Pamela Lesser and Sonja Bickford: Environmental Impact Assessment for the Arctic

In the first brief presentation Dr. Sonja Bickford from the University of Nebraska Kearney, USA will give an overview of the University of Lapland Arctic Centre’s “Testing improvement processes of Finnish environmental impact assessments and the modes for application in arctic regions of Finland and Russia” (Arctic EIA) project. The presentation will cover the goals and background for the project as well as examples of project’s results. One of the aims of the research project was to help stakeholders, such as companies, benefit from its findings of benchmarking EIA practices in the Arctic countries – during the presentation examples from US and Sweden will be discussed.

The second half of the presentation begins with the introduction of the Finnish led Arctic Council project focusing on ‘Arctic EIA’, which is intended to span the current Finnish chairmanship of the Arctic Council (2017-2019). The project is supported by the Sustainable Development Working Group (SDWG) and is officially entitled Arctic EIA: Good Practice Recommendations for Environmental Impact Assessment and Public Participation in the Arctic. The project is based, in part, on the Tekes project discussed during the first half of the presentation, and also on a subsequent book on the same topic that will be briefly highlighted. The presentation will wrap up with a comparison of two very different EIA systems – Finland and Canada (Province of Alberta and Yukon Territory) – followed by examples of best practices in each of those countries.