Posted on behalf of Hannah Hoag
The Canadian and Albertan governments will build a world-class environmental monitoring system to track water and air quality, and monitor biodiversity in the oil sands region of northern Alberta, John Baird, Canadian minister of the environment, announced today. “The need is absolutely urgent,” he told reporters. 
Oil sands host a messy mixture of thick crude oil, sand, clay and water. Although it is difficult to extract useful hydrocarbons from the deposits, they are increasingly being exploited as new processing technologies, and the rising price of conventional oil, makes them economically viable.
The decision to beef up environmental monitoring around the oil sands follows the release of a report from a panel of scientists that was convened by the federal government department Environment Canada. Chaired by Elizabeth Dowdswell, formerly Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme, the panel found that current air, water and wildlife monitoring systems are not up to snuff. While there is plenty of monitoring and research activity in the oil sands region, “there’s a lack of coordination, and a lack of scientific leadership and governance,” says John Smol, an ecologist at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and a member of the panel.
The report says that the Regional Aquatics Monitoring Program (RAMP), the largest aquatic monitoring initiative in the region, was “not producing world-class scientific output in a transparent, peer-reviewed format and it is not adequately communicating its results to the scientific community or the public”. But it also noted that the responsibility lay with the federal and provincial governments. “It is not the job of industry to be doing this; it is the job of governments,” says Andrew Miall, a geologist at the University of Toronto and a member of the panel.
The panel was convened in September after former federal environment minister Jim Prentice noted that “serious concerns have been raised about oil sands pollution … and whether environmental monitoring systems are well-designed and implemented.” David Schindler of the University of Alberta had criticized the system after his research found high levels of toxic metals and polycyclic aromatic compounds downstream of oil sands mining activities. RAMP has said that the pollutants occur naturally.
Today, Schindler welcomed the report, saying, “It had everything in it I had hoped to see in it. Environment Canada knows how to put together a good monitoring programme. In the past the problem has been that they don’t have the budget to do it. RAMP ought to be scrapped and the money turned over to the feds [federal government] to do it.”
“The problem remains that there is still a lot of talk about the process to fill these gaps while the oil sands development expansion proceeds unimpeded,” adds Simon Dyer, a policy director at Pembina Institute, an environmental think-tank. “If Canada and Alberta were serious about doing science based management, they need to temporarily pause oil sands expansion.”
Update: RAMP said in a statement that it welcomed all input on enhancing aquatic monitoring systems and leading to a better understanding of the cumulative aquatic effects of resource development in the Lower Athabasca region. On Tuesday 21 December, more than 2 million data records, including information about climate, water hydrology, sediment quality and fish health, from RAMPs monitoring of the region were made public through its website.
Images from the Pembina Institute