Social Impact Assessment

How Global Warming Could Save Impact Assessment:
But Only If We Make Some Changes!!

Rabel J Burdge[1]

 Keynote address before the 27^th Annual Conference of the International Association for Impact Assessment, Seoul Korea, June 4, 2007. Rabel J Burdge is Professor of Sociology and Huxley College of the Environment, Western Washington University, Bellingham (USA) and Professor Emeritus, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The International Association for Impact Assessment (IAIA) is certainly a lucky organization--the focus on Global Warming as an issue has given impact assessment an expanded window of opportunity. Whether it is, as he likes to be introduced, the former President-Elect of the United States, Al Gore and his documentary “An Inconvenient Truth;” whether it is the UN Intergovernmental Scientific Panel on Climate Change; whether it is the Kyoto treaty or it may simply be our observations about changes in the weather around us. Whatever, much of the world’s population seems convinced that drastic changes in the climate are taking place and wants to both do something about it--and understand the consequences.

So where and how does IAIA and impact assessment fit in and what is our role as assessors? How does this “window of opportunity” fit the theme of the conference and in particular the sub-theme, “Promoting Good Governance and Corporate Stewardship through Impact Assessment?”

The focus of global warming has now moved from acceptance to prevention with the goal being to slow down or even reverse the amount of carbon going into the atmosphere. In our little City, on Bellingham Bay, in the Puget Sound Area of the State of Washington, there are homemade signs showing the predicted water level in 2050. We now have a household carbon counter which allows a family to determine how much carbon they are emitting to include the biggest culprit--the two, three or even the four car family. The governors of the western U.S. states have signed a pact to use more energy from renewable sources and are requiring that future automobiles sold in their states get very high mileage per gallon. And all these changes are coming with no support from the U.S. Federal government except to say that we should use more ethanol.

With the focus on prevention, I have heard little except generalities about how our world will look when the effects of global warming actually come about. We suspect that the sea will rise and many coastal areas will be underwater. We are told that the temperature of the oceans will rise and storms will be more frequent and more violent. In that much of the world’s population lives along coasts and connecting rivers, flooding and displacement will be common. Desertification will increase and droughts will become more frequent and longer in duration. But what we do not hear about is what will happen to the people and their social organizations and institutions—how will they change? What will human populations need to know about adjustments to this new world of global warming?

Least we forget, an environmental impact is the direct and indirect consequences of human action on the natural environment and what we humans are doing to the atmosphere certainly qualifies. An assessment is a judgment about something based on an understanding of the situation. An environmental impact statement is the identification of the likely environmental effects of planned, proposed or unplanned change. Social Impact Assessment like all assessments is a systematic analysis in advance of impacts on the day-to-day quality of life of persons and communities whose environment is affected by a planned, proposed or unplanned action.[2] Whether it is environmental, social, technological, risk or health assessment, the key phrase in all these definitions is in advance. Our goal is to explain and predict (backed up with data) what will happen to human populations during and after an event occurs. Therefore our thirty-five years of experience in assessing future impacts should now be focused on the consequences of climate change.

The term social impact assessment was coined in the context of environmental impact analysis stemming from the U.S. National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969, to recognize and quantify the impacts on human populations resulting from significant alteration of the bio-physical environment. Social impact assessment differs from other types of social science analysis in that it is anticipatory. The inclusion of social impact assessment as a component of the decision making process means that project evaluation must consider the effects and consequences for human populations. Therefore, if we are to do a truly integrated impact assessment of the effects of climate change--the social impacts on the human populations must be a central focus.

Let’s step back to the beginning of impact assessment. Our applied and policy field began when the U.S. Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in December of 1969. This piece of legislation was signed by the then President Richard Nixon very early on January 1, 1970. Nixon did not like the NEPA legislation, but he thought if he signed it early on New Years Day, the press corps would be suffering a hang over from New Year’s Eve celebrations and there would be no media coverage. Under the new law, proponents of development projects and policy change that involved U.S. federal land, tax dollars or jurisdictions were required to file an environmental impact statement (EIS) detailing the impacts of the proposal, as well as project alternatives, on the physical, cultural and human environments (emphasis from the original act).[3]

Before social and environmental impact assessment legislation in North America, project and policy evaluation relied solely on cost-benefit analysis. If, for example, the benefits of building a flood control reservoir could be shown to outweigh the construction costs, project approval was generally given. However, increased project and policy failures led the U.S. Congress and other policy makers to seek something other than narrow economic criteria for project and policy evaluation. Of key importance was how new projects and sometimes the abandonment of older ones were impacting both the bio-physical environment and human communities. Thus environmental, social, technological and health assessments—the need to understand and to prepare for change in advance—was born!

