PhD student's research highlights role of community members in understanding our environment

In Canada, development projects are required to begin with an environmental assessment. Assessments are meant to identify the impacts of development and assist with decision making. However, these assessments are not without limitations. Ecosystems are constantly evolving due to both natural processes and human activities. To gain a full understanding of these interactions, monitoring must ideally occur over a larger temporal and spatial scale.  

Community-based monitoring (CBM) empowers local community members to collect data that can be used by various stakeholders. By incorporating CBM, environmental assessments can become more thorough, leading to better decision-making and more sustainable development practices. 

Jess Kidd has spent over nine years as an environmental practitioner, including running her own independent consulting business. Early in her career she identified community members and community engagement as important components of the environmental assessment process. “You do not need a science degree to be able to collect water samples” says Kidd, “you need to care about the reason those samples are being collected”.  

Currently pursuing a PhD in Social and Ecological Sustainability through SERS, Kidd is focusing on cumulative effects assessments of freshwater ecosystems. Her goal is to enhance the environmental assessment process and improve decision-making for freshwater resources in Canada. 

Kidd evaluated the ability of CBM projects to support the environmental impact assessment process. She identified CBM projects in Canada where community members collected environmental data independent of researchers. The projects were evaluated based on criteria including data management, monitoring frequency, collection protocols and spatial scale. Forty projects were analyzed, spanning across Canada’s provinces and territories. 

The evaluation determined that CBM projects have enormous potential to address the shortfalls of current environmental assessment methods and can lead to more thorough cumulative effect assessments. The CBM projects that received the highest scores based on the study’s scoring rubric included features like training manuals, provincial/territorial government partnerships, and georeferenced databases for data sharing. 

“Community members are an untapped partner in monitoring initiatives” says Kidd. “Without community member input the initiative will lack the local support needed for the monitoring results to be used to protect or improve the ecosystem being monitored.” 

Kidd plans to complete her PhD and continue her career as an environmental practitioner. With her extensive experience and education, she aims to advocate for the importance of CBM and community engagement. By involving those most affected by resource management decisions, Kidd hopes to ensure sustainable decision-making for future development projects. 

The research, Pan-Canadian review of community-based monitoring projects and their capacity to enhance environmental monitoring programs for cumulative effects assessments, authored by Kidd, her PhD supervisors Simon Courtenay and Heidi Swanson and others from Environment Canada and Climate Change, and the Vuntut Gwitchin Government, was recently published in FACETS. 

This article was originally posted on the Faculty of Environment site.