Canada's Oil Sands Monitoring Program: 2012-2019

摘要

The Oil Sands Monitoring (OSM) Program has been in place since 2012 with the mandate to assess if changes in environmental condition are occurring due to oil sands development. Air, atmospheric deposition, surface and ground water, wetlands, wildlife health and terrestrial biological monitoring are assessed under the program. In December 2017, a renewed agreement between Canada and Alberta was signed to continue the program with significant additions including increased direction for integrated cumulative effects monitoring and increased emphasis for Indigenous Community-Based Monitoring. In November 2018, a new governance process for the program was co-developed with 18 Indigenous communities in the region and supported by the oil sands industry. After 6 years of environmental monitoring, significant advances have been made in understanding environmental chemistry, toxicology, fate, transport and transformation of industrial waste products along environmental pathways to boreal ecosystems. We more fully understand sources of trace metals, sulfur, nitrogen and hydrocarbons on the landscape. We are beginning to appreciate the complex chemistry and interactions of surface and ground waters with industrial process water and the buried bitumen ore, and the implications of the deposition of global emissions on the boreal landscape. What we do not yet fully understand is the cumulative influence of all of these products and processes combined with large-scale transformation of the landscape on boreal ecosystems. To address the questions of cumulative environmental change the program is obliged to consider how environmental systems and pathways are interconnected, for example by the creation of conceptual models that serve as nested, testable hypotheses of the influence of industrial pressures on ecological responses. This approach to environmental systems as testable hypotheses allows us to adapt the monitoring system to new information, and to project inferences of changing development pressure on future environmental conditions. In this session, we discuss the recent work that the oil sands monitoring program has conducted to date, our findings, and our approach to and aspirations for integrated cumulative effects monitoring.