Assessment and scenarios for the Ring of Fire area | School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability

You will have heard of the Ring of Fire – the northern Ontario’s hot prospect mining area improbably named after a 1960s Johnny Cash song.

It’s been flagged as a hot prospect mining area for nearly 20 years, but has faced headwinds. The area is Indigenous traditional territory, remote, roadless, and globally important for peatlands/wetlands that are an irreplaceable carbon sink.

These days, Ring of Fire development is receiving some enthusiastic promotion, especially by Ontario Premier Doug Ford. His government has been busy eliminating provincial environmental law barriers, moving to make the Ring of Fire a “special economic zone” and pushing federal support for roads, transmission lines and expedited mining approvals.

Despite all the hurry-up moves, however, the extent and timing of any Ring of Fire mining remains anyone’s guess. No mine proposals are currently on the table and while proposed community and mining access roads are well advanced in the assessment process, completed roads are not expected for another decade or more. Mining will follow, if it happens at all.

Maybe speedy approvals will shorten the time frame a little. Or maybe neglect of social and environmental side-effects and breezy attention to Indigenous rights will spur court actions and other resistance to slow it all down.

In any event, there has been and remains time for the quite different approach that has been quietly underway in an extraordinary regional assessment in the Ring of Fire area itself.

Since January, fifteen First Nations communities in the Ring of Fire area – the people most likely to be affected by Ring of Fire development’s positive and adverse effects and legacies – have been working in partnership with the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada to identify the future they want, how to make change in that direction more likely and how to avoid undesirable change.

The work is guided by a ground-breaking Terms of Reference, negotiated by the partners. Essentially it sets out basic regional priorities and uses them to evaluate scenarios of possible regional futures.

The scenarios will depict what could come with mining and other induced development and what may be the legacies, good and bad, when mining ends. Particular scenarios will present the cumulative and overall consequences of no, low, medium or high intensity industrial development, looking ahead perhaps 10, 30, 70 and 150 years (seven generations).

These are possibilities, not predictions. They will provide a base for forward-looking understandings that will help the communities individually and together to see what to encourage or protect now, what opportunities to exploit, what dangers to prevent or prepare for, what capacities to build, what issues to anticipate, and what governance structures will be needed to deal with them.

That’s not what we usually do. More often we proceed project by project, considering their effects one-by-one. And in times of economic panic, we dispense even with that.

The Ring of Fire Regional Assessment is demonstrating a much more promising route to better futures.

SERS professor Bob Gibson acts as an occasional outside advisor to the Ring of Fire Regional Assessment partners, especially on scenarios for more sustainable futures. He ranks the regional assessment among the top ten exemplary steps in assessment and sustainability in his experience over the past 50 years.

The Terms of Reference for the Regional Assessment in the Ring of Fire Area, prepared the the Regional Assessment Working Group can be found on the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada website.

Maps are from 1) the Terms of Reference for the Regional Assessment in the Ring of Fire Area and ii) the Wildlife Conservation Society of Canada by Meg Southee.

Banner credit: James Bay Lowlands image, Terms of Reference for the Regional Assessment in the Ring of Fire Area document.