In February, 1970, the Bureau of Land Management in the U.S. Department of the Interior submitted an EIS to accompany the application for the Trans-Alaska pipeline permit to build an oil pipeline from Prudhoe Bay on the North Slope of Alaska to Valdez a warm water port on Prince William Sound. Two days later the Wilderness Society, the Friends of the Earth and the Environmental Defense Fund filed suit contending that the EIS was inadequate because it did not consider, for example, the consequences to permafrost of pumping hot oil through a pipe laying on the ground. In addition, no provision was made for disruption to the annual migration of several caribou herds. Although not specifically mentioned in the litigation, some observers wondered where all those construction workers and their families would be housed who would come north to work on the pipeline[4]. It is hard to imagine that the first EIS was six pages long. Three years later the permit to build the pipeline was issued. In the meantime, the EIS had grown from six pages to six feet. More importantly, most of the potential environmental problems had been addressed to the satisfaction of the courts, the plaintiffs and the Alyeska Pipeline Company. Anticipatory planning had worked and all sides agreed that the NEPA process had allowed project proponents to deal with issues that might otherwise have been overlooked.

Who First Used the Term Social Impact Assessment? After the permit to build the Trans-Alaska pipeline was issued, one of the Inuit Chiefs made this comment “...now that we have dealt with the problem of the permafrost and the caribou and what to do with hot oil, what about changes in the customs and ways of my people?[5]” Unfortunately, as the Inuit chief pointed out, the social impacts on both the indigenous and other Alaskan peoples were never addressed. Would the traditional cultures and way of life be changed by so massive of a construction project? What about the influx of construction workers from Oklahoma and Texas who spoke different dialectics (of English) and brought with them a distinctive lifestyle? Obviously, with a total population of 351,000 (in 1973) the State of Alaska could provide only a fraction of the estimated 42,000 persons that would work on the pipeline during the periods of peak construction. Because of these and other related events the impacts of development on the human populations began to be discussed alongside bio-physical and economic alterations.[6]

The Spread of SIA outside North America--By the 1980s many developed countries as well as international donor organizations had adopted or were considering SIA as part of their EIA requirements in national legislation and agency policy.[7] Developers in both the private and public sector recognized the benefits of SIA and EIA. Even in the more development oriented ministries and agencies, there was grudging recognition that social and environmental assessment actually improved project implementation and success rates. This attitude change was due in large part to project failures resulting from inadequate appraisal based on narrow economic and technical criteria.

In 1985, the European Economic Community began to recommend environmental impact statements for their members and by 1989 the recommendation became a requirement. The event is significant, not only because of the diversity of language and culture involved, but the recognition that bio-physical and social impacts due to environment alteration do not stop at national boundaries.

An equally important event happened in 1986 when the World Bank made a public commitment to include environmental assessment in their appraisal process. The event was important because the requirement represented a split with the Reagan Administration policy of minimizing environmental considerations. By the late 70s and early 80s it was obvious that many World Bank projects were failing due to environmental problems and a lack of fit with the social and cultural milieu of the targeted communities. Taking their cue from the World Bank, regional banks and other bi-lateral aid agencies began to incorporate environmental and social impact assessment into their project appraisal procedures.

Integrating EIA-SIA into the Planning Process--why is it that social and environmental assessment were late in finding a home in the planning/decision process? Our journal, then called the Impact Assessment Bulletin and Environmental Impact Assessment Review each devoted two issues to analyzing the problem and provided many suggestions.[8]

The first problem, which is only now being overcome, is that early EIS and SIA statements were seldom prepared by persons trained in the planning process or with a social science background. Because EIAs were completed by the proponent and initially dealt with big construction projects, engineering and architectural consulting firms were the first “environmental consultants.”

