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Published in Spring 2002
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News and updates from the CEC
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Law and Policy
Wildlife Enforcement
Wildlife enforcement agents have to deal with an impossible reality: their resources are perpetually tight and the payoff for smugglers and poachers can be enormous. To help address the resulting power imbalance, the CEC and the North American Wildlife Enforcement Group (NAWEG) invited representatives of government, NGOs, academia, and the public to explore a role for ordinary citizens in enforcement activities. Participants at the two-day conference, held in Washington, DC last March, focused on comparing enforcement systems in the three countries, examining avenues of public involvement, and developing strategies for public partnerships.
All three countries already rely to some degree on community involvement. In Canada, the Environmental Protection Act allows citizens to request investigations, and in some cases to initiate a suit. In Mexico, a popular denunciation system works much the same way. If an individual or group files a complaint, the appropriate government agency must follow up with an official response. By comparison, citizens perhaps have a less institutionalized role in the United States, where there is an ideological tradition of keeping the public at arm’s length from law enforcement.
Still, according to Benito Perez, an assistant regional director for the US Fish and Wildlife Service, about half the cases that cross his desk have depended on some input from the public. In one case study presented at the conference, environmental groups were crucial to the success of the grey wolf reintroduction program in Idaho and Wyoming in 1995–96. The program faced stiff opposition in Idaho from ranchers, hunters, and anti-government groups, whose passions were further inflamed by local media and politicians. But environmental groups managed to defuse the escalating tensions, in part by offering compensation to ranchers who had lost livestock to wolves, and also by supplementing government rewards for tips leading to arrests.
Similarly, a Mexican cattlemen’s association, which emphasizes sustainable development and conservation, was instrumental in re-establishing two species in Mexico—the Texas white-tailed deer and the black bear. This growing community involvement in all three countries demands some rethinking by enforcement agencies, suggests John Mombourquette, enforcement director of the Department of Natural Resources in Nova Scotia. Rather than a traditional emphasis on the three “Rs” of random patrol, rapid response, and reactive investigation, he told attendees at the conference, a more effective approach should stress prevention, problem solving, and partnerships—making agencies more responsive and integral to the community. NAWEG and the CEC are now working on follow-up plans to build on the ideas and momentum of the meeting.
Environment, Economy, and Trade
Financial Markets
In an ongoing effort to use financial markets to promote environmental well-being, the CEC held an informational meeting in New York City last March with investors, financial consultants, academics, and representatives of the three NAFTA governments. The driving question was this: to what extent do investors consider environmental information when making their financial decisions?
“What you want is to have financial markets change the availability of capital to reflect environ-mental performance,” says Scott Vaughan, head of the CEC’s Environment, Economy, and Trade program.
“You want a dirty company to pay more for access to capital than a clean company. That’s the goal. If capital doesn’t distinguish between very dirty and very clean companies, then companies don’t have much incentive to clean up.”
After the Enron fiasco, investors quickly became sensitized to the risks of not asking enough questions. And it’s clear that environmental disasters can be as costly as any other time bomb. But according to participants at the March meeting, environmental questions still don’t rank high on their list. That’s partly because the information available to investors—from both government and private sources—fails to analyze how a given situation might affect cash flow, asset value, liability, corporate reputation, or investor relations. “The biggest thing they told us was that the information provided isn’t targeted to what the financial industry needs,” says Vaughan. “There’s a big gap between identifying an environmental risk and translating that into a potential financial risk.”
The challenge of the CEC’s project is to quantify the risk and make sure those numbers are widely available. With that goal in mind, half of the March meeting was devoted to exploring what sort of environmental disclosure each country requires by law, and whether there is an opportunity to harmonize regulations.
Plans for follow-up include a closer examination of what environmental information is accessible, and how it is used by financial analysts. A working-level meeting with auditors, regulators, financial rating specialists, institutional investors, and lenders, among others, will focus on broader disclosure-related issues. Then, in conjunction with those discussions, project members will work with lenders and investors to prepare case studies that make environmental risk more meaningful to the financial community.
