Presenter: Julian Gonzalez, EcoPlan

Presented at the 2018 DAAG Conference in Vancouver.  In Session 6: Involving Communities of Interest in the Decision Process

Abstract: Impact assessment for large, linear projects means understanding the key impacts – to everyone and everything. But how do you do this when some of these impacts are hard to measure social values? And how do you do this when figuring out what a "significant” impact is depends on a local community’s view as to what matters? Or when outcomes are highly uncertain? EcoPlan International was retained by the Matsqui First Nation to help understand the potential impacts of the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion Project from their perspective. In this presentation, we will outline the assessment methods used capture the biophysical, social, economic values, as well as values specific to Matsqui, such as cultural and traditional values, both for business as usual and low probability spill events. We will show how constructed scales can be generated with impacted communities to capture dimensions of impact not normally included in traditional impact assessments. Finally, we will demonstrate how these decision analysis techniques can be used to link First Nations’ concerns to regulatory permitting practices, and, if time permits, walk through how these values can be linked to a framework of calculating financial impacts in terms of market and non-market impacts.

Keywords: scenario analysis scenanal, framing and structuring framestruc, analysis and modeling anamod, culture cultr, societal decision socdec

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