Old Drug, New Target: Repurposing the Impact Assessment Paradigm for the Post Pandemic Era

By Manishankar Prasad,

​Date of Publication: 27 April, 2020

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Climate Change has been a moving target for environmental planning professionals to create the apt intellectual response in the face of the mega trend. COVID-19 can upped the game by a few notches by changing the goal posts itself, as the world grapples with the great pause, which the pandemic has triggered. The world is at a standstill, oil prices at the lowest and the best air quality in cities for years. This should be an environmental planning professional’s dream scenario of low carbon and low pollution. 

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However, for every beam of sunshine there is a shadow somewhere lurking. As the world is at staying at home, the economy is also at a stop. Jobs are at peril. We are not totally post carbon yet, as the petrocapitalist wiring will be around for a few decades more. The low carbon transition pathway will cost a substantial quantum of money, which will be deferred in a slow economy as other pressing priorities take precedence as public health and digital infrastructure.

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Cheaper oil makes renewables less attractive. Renewables win when oil is at a premium.  Paradoxes cannot get weirder. Markets calibrate towards an equilibrium, and choices are framed by supply-demand dynamics. Environmental and Social Risk is slowly getting converted in to balance sheet level risks in an impact weighted manner, but pre project Environmental Planning utilizes little cost benefit analysis. 

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The ‘Old Drug, New Target’ metaphor is borrowed from pharmacology where old drugs are ‘go-to’ candidates to begin searching for drugs for new diseases. HCQ is an old drug, which became popular as tentative medication for COVID-19 (the efficacy not yet tested), and a topic for a geopolitical storm in the teacup between India and United States.  Environmental Planning has been a mainstay for infrastructure development since NEPA in 1970.  It can be tweaked around and repurposed for the Post COVID-19 future as a platform with a substantive legacy and institutional memory. 

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Environmental Planning frameworks such as Environmental, Social and Health Impact Assessments or ESHIA is the mainstay of pre project activities from an ESG perspective. ESHIA Reports run in to the hundreds of pages and are exhaustive technical documents when written well are a treasure trove of evidence for effective developmental decision making. ESHIAs are very conservative and subjective policy instruments which vary in quality and scope from sector, consultant and regulator lenses. These dense reports are barely read after the environmental permit is issued. The proportion of E, S and H vary as per the intervention context. Some countries do not mandate a Health Impact Assessment or a Social Impact Assessment as per legal strictures, although are performed when needed on a case by case basis. Australia requires a Social Impact Assessment (as per law) to be performed in states such as Queensland as mining or oil and gas dominate the economic terrain. 

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In the recent years, Climate Change has been an important topic to be assessed and included in ESHIA Reporting. The Sultanate of Oman, as a progressive environmental leader in the region mandates a compulsory climate affairs chapter to be authored with Scope I, II and III requirements. In a post pandemic era, the traditional ESHIA would have to expand its realm to include matters of social and environmental determinants of health, as health is shaped beyond its strict biomedical contours of clinical applications. One thread would be to make Health Impact Assessments of projects near mandatory. Social Impact Assessments could include greater detail to map social resilience in the project area. I am aware that ‘Black Swan’ events cannot be predicted, but more robust studies could identify the known unknowns. ‘The Future of Work’ which is a vital theme across the board, is a driver Social Impact Assessments can address in some detail. 

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The ‘Analysis of Alternatives’ Chapter in the ESHIA report can be made more holistic by actually mapping alternative scenarios through futures models for projects which could minimise the environmental and social risks that major investment decisions face during a proverbial economic sandstorm such as a ‘great pause’ such as this pandemic. The Environmental and Social Management Plan as an actionable, live document could include public health related provisions.  

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As the future has been preponed, and the ‘business as usual’ scenario has been breached for good ESHIA practice can leverage technical reporting for evidence as regulators would require better intellectual tools to tackle the new reality. At YE, we research to push the envelope of best practices towards the next practice futures. Tick box compliance is for the ‘Before Corona’ era. Please speak to me or the team for a conversation of how to make the most of your ESHIA spend.