Pollutants and Health
Children’s Health
In March, more than 100 participants attended a very successful meeting in Mexico City on the CEC’s children’s health project. Co-hosted by our Expert Advisory Board on Children’s Health and the Environment and by the Joint Public Advisory Committee (JPAC), the purpose was to discuss a cooperative agenda for the project, which will be presented for consideration of Council in Ottawa this month.
Attendees voiced support for the project’s draft agenda, while offering many suggestions for expanding and detailing it. Highlights included:
- preventive action to minimize children’s exposure to environmental contaminants, and more research and monitoring;
- an emphasis on precaution and ethical considerations when discussing risk assessment, as well as the recognition that transparency is vital in regulatory decision-making;
- collaboration between the children’s health initiative and the CEC’s Sound Management of Chemicals (SMOC) program, to ensure that children’s health issues are front and center in trilateral work; and
- more public education and outreach, including involvement of health professionals and a role for children themselves.
After the meeting, the cooperative agenda was revised to reflect the public comments and input from the board and JPAC.
In other children’s health news, Dr. Alessandra Carnevale was appointed to our advisory board to replace Dr. Miguel Ángel Montoya Cabrera, who passed away in December. Dr. Carnevale is a professor of medical genetics in the School of Medicine at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and a member of the National System of Researchers in medicine and health sciences. Since June 2000 she also has been research director at the National Institute of Pediatrics.
An active member of many medical societies, Dr. Carnevale is widely published and participates on the research and bioethics committees of Mexico’s National Commission on the Human Genome. Since 1994, she has been a member of the evaluators’ board for research projects at the National Council for Science and Technology (Conacyt).
The CEC and expert advisory board continue to mourn the loss of Dr. Montoya—a caring and dedicated man who had a long and distinguished career in pharmacology, toxicology, and pediatric medicine. We will miss his presence and guidance.
Law and Policy
Water Management
Responding to a request from Council to address water management issues, the CEC Secretariat sponsored a freshwater workshop in Toronto last January that brought together experts from the three NAFTA countries, many of whom had never met. The meeting focused on looking at groundwater from a North American perspective and was hosted by the Program on Water Issues at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. “With groundwater, you realize how frustrating it is for people who are working on an issue that is really continental in nature,” says Adele Hurley, senior fellow at the program. “This was an opportunity for them to work with colleagues on something that needs to be approached collegially.”
Since the workshop was the CEC’s first scientific look at groundwater—as opposed to previous work at the legal and policy level—participants spent the day laying out the issues and broadly considering a course of action. All agreed that there was a vital need to protect groundwater, which is being threatened by overuse, contamination, population growth, climate change, and deforestation. In many areas of North America, the situation has become critical, mostly as a result of over-pumping and aquifer contamination.
But dealing with these problems can be slippery, the experts noted. For a resource that is so ubiquitous and familiar, many aspects of water are surprisingly murky. There is only sketchy understanding, for instance, of how aquifers work or how ground and surface water interact. Information about usage and aquifer replenishment rates is likewise lacking, at least on a macro level. “It would be wrong to say we don’t have much information on groundwater, but for the most part it is very local,” says environmental writer Joanna Kidd, who prepared the workshop discussion paper for Lura Consulting. “What we don’t have is aggregate information at the national or regional levels.”
These knowledge gaps point out the enormous complexity of groundwater. First, water management in North America is spread out among dozens of regional, provincial, state, and federal agencies. Second, the science itself is complex—part of the hydrologic cycle, which is only partially understood by scientists. And finally, groundwater issues overlap broad jurisdictions, from our ecological systems to our economic and social systems. That’s not to mention how dramatically priorities and water conditions can differ between countries, states, and provinces.
The CEC can play a key role in facilitating transborder cooperation in water management. As a first step, participants at the Toronto workshop provided many valuable suggestions that will help in pulling together options for consideration by Council.
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Meeting Report of the Expert Workshop on Freshwater in North America