However, the engineers were not the only unprepared profession; urban and regional planners systematically ignored environmental and social issues in the planning process. Trained in land use allocation, the planning profession had little experience in incorporating environmental and social concerns, as well as sustainability issues into the process. Furthermore, planning tended to be top-down and the affected population was seldom considered or asked for their input.

Outside of North America, the British Town Planning System was the model for land use allocation and preservation. As part of the process, public comment was allowed before the final decision. However, the British approach did not specifically include an environmental component. The integration of EIA-SIA into the planning process was therefore slowed because many countries that used the British planning model assumed that environmental concerns would be accounted for through public comment and not as part of the planning process. However, by 2003, strategic environmental assessment with a focus on sustainability became part of English structure plans with some social and cultural components included in those assessments.[9]

Even with some success in integrating EIA-SIA into the planning process we have never addressed the question of who is responsible for implementing and following up with a long-term monitoring program.[10]

ISSUES FOR IMPACT ASSESSMENT IN A RAPIDLY CHANGING BIO-PHYSICAL WORLD

What are some of the issues that we as individual and collective assessors as well as our organization (IAIA) must address to assist in helping people understand the consequences to human communities of the effects of climate change?

1.                   As an organization and as a profession we first need to agree on terminology and definition. For example, most everyone present at the Conference in Seoul agreed that the letters SEA stand for Strategic Environmental Assessment. Not so, however, in the Yukon and Northwest Territories of Canada, SEA means Socio-Economic Assessment. While social impact assessment is the most used terminology—other labels remain. Some anthropologists and a few countries use the term “human impact assessment.” The World Bank (along with regional counterparts) uses the term “Social Analysis.” New Zealand and some US land management agencies use the term “Social Assessment.” The US Department of Transportation uses “Community Impact Assessment” and the term “civic impact assessment” has crept into the literature. “Socio-economic impacts” remains the favored term in Europe where in many places the assessment of social impacts is limited to job and infrastructure changes.[11]

2.                   Is the EIA-SIA process really working? Are we happy with the process and the way it is done? Is it achieving the goal of becoming a critical part of the planning-decision process and more importantly has the bio-physical and human environment improved as a result of doing these assessments? Is there an attitude among agencies and proponents that SIA (and to some extent EIA) is an administrative hurdle rather than a beneficial planning tool? Is there, as Professor Richard Fuggle points out, an increasing disillusionment with SIA-EIA? Do different stakeholders have different ideas as to what is expected from the process? For example, proponents want the opposition to go away while project opponents expect impact assessment to prevent change from happening in their back yard.

3.                   Embedded within the EIA-SIA process are both stages and steps—is there general agreement on the steps in the process? Stages tend to be project specific, that is, announcement and planning, construction or implementation, next operation and finally in some cases, closure, abandonment or a policy change. The steps in the process are modeled after the 1986 guidelines provided by the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). Basically, you start with a description of the proposed action, proceed to obtaining baseline information, do scoping, measure significant impacts and do mitigation and in rare cases the process ends with monitoring and evaluation. Are these steps appropriate and do they work for all types of assessments?

4.                   Do we have too much description and not enough assessment? Assessment implies specific information on what will likely occur and not vague generalities! In the case of climate change we will be asked to explain and back it up with data (remember in God we trust, all others bring data) on what will actually happen if predicted changes take place. We know there will be massive relocation of human populations. But what will be the social and demographic composition of those forced to move? Will it be the poor and ethnic and minority groups? Will they be aged and perhaps unemployed? What about the reconstruction of family and community social relations? What new social, economic and political institutions will be required? As the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River in China began to fill, three million people were moved in a very short time into three planned communities. Revisiting the China experience would help in predicting the consequences of adjustment to a new infrastructure, different occupations and the degree to which and how quickly family and social relations were reestablished. Michael Cernea, a World Bank sociologist, spent three decades chronicling the social impacts due to forced relocation during reservoir construction. Many of his findings would transfer to forced relocation due to climate change.[12]

5.                   We must develop mechanisms to better access the “literature” on completed SIAs and EIAs. Most assessments are done as either agency or proponent reports and often in combination or as a “social and environmental follow-up.” As a result they are generally missed in a search of the serialized literature. Practitioners seldom have the time (and in some cases are not permitted) to publish in the refereed literature—for their job depends on finding and completing the next project. Completed assessments provide the knowledge base for making future predictions. Research findings on identified impacts from “social follow-ups” and ex-post facto studies of existing projects and policies are badly needed because before and after studies are limited[13]. In one example of literature use, proponents for building an offshore oil platform in Newfoundland, Canada, looked at previous research on “boom towns” and were able to mitigate and manage social impacts based on their own and other assessments[14]. Consolidation of SIA findings into a knowledge base is a research activity. An institutional mechanism is needed to fund and coordinate this activity.

