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<The Councillor as Guardian of the Environment> Part I - Essay on the Councillor as Guardian of the
Environment Definition and Summary D. Tactics, Strategies and Approaches for Sustainable Development 3. ASSESSING RISKS Assessing Risks is the process of taking your awareness and pursuing it further through additional data gathering, information expansion, analysis and confirmation. Assessing risks is concerned with problem finding, a diagnostic process that sheds light on barriers to sustainable development and environmental protection. Assessment results in greater clarity regarding the situation you hope to influence in your policies, decisions and actions as elected leaders in your community. Assessment should increase your confidence in these policies, decisions and actions; confidence that they will produce the outcomes you want. In the literature you will find a number of assessment techniques with, sometimes, rather confusing names. Out of this host of assessment methods, we want to briefly introduce only two: Environmental Risk Assessment (EnRA) and Environmental Technology Assessment (EnTA). These are major strategic planning tools for decision making in environemental management. While EnRA evaluates the environmental status of, e.g., a city, to predict future consequences of exposure to hazards, EnTA mainly focuses on the ecological opportunities and risks of new technologies. Environmental Technology Assessment, however, would also include in the analysis - to give an example - trade-offs between economic and ecological impacts. EnTA can be done in the context of problem finding (acknowledging that the technology itself can be problematic) and as a process for evaluating alternative technical solutions to a problem. In the first context, EnTA is integral to the risk assessment. In the second, it becomes a legitimate tool for evaluating options for action. The case studies that follow are designed to illustrate the range of possibilities in the environmental risk assessment process. But before we present them, here are some concerns about relying too heavily upon experts to conduct either of these assessment tasks.
Assessments, either of the risk or technology kind, can become so complicated that they are taken over, or perhaps handed over, to the experts. That may have been part of the problem in Nakuru where the flamingos departed the local scene and took most of the tourists with them. Technical specialists are essential to understanding and resolving most environmental challenges and should be brought into decision making and problem solving processes. However, we are concerned that local government councils often allow the assessment process to be taken over by experts and specialists, or they hand it over to the technical specialists without providing for proper oversight. (Overseer: this is another of those important roles
you have as an elected leader. Another potential trap in using the assessment tool is to become over confident in the conclusions that can be drawn from the data, when you and your elected colleagues make decisions. There is nothing as reassuring as a bunch of complicated data, even when it is wrong. Think about it. How many times have you, as a councillor, been lured into a decision based on the "validity of the numbers"? While we have waved this red flag of warning about over-reliance on the "predictability" of hard data, we also recognize the importance of technical experts and their counsel on environmental/development issues of increasing complexity. And, of course, there is the trap of believing a comprehensive assessment of some environmental risk in your community, at some specific point in time, removes the need to continue the assessing process over time. The dynamics of interplay between physical, economic and social development, and the natural environment, is such that assessment must be an ongoing process.
Assessment doesn't have to be complicated or comprehensive, although it can be both. In the three cases that follow, we discuss three very different approaches to environmental risk assessment.
At the Second Annual World Bank Conference on Environmentally Sustainable Development, 1994, Elisea Gozun, Coordinator, Metropolitan Environmental Improvement Project, Manila, reported on the role of community governance in urban environmental management. While her presentation covered a wide range of topics and experiences in the metropolitan area, we want to focus on her comments about how one community came to grips with a pervasive pollution problem through an assessment conducted from the outside. While there was general awareness of the pollution problem in the community, a large multinational corporation was consistently thought to be the major contributor to the pollution in and along the Paco Estuary. Perhaps out of self defense, the corporation commissioned an NGO to study the problem, in other words, to carry out an assessment. When the assessment was completed, it revealed the Paco Public Market as the primary culprit. Assessment information isn't worth much if it isn't shared and acted upon, so a public workshop was held to share the results. Recognizing the need for partners and coalitions in any permanent resolution of the pollution problem in and along the Paco Estuary, the sponsors invited a wide range of stakeholders to attend. They included vendors, hawkers, market administrators, local elected officials, corporate officers working in the community, and representatives of metropolitan and national government agencies. While the main source of pollution had been identified though an external assessment, it didn't stop the participants from pointing their fingers at everyone else as the culprit. Ultimately, the blame placing stopped and the major contributors of pollution signed an agreement to plan and implement a waste minimization project to stop the pollution of Paco Creek. Assessment alone won't overcome sources of environmental degradation. As Ms. Gozun pointed out in her presentation: The community must understand the problem and must be willing to act; and, individual members of the community must have a sense of ownership in the solution. While many organizations (public, NGO and private) contributed to the success of the Paco Environmental Enhancement Project, the most heartening contribution came from the street vendors and hawkers. They spent personal time and effort to clean the Paco Estuary and hired their own street sweeper to help sustain the environmental quality resulting from the restoration effort.
