Technical Design
Whether land use planning, position papers, data analysis, technical reviews or environmental monitoring, Endeavour can design the strategies to help your nation achieve their stewardship goals.
Our team’s experience in environmental monitoring programs and working with Indigenous communities to achieve their goals is unparalleled. Not only has each member of our team worked with Indigenous communities on environmental monitoring and stewardship issues for many years, but we have been instrumental in the design and implementation of monitoring and analysis projects throughout the Alberta oil sands region.
Our focus is helping communities build monitoring programs that answer their specific questions and meet community needs. Too often, monitoring is suggested as a mitigation for potential environmental impacts without consideration of how this information will support Indigenous communities in repairing the land or improving their stewardship abilities. As a result, a great deal of monitoring effort is wasted finding answers that may be academically interesting but do not have the power or specificity to allow Indigenous community members to make informed decisions.
We often live in a world where data and knowledge are available, but have not been analyzed to their full potential to truly answer the questions that Indigenous communities have. Furthermore, a poor understanding of statistics or experimental design plagues environmental monitoring and reporting, leading to analyses that are underpowered and over-generalized.
And it is only when monitoring and analyses are linked to supporting stewardship or management goals do they become useful, rather than academically interesting. Endeavour and collaborators have worked with multiple communities to develop land use planning approaches that improve Indigenous stewardship.
Endeavour led a technical team that reviewed Alberta's existing cumulative effects management framework for the Lower Athabasca Region, and recommended amendments.
Working with eleven Indigenous communities in the Lower Athabasca Region, we are identifying key questions and analyzing existing oil sands monitoring data to determine whether core monitoring can address Indigenous concerns.
Working with researchers from throughout the Alberta oil sands region, Endeavour contributed to a special series compiling the state of the knowledge from oil sands monitoring. We have been intimately involved in the program, including helping to develop its governance structure, since its inception in 2018.
Working with researchers from throughout the Alberta oil sands region, Endeavour contributed to a special series compiling the state of the knowledge from oil sands monitoring. We have been intimately involved in the program, including helping to develop its governance structure, since its inception in 2018.
The Forest Health Monitoring Program of the Wood Buffalo Environmental Association was initiated in 1998 in response to concerns from community members in Fort McKay First Nation regarding the potential impacts of oil sands development on forest health. This synthesis report summarized the findings from a major data review and made recommendations for amending the program.
Typical approaches to detecting environmental change, like looking for trends, are only one type of change. As seen from this analysis of air quality data, environmental change can be dynamic and non-linear. However, a narrative based on lack of trends resulted in Fort McKay First Nation's concerns about air quality being discounted. In this report, we reanalyzed ambient air quality data to reflect the lived experience of community members.