Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Because of the inclusiveness of the process and of its unambiguous end points, the
BEMP began to enjoy the support of indigenous communities, together with the operation-
al people in industry, and we were able to justify the whole programme to our political
masters in Ottawa. Scientists were a little slower to warm to this form of decision making,
but in less than a year, most became advocates. The result was that we now had a manage-
able list of specific research and monitoring topics that all “stakeholders” had agreed on.
Furthermore, we had a management framework that involved the same participants evalu-
ating future results and modifying our research and monitoring activities.
By about 1987, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)-inspired
global shortage of oil vanished. Consequently, offshore oil and gas exploration in the Cana-
dian Beaufort Sea was abandoned for nearly 20 years. The BEMP ground to a halt, but the
experience had a major impact on how we later approached the management of research
and monitoring. As we pondered how to organise the NCP, I realized that we needed a
mechanism that would involve, be embraced by and support cross-fertilization with north-
ern indigenous peoples, scientists and government agencies with responsibility for human
health and the environment. It would have to set tangible policy-relevant objectives and
deliver on them or it would lose the confidence of Northerners and would not escape the
long knives whenever budgets would become lean.
Naively, I thought that perhaps the “AEAM” methodology we had modified for the
BEMP could be pressed into service and I asked Russel to give it a trial. We quickly found
that it would not work, primarily because we could not find a surrogate for the BEMP's
industrial scenario. Instead, we progressively built our own system. At its core was our de-
cision to say that the strategic objectives of the programme were to:
1. Identify how contaminants reached the Canadian Arctic and where they came
from.
2. Measure the contaminant levels in air, snow, water, soil, plants, fish, wildlife
and people of the Canadian Arctic.
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