Executive summary

Sustainability development has become a very important topic nowadays mainly due to recent changes of the business environment. Therefore organizations highly focus on not only financial performance but also environmental, social, technological and many other aspects as well. Peace River Site C project is a third proposed dam and the hydraulic power station which based on the Peace River, British Columbia in Canada. The target of this project is to generate 1,100 MW of capacity per year which is enough to provide electricity more than 450,000 per year. Construction of the project was commenced in 2014 and will be completed in 2024. Then this project will have ability to provide clean, reliable power for next 100 years for very affordable price. Even though proper environmental analysis was conducted prior to initiate the construction, many criticisms and objections were raised after start the construction. This is due to environmental and sociocultural issues. Therefore objective of this paper is to identify and evaluate those environmental and sociocultural issues. Further, this study discuss financial and business aspects of the project. According to report, many environmental effects have been identified including effects to the wetlands, bird spices and many other species and mainly greenhouse gas emission. When it comes to social issues, this project directly affect to First Nations and their traditional practices and also farmers and residents. Further, possible mitigated actions have been also discussed in this paper. Secondary information such as journal articles, subject related books have been used to conduct this study.

1.0 Environmental aspect

1.1 Introduction

According to Canadian environment assessment agency (CEA), there are many adverse environmental effects of this Peace River site C dam project. According to research, this project could have more highly critical environmental effects than any other project which evaluate according to Canadian environmental assessment act in last 25 years (Bakker and Hendrick, 2019). This is mainly due to rare biodiversity of the area which ecologically highly important and significance to first nations’ land. Further, it has been identified that there is greenhouse gas emission too. Therefore, alternative options need to be find to minimize the environmental effect.

1.2 Impact identification

Mainly the environmental effects are evaluated based on the biophysical and sociocultural value. Significance of this effect is measured based on key criteria such as geographical significance, scale, duration, timing, frequency and reversibility. Once determine the significance of the environmental effects, likelihood of the effects need to determine. Based on that, the most significance environmental effects has been identified. CEA assess the environmental effects based on the below criteria.