Climate-change mitigation in Canadian environmental impact assessments

摘要

Environmental impact assessments (EIAs) are still developing approaches to address the issue of climate change. The aim of the study is to examine how recent EIAs in Canada have approached the issue of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions when evaluating each individual project's contribution to and impact significance on climate change. Twelve EIAs performed under national legislation in Canada were analyzed. Canada developed approaches to GHG emissions more than a decade ago, and it is now common to assess the emissions and propose some mitigation in EIAs. Large emitters have proposed some substantial measures, typically the latest technologies, to reduce emissions. However, other proposed ideas may still be ambiguous and hard to examine in terms of real effects. Furthermore, there were many ambiguous and/or inconsistent definitions of GHG emission levels as well as significance of GHG emission impacts. The expressions of GHG emission amounts using percent are potentially misleading. In response to these situations, we suggest the use of clear and reasonable evaluations and definitions of GHG emissions as well as their significance.