The Eastern Athabasca Regional Monitoring Program (EARMP)

  What is
  
    EARMP

The Eastern Athabasca Regional Monitoring Program (EARMP) is an industry-government partnership between the Government of Saskatchewan, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC), and uranium mining companies, Cameco Corporation and Orano Canada Inc. The environmental monitoring program was established in 2011 under the Province of Saskatchewan’s Boreal Watershed Initiative. One of the primary goals of the program was to assess the ecological integrity of Saskatchewan’s northern watersheds in order to address potential environmental concerns and to identify sustainable management practices in the region.

Community Environmental Monitoring Program

The Athabasca region is home to several indigenous communities as well as uranium mining and milling operations. These communities and their indigenous and local knowledge are at the core of the EARMP study design and its goal of monitoring potential effects on the water, fish, berries, and wildlife in the Athabasca region downstream of uranium mining operations. The EARMP community program was developed to address potential concerns about the safety of traditional foods.

Technical Environmental Monitoring Program

The technical monitoring program was established to monitor potential long-term changes in the aquatic environment far-downstream of uranium mining and milling operations in the Eastern Athabasca region. The technical program collects water, sediment, fish (flesh and bone), and benthic invertebrates for analysis.

The uranium mining industry is regulated by both federal and provincial agencies including Environment and Climate Change Canada, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, and the Saskatchewan Ministry of Environment. Extensive amounts of environmental monitoring are required and completed near each uranium mining and milling operation in northern Saskatchewan, yearly. In addition, community-based environmental monitoring has occurred in some form throughout the Athabasca region for over 20 years. EARMP is meant to complement the other monitoring programs and allow for a more comprehensive evaluation of potential cumulative effects from industry in northern Saskatchewan.

  What are
  
    CUMULATIVE EFFECTS?

Cumulative effects are defined as impacts on the environment that result from the incremental impact of an action when added to other past, present, and foreseeable future actions. Cumulative effects might occur when operations overlap spatially, such as when two watersheds exposed to uranium mining and milling activities converge, and they may also occur temporally if contaminants are emitted into the environment over extended periods of time. EARMP was developed to establish baseline conditions and facilitate the examination of spatial and temporal changes over the long term. For more background, see About