World Bank Annual Meeting Policy Forum – October 10 th , 2013

1. World Bank Annual Meeting Policy Forum – October 10th, 2013 Environmental and Social Assessment and Management: Strengthening all levels of the Integrated Framework Cumulative Impact Assessment: Making it work: challenges and options Emmanuel Boulet Principal Environment Specialist Inter-American Development Bank

2. Assessment methodologies are well established… • General consensus on needs and definition • Address “blind spots” of the project-focused ESIA process • Definition e.g. “changes to the environment that are caused by an action in combination with other past, present and future actions”(Hegmanet al.) • Methodologies exist and their value is proven • Identify the Valued Ecosystem Components (VECs) • Consult stakeholders on VECs and agree on key ones • Define the geographical and temporal scale • Build scenarios and assess impacts of each scenario on key VECs (VEC-centered perspective) • Identify impact and risks mitigation strategies following the mitigation hierarchy

3. …but there are challenges to make it work in a project-centered safeguards framework • Roles and responsibilities: attribution of impacts to a specific project is in effect impossible • General attribution methodology considers: • Comparison with/without the Project • Relative contribution of the Project to the resulting cumulative impact • Interdependence of effectiveness of mitigation strategies: considering each project in isolation leads to sub-optimal solutions. • Example: cascade hydropower: • With/without a specific project in the cascade generally does not make a lot of difference to the overall cumulative impact • Cumulative impact >> ∑(project impact): each project can have a small contribution to a resulting significant cumulative impact • Management dilemma: e.g. barrier effect on migratory fish. • Who owns and manages the resulting cumulative impact?

4. Attribution challenge: Chiriqui Viejo River • Nine hydropower plants are being developed in cascade on the Chiriquí Viejo River, in western Panama. • The tailrace of each project - • in effect converting the river • in a succession of small • reservoirs and dewatered • stretches. • Consider cumulative impact • on the river with/without a • specific plant. For each plant.

5. What are the options or how to make it work ? • Public Sector: appropriate regulatory and institutional framework in place, e.g. for hydropower cascade: • Planning tools at the river basin scale, e.g. watershed management plan, • Stakeholders representation, e.g. river basin committees • Authority which “owns” the cumulative impacts at river basin scale • Lessons learned: Sequencing is important. CIA recommendations are unlikely to be acted upon if the key elements of such framework don’t already exist. • Private Sector: best efforts to engage and contribute to a multi-stakeholder collaborative approach for the implementation of management actions that are beyond the capacity of an individual project proponent • Lessons learned: Requires a champion. Who is willing to own by default the cumulative impact issues ? Often difficult to implement in practice due to the attribution challenge and a “tragedy of the commons” situation. • Synergies public/private: “the Panel finds that this absence of complementarities between public and private sector development efforts is partially responsible for the observed flaws.” (Compliance Review Report of loan 2266/OC-PN “Pando-Monte Lirio Hydroelectric Power Plant Project).

6. Another outcome of CIA process: river offset for the Reventazon Hydropower Project in Costa-Rica • A CIA process was carried out considering all existing and future developments in the Reventazon River basin • Conclusion of the CIA was that cumulative impacts on key VECs (fish, tourism, water quality, etc…) would be significant. • As a consequence of the CIA process, decision was taken in line with the mitigation hierarchy to develop and implement a river offset: e.g. commitment to leave a free flowing and healthy river system untouched recognizing that cumulative impact on the developed river system can’t be further mitigated.