The Need to Measure and Manage the Cumulative Impacts of Resource Development on Public Health: An Australian Perspective

Abstract

'mining, oil and gas operations, including operating mines, quarries, oil and gas wells, as well as constructing those operations… (and) mining support activities such as fee-for-service activities and exploration'. Australia's resource regions are already of significant economic value, with the latest estimates for exports in resources and energy being placed at approximately $200 billion for 2011-12 [2]. Ongoing growth is also expected, particularly in the states of Western Australia and Queensland, and this is being driven by the strong relationship between Australian and Chinese markets, together with the rise of the Indian and Chinese middle class; a high demand for natural resources (coal, power, water) and the mobility of the international skilled workforce [3]. The socioeconomic and other changes associated with large-scale mineral resource extraction are key issues for regional development in Australia, and well as for other na

Growth‐inducing infrastructure represents transformative yet ignored keystone environmental decisions

“…This includes not only the physical systems that transport people, energy, and their waste, but also the social systems that support communities. For example, rapid influx of temporary workers or even growth of the resident population can exceed the capacity of schools and the health care system (Kinnear, Kabir, Mann, & Bricknell, ).…”

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

“…Yet, accounting for environment and ecology can compound social and cultural tensions, as suggested by critiques of ecological justice narratives in relation to Indigenous ontologies [47][48][49]. The interactions in Figure 1 also suggest potential for cascades of interacting inequities where, for example, the same upstream industry could impact on the mental health and wellbeing of those witnessing changes to their communities and environments [50][51][52][53][54], on the livelihoods of workers or families of workers [11,55,56], and other nuances of lived experience within impacted communities [10,50,57].…”

“…The cascade also has planetary implications across scales and generations. Cumulative impacts from multiple resource developments within the same landscape are also driven by global processes spanning climate change, corporate power dynamics, urbanization, and other megatrends, with an array of overlapping environmental, community, and health consequences [2,11,27,58,59]. Attention to temporal and spatial dimensions of impacts draws attention to both short-term acute crises and longer-term health implications of global ecological change [60].…”

“…Yet, classic public health observatories face two notable challenges when addressing the cumulative impacts of resource development. First, current monitoring, evaluation, and analytical tools tend to deal with environmental, community, and health concerns in isolation, and are poorly equipped to integrate data and information, creating missed opportunities to "see" in an integrative way, or to benefit from the full range of knowledge and experience relevant to the cumulative impacts of resource development [10,11,13]. A second dilemma is the need for increased capacity for intersectoral actions and responses, which requires working and learning together both "vertically" (through levels of socioecological or political systems) and "horizontally" (across the same levels of a system) including across species boundaries [18,[82][83][84][85].…”

“…Within its developmental context, the Canadian economy has been tightly coupled with resource development and extraction [8] ranging from mining, oil and gas, forestry, fisheries, agriculture, and aquaculture to renewable energy developments and nature-based tourism activities. Attention to the risks and benefits of resource development in Canada is active and ongoing, with a growing focus on impacts that accumulate across space and time [9], along with increasing questions about cumulative determinants of health impacts, especially in rural, remote and Indigenous communities in resource-rich regions [10][11][12][13]. We use the term Indigenous to refer to Indigenous peoples in Canada and also in other parts of the world, consistent with the United Nations Declaration of Indigenous Peoples (United Nations, 2008).…”