6.                   We must continue to emphasize the importance of SIA in mitigation and monitoring. The issue is ”is compensation a trade-off for long term mitigation and monitoring activity?” While mitigation is part of project based conceptualization, the potential for the development and implementation of effective and ongoing mitigation strategies is limited by the failure to include SIA as part of the process. Impact statements tend to be used to determine whether a proposed action should be approved. Generally, mitigation and compensation is a part of a negotiated approval which focuses on project alteration and compensation. Other projects may be approved if compensation is paid, even though compensation itself may create considerable social impacts that appropriate mitigation and planning may have avoided[15].

7.                   Climate change assessments will need to address concerns over risk in a manner that acknowledges the legitimacy of public attitudes towards risk—that perceptions are real and that they determine how people feel and act. The International Society for Technological Assessment (ISTA), the forerunner of IAIA, spent much of their conferences discussing how to manage risk for new technology. The society folded in 1973, but the SIA practitioners within the organization emphasized that people’s attitudes towards risk can be an important variable in determining the nature and significance of real, observable and measurable effects.[16] The SARS outbreak of 2003 is an example where perceptions of risk dramatically altered behavior. Whether perceived or actual, the perception of risk is real in all its consequences. What does the perception of risk mean for climate change? How will variation in perception of risk alter relocation adjustment? The aftermath of the Katrina and Rita hurricanes in New Orleans could provide insight on the degree to which risk determines willingness to return.

8.                   Are we doing Integrated Impact Assessment? This year’s conference included a session on health and social impact assessment. The activity was to outline a truly integrated environmental, social and health impact assessment for a liquid natural gas processing facility on a coastal corner of an African country. The group focused on an integrated environmental, social and health impact assessment even though the national regulatory requirements only covered EIA. We would all agree that climate change is an issue that requires integrated impact assessment and that we must move toward encouraging jurisdictions to require truly integrated impact assessment as part of the planning process.

9.                   We must again consider certification and if we do, it follows that we need some agreement as to the content of our training courses. The Executive Director of IAIA, Rita Hamm, has long advocated a certification program. The International Association for Public Participation (IAP2), which started as an off-shoot of IAIA, now has a very successful certification program. The courses are conducted in several languages and they even have an academy to train the trainers. The successful graduates of an IAIA training courses would have our professional backing and the results of an EIA-SIA by a certified assessor would carry more weight in the decision process. However, to have certification, we must agree not only on course content and terminology, but how to communicate to participants’ expectations for job behavior. At the moment we have many EIS type training courses, but most are geared to sector and local environmental legislation.

10.               Colleagues from a technical and bio-physical background have yet to fully embrace SIA as a part of the assessment process—it is still seen as so much “fluff.” These persons want to know about social impacts in analytical terms, but unfortunately not always from a methodology that assumes and welcomes the involvement of the affected population[17]. A big benefit of the integration of EIA, SIA and HIA would be social learning by the proponent, agency planners and the community, with the outcome often being the successful implementation of the proposed action.[18] As Edelstein points out in a review of U.S. administrative law, SIA is a “means for balancing the technocratic bias with critical learning and giving consideration to potential victims of progress.[19]” However, in defense of engineers and planners as proponents, many now recognize the importance of social impacts, because including them may be the only way to get project approval.