Lancashire County in the west-central part of the island of Britain lives with an environmental legacy that dates from the beginning of the industrial revolution. With a traditional economic base of mining and manufacturing based on technology that largely ignored environmental consequences, the county has had to work uphill to overcome past indiscretions against nature. But this awareness, coupled with a vision of what their future can be, in terms of sustainable development, is a story worth sharing. In 1990, the County Council of Lancashire (an urban community of 1.4 million people), motivated by the public's concern with both local and global environmental issues, funded the initial step in a six stage strategy to improve the quality of the local environment. This initial phase, financed solely from local tax revenue, was a comprehensive environmental audit (assessment) designed to "provide the people of Lancashire, and all interested parties, with the first comprehensive picture of their environment." The audit, compiled over two years by a full time staff of five, resulted in a 325 page document that details all aspects of the county's environment, from topography to types of wildlife habitat to sites of significant noise pollution. Since most citizens can't be expected to read such a heavy tome, the county condensed the report to 60 pages for dissemination to citizens and other interested parties. While the preparation of the audit was primarily the responsibility of the five person team, they had lots of partners and coalitions to work with. One important partner was the Geographic Information System staff while an invaluable coalition was the Lancashire Environmental Forum, a broad-based environmental stakeholders organization formed by the Steering Committee of the County Council. The Forum represented over 65 organizations within the county, including government agencies, industry, other forms of local government, NGOs, community groups, and academic institutions. The breadth of representation was designed to accomplish several objectives:
All are important, but we want to emphasize the last point. The data used in the audit (assessment) was not created by the team but rather gathered from other sources. The council recognized early on that most of what they needed to know about the environment in their large urban community was already known by some organization or person. The audit team's task was to ferret out the information and bring it together into a cohesive document. The Green Audit had six objectives, all designed to turn the information and data in the audit into follow up actions. In other words, to assure it would not become a dust collector in the county's archives. These were to:
The Food Research Institute in Ghana saw the need to introduce appropriate technologies to reduce post-harvest losses and to provide technical support for the development and growth of the local food processing industry. Assessment techniques included direct observation, individual and group interviews with key stakeholders, including the target beneficiaries, and review of available written information sources about the history of local post-harvest losses and alternative technologies to reduce the losses. Since the two main crops focused on by the Institute were fish and cassava, the socio-economic issues were quite different. Working closely with the fishermen and farmers, the Institute developed a list of constraints, needs and priorities. Criteria that influenced the final design of new technologies included:
The final criteria were important to assure that adoption of new technology wouldn't suddenly shift production to another socio-economic group, either within the community or beyond its boundaries. Affordability and sustainability were enhanced by opportunities to manufacture equipment and spare parts locally. The assessment phase included pilot projects where the new technology was tested in relation to the criteria listed above. When Abigail Andah from the Food Research Institute spoke about their efforts at a Regional Workshop on Technology Need Assessment in Support of the Transfer of Environmentally Sound Technologies, she reported that over 100 towns and villages in Ghana and neighboring counties had adopted sustainable technologies to process and preserve two of the main food products in the region. We have looked at the use of assessment tools in three very different contexts as they relate to environmental issues and your role as Guardian of the Environment: assessing the viability and acceptance of new environmentally sound technologies along the coast of West Africa; finding the real source of pollution in one of the communities within the metropolitan complex of greater Manila; and, finally, a look at how an old industrial city in England built an information base for environmental decision making based on a collection of assessments carried out by other organizations.
The techniques used in environmental risk assessment are not new. In their rudimentary form they date back to the last century, evaluating the probability of a particular adverse effect occurring to humans or the environment as a consequence of specific actions. The actuarial tables estimating the life expectancy of men and women for insurance purposes is an example of the early use of the technology. The process of assessing environmental risk to humans grew more sophisticated over the years as exposure to certain elements became more prevalent. For example, the level of chemical risk to the human body was equated by looking at two fundamental variables, toxicity and exposure. According to the experts, a risk does not exist unless two criteria are met:
One of the authors had a direct experience with this assessment process when he was living in a village in south Asia many years ago. After becoming the host of some nasty amoebae, he sought a physician who fed him arsenic, but only enough to kill the squatter population (no pun intended). In this case the Human Health Risk Assessment (HHRA) was measured between two adverse consequences. EnRA becomes more complicated when it takes on the challenge of estimating the environmental risk to ecological systems (expanding the definition to encompass the risks to all non-human elements in the environment). The experts call this technique Ecological Risk Assessment, or EcoRA. And, they point out three distinct differences between HHRA and EcoRA.
Let's see if we can make sense out of these differences from a non-technician's perspective. Let us assume that some highly insensitive entrepreneur has created a junk yard of spent vehicles in your residential neighborhood. While it offends your aesthetic sensitivities, you are certain that it also has an impact on the community and larger ecosystem. For example, harbouring rats and eventually leaching certain unfriendly elements into the nearby estuary. The environmental values to be protected (assessment endpoints) are also a bit unclear; otherwise, why are there so many automotive junkyards in the world. Finally, the ecological risk assessors factor in the non-chemical stressing agents. You and your neighbors are suffering from emotional anxiety and visual deprivation, not to mention the possibility of some new strain of bubonic plague caused by rats ingesting high levels of used rubber and polyester seat covers into their daily diet. Given these fundamental differences, we are probably dealing with an ecological risk rather than a human health risk but an environmental risk nevertheless. While this interpretation of the basic differences between the two types of environmental risks is no doubt simplistic and perhaps even misleading, it emphasizes the dilemma most lay persons are confronted with when trying to make sense out of complex, long range ecological impacts of every day living arrangements we have come to take for granted. For most of us it is difficult, if not impossible, to fathom the ecological impact we are having on the ozone layer every time we push the release button on a pressurized can of whatever. And yet, this individual act of indiscretion when multiplied by billions of similar acts around the world on any given day, if not restrained, will surely impact at some point on our ability to survive as residents of Planet Earth. Human Health Risk + Ecological Risk = Economic Disaster in Surat, India and Other World Communities
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