Do environmental assessments protect the environment? – Features – ABC Environment (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Do environmental assessments protect the environment? – Features – ABC Environment (Australian Broadcasting Corporation):
 "Government and industry don't want to admit there is a real conflict of interest in government issuing exploration licences and earning [the government] hundreds of millions of dollars, and then it turns around and says that it can independently assess the mine project," he says.

Andrew Macintosh - Associate Director of the Australian National University's Centre for Climate Law and Policy - says EIAs are as much about public consultation as they are about improving environmental outcomes. On that question, he feels the EIA process also leaves a lot to be desired.

"The problem is that public participation sounds nice in theory and a lot of people support it in theory, but in practice it isn't working," Macintosh says.

To begin with, the EIA reports, which are required to be made available for public comment before a decision is made on a project, are often inaccessible.

"The public gets 30 days to make comment on an EIA that can be up to 5,000 pages long, which is completely unrealistic," he says. "A lot of them are standardised documents, and they just basically fill in the gaps, so the reader is often faced with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of pages of gumpf."

‘When we looked at the sum total of that work, we had a pile of EIA reports, probably up to 1.5 metres high, and of all of that paper, less than 80 pages was addressing the social domain, and most of that was addressing issues of employment and economic development.’

According to Prof. Howitt, the assessments neglected to address a huge range of issues, such as the impact of rapid changes in housing prices and accessibility, the price of local goods and services, the impacts on social exclusion of local Aboriginal Australians, and the impacts on Aboriginal Australian culture in the area.

‘Even [taking] the narrow view that the environment is about non-human elements, that piecemeal approach is potentially catastrophic in periods of dramatic change.’

Prof. Howitt also says the environmental impact assessment process has a poor track record of follow-up after a project has gone ahead.

‘Once you’ve got a project approval, there’s a very poor history of going back and checking whether the impacts that were predicted have occurred or haven't occurred, and whether the impact management processes proposed have been adequate or need to be reviewed.

‘We might at best get a five-year review, but five years of social catastrophe is a generation in most Aboriginal communities – it’s a disaster.’

Part of the problem is that the experts contracted to undertake EIAs tend to be scientific experts on engineering, hydrology or ecology, for example, but not the social domain.

A whole industry has sprung up around EIAs, with consultants who specialise in these assessments. Assoc. Prof. Macintosh says there are some extremely competent experts in the industry, but they are hamstrung by a shortage of time and resources.

‘When people have actually looked at how accurate these assessments are, they have found a significant gap between the predicted impacts and actual impacts. The reports have predicted that x was going to happen, when in fact, the impact was y,’ he says.

‘When you think about it, the inaccuracy in predictions is not that startling. The contractors have to make assessments about difficult- to-predict variables with little information and compressed timeframes.