Forty years on, we look to understand what has changed, and what has not, as we work to advance the current practice of impact assessment.
In 1987, 40 years ago David was the Co-Chair of the second IAIA conference held outside of North America in Barbados. The conference considered some of the profession’s biggest emerging challenges At the time, he was administering Canada’s environmental assessment and review process across western and northern Canada. Around this time he delivered a series of lectures in New Zealand on lessons learnt from some of Canada’s more substantive environmental and social impact assessments. More than forty years later, returning to New Zealand provides an opportunity to ask: what has actually changed?
Many of the issues being discussed then remain strikingly familiar today: integrating impact assessment into planning and decision-making, meaningfully involving communities, addressing cumulative effects and uncertainty, and ensuring commitments made through assessment are implemented and followed up.
Drawing on those early discussions and more than four decades working in IA and sustainable development, including serving as President of IAIA in 1989-90, David will reflect on what has genuinely improved, what we have learned, and which expectations of the emerging profession have not been realised. If some of the same challenges remain despite enormous advances in our methods, institutions and experience, why have they proved so difficult to resolve? Which lessons from earlier practice remain relevant, which have we forgotten, and what should the next generation do differently?
David Marshall is the former Executive Chair of the Fraser Basin Council, a sustainability non-profit. He was IAIA president '99-'90 and oversaw major IAs for the Canadian Federal Government 1980-90..