Managing and Monitoring:
Tools for Sustainable Development

Tundra colours near Big Lake, Northwest Territories.

To protect the environment and the social fabric of the North, representatives of aboriginal peoples, governments, industry, and environmental groups agree that future development of natural resources must be environmentally and socially sustainable. Although there are many different views on how this may be best achieved, all would probably agree on the importance of managing development.

How can we manage the exploitation of oil, gas, minerals, and other natural resources to ensure that development is sustainable? There are no quick or easy answers to this question, because the concept of sustainability is open to interpretation, but it is clear that to move toward sustainability we need planning, assessment; and implementation processes that work well. In addition, we need to re-focus our management efforts on nature's ecosystems and away from political jurisdictions that have little environmental meaning.

In Yukon and the Northwest Territories, land-claim agreements are requiring that new and innovative planning and assessment processes be put in place, and northerners, particularly aboriginal northerners, are gaining much greater influence in how natural resources will be used and developed. But the involvement of northerners will not automaticallyensure decisions that promote sustainable development; rather, the quality and quantity of information, and how it is used, will determine whether decisions are good or bad.

Information about the natural world provides the vital context in which proposed developments are considered and, if approved, implemented. All involved in northern issues have heard researchers and government regulators call for more information but, despite this need, decisions still have to be made.

To be useful to those who make decisions, information must be accurate and relevant to the issues at hand. We need specific information on the probable and actual impacts of projects and general information on the natural and human environments in which they are undertaken. We need monitoring and research programmes to generate this information, and it must be reported in ways that allow both the decision-makers and the public at large to judge whether we are going in the right direction to meet our objectives. Finally, information must be used in ways that integrate our views of the world with the way the world actually works.

Portions of the North will soon experience an explosion in mining activity, with potential environmental and social impacts. Already, contaminants generated in the South and in the

Federation of Russia are being transported by waves and winds to northern Canada. Once here, many of these contaminants accumulate in the living tissues of animals and, eventually, in humans. Research now confirms that northerners who eat large quantities of certain "country" foods are at risk.

This issue of Northern Perspectives looks at monitoring, at reporting environmental information in northern Canada and at the need to apply ecosystem principles to the management of the natural environment. Various government agencies have put considerable effort into these matters in recent years. Canada is planning to publish its third state of the environment report in 1996. Certain of the northern landclaim agreements require that governments improve their monitoring capabilities. The 1991 Arctic Environmental Strategy (AES), the northern component of the federal government's "Green Plan," stresses the need for more comprehensive monitoring of changes in the northern environment. Ministers of the Environment from all eight circumpolar countries plan to convene in Canada next year to assess the implementation of the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS). While all this demonstrates that progress has been made, the following articles indicate that much more remains to be done.