The province of Alberta is getting rid of its arms-length environmental reporting agency and establishing a new model for effective and accountable oversight of environmental monitoring on behalf of Albertans.
The new structure was announced on Tuesday (April 5) by Minister of Environment and Parks Shannon Phillips at the same time an independent review of the Alberta Environmental Monitoring, Evaluation and Reporting Agency (AEMERA) was released.
“We are committed to doing the best job we can of monitoring the environmental impacts of industry and resource development as we build a more resilient, diversified economy,” Phillips said. “Outsourcing this work was not the answer. Moving expertise back into government under the guidance of two panels reporting to a new provincial chief scientist will allow us to strengthen our scientific capacity and be more transparent and credible in our reporting.”
The review was prepared by Paul Boothe for the government and looked closely at the 18-month old arms-length environmental monitoring agency’s governance and operations, its effectiveness to deliver its mandate and implementation of the Joint Oil Sands Monitoring Plan.
Boothe called the AEMERA a “failed experiment in outsourcing a core responsibility of government to an arms-length body.
“Three years and tens of millions of dollars later, the results are an organization that is still struggling to get established, dysfunctional relationships with its two key partners, Alberta Environment and Parks and Environment Canada, and a failure of all three parties to realize the promise of the transformational Joint Oil Sands Monitoring Plan to bring critically needed, world-class environmental monitoring to Alberta’s oilsands.”
To establish a new structure, the province plans to retain an independent science advisory panel and an ecological knowledge advisory panel. Both will advise a new Environment and Parks division led by a chief scientist.
The science advisory panel will report directly to Albertans on the province’s monitoring and science system. It will provide independent advice to the new monitoring and science division on the collection, analysis and reporting of data. The new division will be led by Fred Wrona, who moves to the new position from vice-president and chief scientist AEMERA.
The new structure will also integrate traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) through a panel. The TEK panel will work with Indigenous communities to identify approaches that reflect community-based knowledge.
