CALGARY C The Alberta and federal governments have collected vast quantities of data on air and water quality within the oilsands, but have regularly didn’t analyze, interpret and set of that data.
A study released Monday criticized the Joint Oil Sands Monitoring initiative, a group effort by environmental agencies in Ottawa and Edmonton, because the partnership has yet to publish annual reports around the data it’s collected.
“The question is when do we start to see much more effort to convert that data into information?” the lead author of the report and Clarkson University professor Philip Hopke said.
Alberta and Ottawa teamed up to establish JOSM this year in order to collect more data on air, water, wildlife and biodiversity in and around Fort McMurray, the main hub for oilsands extraction in the province.
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Hopke’s study evaluated whether some pot effort has improved the scientific integrity of environmental monitoring in the oilsands compared with the separate provincial and federal monitoring in position before 2012. “I’d probably give them a solid ‘B,'” he told reporters in Edmonton.
“There’s a lot (of data) out there and if you really knew that which you used to do, you can pull a lot of useful information out, but for most ordinary people that could be extremely difficult to do at this time,” Hopke said.
Hopke, along with a team of researchers from Canada, the U.S. and the European Union, provided a number of recommendations to JOSM on how to improve.
He urged JOSM to write reports around the data, to help make the data easier searchable for both academics and the public and also to create a plan that outlines exactly what information is most important for the government to trace.
“It’s very hard to understand if you’ve hit the target, if you do not know what the target is,” he explained.
Financial Post
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