By Katie Suek, Human Environment Specialist, Canada North Environmental Services
Selecting the right environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria for your company or operation is important when it comes to setting and advancing your sustainability goals and meeting the expectations of your stakeholders, shareholders, employees, and communities of interest. A potash mine that becomes operational in a community soon emerges as a community fixture, a primary source of employment and benefits, and in many ways, a part of a community’s sense of identity. When engaging in discussions with community members from the potash belt over the years, it was not uncommon for one to hear phrases like, “I come from a mining town”, “my family is a mining family”, or “when I graduate, I am going to school to get my tickets so I can work at the mine”. With this pride and reliance for the potash industry comes great responsibility for potash producers to ensure that the design of ESG targets, measures, and reporting efforts are community-informed and validated.
Ongoing identification, evaluation, and management of social and environmental impacts (both positive and negative) through meaningful engagement with communities (including stakeholders, rights holders, and communities of interest) are important aspects of any ESG approach and are often listed as requirements of sustainability standards and certification. Decision-making processes that are community-informed often result in stronger, more sustainable decisions. However, little guidance is available on how to include community input in a decision-making process and engage in a way that is considered welcoming, safe, inclusive, and meaningful to participants.
Designing, facilitating, and reporting back on engagement in a way where participants feel safe sharing input, where participants understand how their input will be used, and where they feel confident that their input impacted the decision-making process is a bit of an art form. Designing engagement well takes a combination of training, experience, intuition, and consideration of input received through multiple ways of knowing. An effective and thoughtful engagement plan should focus on finding ways to reach underrepresented or disproportionately impacted groups and should be designed with input from communities to ensure that the engagement activities selected will work well and meet the expectations of the people involved.
At Canada North Environmental Services (CanNorth), our Community Division comprises a team of social scientists with over a decade of experience, specializing in social impact assessment and management planning, land use and community capacity studies, environmental assessment, and participant-focused stakeholder and rights holder engagement design, facilitation, evaluation, and reporting. We design community-based studies and engagement plans in a way that accounts for, and holds space for, information received through western science, local knowledge, and Indigenous knowledge, and we regularly hire and train local community members (or community liaisons) to support or lead engagement activities and research programs in the communities where they live.
Navigating the ever-changing and evolving landscape of engagement best practices, regulatory requirements, and community expectations can be challenging and time consuming. The pathway to creating or enhancing community-informed decision making is as unique as the clients and communities we work with. Do not hesitate to contact CanNorth for support to advance your engagement goals.
