Challenges and Opportunities of Integrating Human Health into the Environmental Assessment Process: The Canadian Experience Contextualised to International Efforts

Abstract

A scoping review of the literature was conducted to identify the most pressing issues pertaining to the application of Health Impact Assessment (HIA) and the integration of health concerns into the Environmental Assessment (EA) process in Canada and internationally. The issues identified include the need for government intervention, gaps in methodology and tools, limitations of capacity and expertise, poor intersectoral, disciplinary and public collaboration/participation, challenges of data quantification and analytic complexity, and the need for process efficiency. The issues presented were also contextualised to the status quo practice of EA in Canada and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act (CEAA 2012). Recommendations were proposed as a starting point for improved integration. First, a commitment by the actors involved to the protection of human health — aligned with the core mandate of the CEAA. Second, the achievement of intersectoral, disciplinary and public collaboration, led by government, ideally the health sector. The case is made for a new era of Canadian leadership and innovation at the interface of health and EA.

Use of Genomic Information in Health Impact Assessment is Yet to Come: A Systematic Review

“…HIA has repeatedly been identified as an appropriate method for assessing the future health impact of integrating genomic information and genome-based technologies into practice, being able to provide a forum for stakeholder discussion by its participatory approach, to consider inequality across different population groups and to generate and disseminate valuable information for decision-makers, especially if quantitative assessment is feasible, that is often not otherwise available [ 7 , 39 , 40 ]. In HIA practice, participatory methods and consideration of inequalities are commonplace, while impact quantification is less frequent [ 25 ].…”

Addressing the Environmental, Community, and Health Impacts of Resource Development: Challenges across Scales, Sectors, and Sites

“…Calls for attention to cumulative impacts in Canada are consistent with a range of critiques of the Canadian environmental assessment (EA) process [24,58,64]. This includes urgent calls for increased and more robust inclusion of Indigenous decision making in impact assessment processes [12,[65][66][67], and ongoing critiques of the ability of formal health impact assessment to express an integrated understanding of social and ecological determinants of health [68][69][70]. These concerns also align with critiques of cumulative effects assessments as a component of environmental impact assessment [58,59,64,71] through to overt concerns about the failure of the EA process to address the intrinsic value of other species [45].…”

Perception survey on the relevance of main categories of health determinants for conducting health impact assessment

“…Nevertheless, the measurement of interactions and weighing of each one of them related to health outcomes is still an underdeveloped and challenging task (Bonnefoy et al, 2007;Krumeich & Meershoek, 2014). On the other hand, the never ending debate about the integration of HIA into other impact assessment processes remains on the table without having yet reached a clear conclusion in this regard (Steinemann, 2000;Mahboubi et al, 2015; XXX, masked for blind review). In this sense, a major concern for the inclusion of health into EIA is the large dependency on practitioners' subjectivity.…”

“…Likewise, Law 21/2013 on Environmental Assessment includes the need to analyse human health with the rest of environmental factors, an aspect now reinforced with Directive 2014/52/EU, replacing the term "human being" under the scope of covered environmental factors (Article 3) for "population and human health", which brings hope for better evaluations on health issues within the EIA procedures. Regarding EIA, it should be noted that there is still a never ending debate at an international level on the integration of HIA into other processes such as EIA and strategic environmental assessment (SEA), which remains on the table without having yet reached any clear conclusions (Steinemann, 2000;Mahboubi et al, 2015; XXX, masked for blind review). In the meantime, Article 5.…”