11.               The recognition of and use of “local knowledge” must be a key component of the assessment process. An SIA for the Coronation Hill mining project in the Northern Territory of Australia showed how Aboriginal people participated in the process and helped the decision-maker to understand how their knowledge of the impact area raised questions about project success. The articulation and integration of indigenous values, beliefs and worldviews must be a part of the decision process. The use of local knowledge also helps to legitimize the EIA-SIA process among affected populations.[20]

12.               Another benefit of including SIA as part of an integrated assessment is a sociological interpretation of economic and financial indicators. Except for localized input-output models based on goods and services produced, and raw numbers of jobs gained or lost, contributions by economists to the ex-ante assessment process have been limited. Part of the problem is that data for economic models are collected in the aggregate and therefore multipliers are subject to considerable variation in a localized setting. Cost-benefit analysis is the most widely adopted economic assessment tool, but the technique has difficulty accommodating environmental, health and social impacts[21]. Remember, most environmental and social assessments are undertaken at the community or project level where the impacts are felt, not at the regional and national level where benefits are sold. When a politician quotes benefits in terms of the number of jobs; I always ask--what kind of jobs, do they provide a family level wage, will minorities benefit and could the jobs be taken by our current unemployed?

13.               All future assessments must deal with issues of environmental justice^[22] In doing social and environmental assessments we must be concerned about the distribution of benefits and consequences across social and income classes and ethnic and minority groups[23]. A focus on climate change assessment must consider future communities comprising generations not yet born. These future communities will suffer social and environmental impacts as the result of present human activities. These questions are political, but remember one of the benefits of assessments of all types is to cut down the amount of politics injected into the planning-decision process. During the Katrina disaster, the television cameras showed the world that the poor and black populations of New Orleans bore the brunt of the hurricane--while the white population remained high and dry.

14.               Splintering. Is IAIA getting away from its core focus on impact assessment by too many sub-fields and too many acronyms? The acronyms created to describe activities within our organization include, among others, EIA, SIA, HIA, TIA, RA, SEA, TK, IA, PI. At the Seoul conference I heard two more, ESHIA (environmental, health and social impact assessment, and SA (an acronym some thought to be social assessment and to others it is sustainable assessment). Are we becoming so splintered that we are not sure what each sub-group is doing and how it actually fits into the overall goal of impact assessment?

15.               Changing Corporate Attitudes and the Use of Impact Assessment. This conference is focused on the changing role of the corporate sector in impact assessment. The private sector and the local community can be brought together through the local/global connection—or what I call “the globalization of the local and the localization of the global.” The phrase refers to, on the one hand, one of the most intense and enduring relationships that international corporations have is in their communities of investment and operation. National and state regulation is important and provides the context for corporate--community relations, but because of the rise of conservative governments, continual under funding of environmental regulatory agencies, cooptation and like activities, local communities are a more challenging set of relationships for international corporations than regulatory agencies. On the other hand, outside of family and friends, the most important relationship that local people have is with its major employer often a transnational corporation. How this relationship plays out from either end has a lot of relevance for how the social and environmental impacts of production are measured, mitigated and evaluated over time. The increasing conservatism of western democracies has pushed impact assessment and specifically social impact assessment to the margins of political decision-making—and the present U.S. government is the best example. Whereas, in the private sector the realities of local community resistance, a desire to avoid regulation and of course to save time and money, the philosophies of corporate responsibility that has emerged in the past decade has been-- “to go beyond compliance to regulation--as a way of avoiding regulation” and to increase attention to local social and environmental impacts, even to the point of “project specific power sharing” between companies and local communities[24]. As a result, there is no question that concepts of corporate responsibility for the environment and local communities have diffused through management decision making. No company can remain either indifferent or ignorant of their impacts at the local level. And because we operate in real time and space--to ignore the communities would invite international repudiation, bad press, law suites and even questions from banks lending money. I realize that the United States may not be representative, but we are finding that corporations and major utilities are leading the charge to do something about global warming. The utility companies, which burn mostly coal, are jumping on the bandwagon, mostly, perhaps out of fear, that as soon as the US Federal administration changes new emission standards will be required and rigidly enforced.

My basic argument is that we need to return to our roots, revisit and reaffirm everything from the assessment process, to the actual conduct of EIAs and SIAs and whether the results of our assessments are actually being used in the decision process and whether mitigation and monitoring are helpful in adaptive management. And are we developing a sufficient knowledge base to make accurate statements about the future? If we do a good job of assessing the human and environmental impacts of climate change perhaps we will scare people enough that they will get serious about prevention. SIA is presently in the backwater of IAIA and assessment in general—perhaps a focus on climate change will move it and us to “Center Stage.”

This site was updated on 11/10/2008
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