Other participants expressed a similar tiered relationship
between CEAM and project-based EA. One EA practitioner noted
the “broader scale assessment sets what a desired outcome is and
builds some objectives in terms of what is going to be acceptable or
not.” The participant went on to explain that this not only provides
some consistency across project developments, but also greater
certainty to developments in that “before a proponent spends a
lot of money planning to do a project they can actually identify
whether or not it is even feasible for them to go or not” An EA administrator
agreed, and indicated that “project EA would be very useful
if we agreed what residual impacts from a project are relevant to
manage, and used that information to contribute to a larger knowledge
of the change in the environment in the broader perspective.”
The participant went on to explain that if the evaluations for individual
projects are done in the desired fashion, with some standards
and consistency across project due to the higher level direction of
watershed CEAM, then it is possible to “know the contribution of
the residual effects of each development into a larger framework to
understand the overall changes”. “The need for project assessment
is still going to be there”, explained another EA administrator, “but
it will be in a different context.” The participant explained that “if
we are doing assessment at a regional scale, in doing those assessments
we should be aligned in addressing some of the data needs
and data standardizations. . .and the project would have to follow
those kinds of protocols in assessing the impacts of their project.” A
scientist from academia simply summed up their view as follows