.