Cumulative effects and impacts: The need for a more inclusive, integrative, regional approach

Abstract

The decisions we make today have implications that reach long into the future. This is especially the case for resource development projects. For example, decisions to harvest trees have immediate effects on ecosystems, economies, and communities, but the impacts of, for example, increasing access to backcountry areas will be experienced over the coming decades and it can take up to 100 years for the forest ecosystem to fully regenerate. Other resource development projects have both immediate effects as well as impacts that range across time. These examples may seem obvious. Less obvious are the combined longer-term socioeconomic and ecological implications that flow from decisions to allocate resource rights or licences that effectively predetermine the type of resource development pressures a region will experience long before any form of discussion, dialogue, or debate on the development pathway or project assessment process gets started. In those cases, the choices both now and into the future are already constrained. This book is premised upon the recognition that the accumulation of impacts from multiple resource development sectors and from multiple resource development projects reduces our available future options over time. We explore and define a broader and more integrative vision for identifying and then managing the regional cumulative impacts that result from natural resource development. To that more integrated regional approach, we also add a longer time horizon so as to incorporate the cumulative trajectories of past, current, and future impacts. In this first Chapter we begin to build the case for a more inclusive, integrated, and regional approach to cumulative impact assessment.