In public debates over pipelines, mines, dams and other major infrastructure projects, governments often make assurances that any communities or other parties adversely affected by the development will be “compensated” for losses. The language sounds fair and rational: Impacts to lands and people that remain after mitigation will be measured, damages calculated, and payments provided to those who experience negative impacts.

But for many individuals and communities, this promise rests on a profound misunderstanding that at times borders on an outright lie — one that is usually convenient for commercial interests driving the development.

The problem is more fundamental than simply the flawed methodologies used to evaluate environmental damages and assess compensation, which typically focus on tangible losses that can be counted — jobs eliminated, fish harvests lost, acres flooded or revenues forgone. Using economic tools, these measurements are then converted into dollar amounts.

Yet the losses that often matter most are ones that impact evaluation frameworks generally ignore — the hard-to-measure consequences of an action that are typically overlooked because they lack common definitions and are not easily enumerated, quantified and expressed in monetary terms.

What impact evaluations often fail to include

Such neglected losses can be caused by hydroelectric dams (in Canada, the U.S. and India); mining initiatives (in Ontario and Quebec, including current battles centred around the Ring of Fire); forestry practices (in Australia and Western Canada); and pipelines (from Trans Mountain in the west to Enbridge’s Line 5 into Ontario). Many of these initiatives end up mired in lengthy court cases, with solutions left to judges rather than elected officials or science-based assessments.

The problem is not simply one of oversight. It is also structural, built into current systems to support certain economic interests while ignoring those of affected communities. As a result, important losses or gains that are the hardest to quantify (effects on cultural knowledge, the right to a robust role in decision making, mental health, the protection of sacred places, relationships between communities and ecosystems) are often excluded altogether from decisions made on the basis of project impact evaluations or compensation assessments.

What remains........

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