Reprinted from; J. D. Wiebe, E. H. Kustan & S. Hum (editors).1984. "Environmental Planning for Large-Scale Development Projects". Final Report of the International Workshop on Environmental Planning for Large-Scale Development Projects, héld at Whistler, British Columbia, Canada, October 1983. Vancouver, B.C.,Canada. 339 pp.

LARGE-SCALE DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS IN THE VENEZUELAN ORINOCO WATERSHED AND THEIR ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT STUDIES by J. E. Rabinovich* Centro de Ecología instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Cientificas Caracas, Venezuela E. I. Buroz Oficina Técnica Caura S.R.L. Caracas, Venezuela and D. Gonzalo Graduate Student

Introduction

Historical, economic and ecological factors have led towards a polarized development of Venezuela: most of the population is concentrated along two main axes: the coast and the Andes. Many important natural resources are located in areas with a population vacuum; that emptiness is crossed by one of the giant rivers of the world, the Orinoco. The river's watershed is not only the source of a major hydroelectric potential, but it also offers the possibilities of massive material'and human transportation through a network of tributaries. Thus, Venezuela is looking towards this watershed as an alternative for the present style of growth. Ambitious multimillion dollar development plans are being evaluated and no doubt many potential environmental effects exist. The government wanted to anticipate these effects in the most preliminary phases of these plans, and a workshop was organized to obtain an indication of the possible potential environmental impacts and provide a guide to the field studies necessary to assess specific consequences.

The Orinoco-Apure Project

The Orinoco-Apure Project (OAP) has a specific task; to perform the studies and analyze the strategies for an integral use of the Orinoco-Apure fluvial system in connection with national, regional and local development plans.

1 Geographical setting

Venezuela is located north of the Equator, (roughly between 1 and 12 degrees north latitude) and its bordering countries are Brazil in the south, Colombia in the west and Guayana in the east; the Caribbean Sea limits Venezuela in the north. (Figure 1) The Orinoco River crosses the

* On sabbatical leave at the Instituto Nacional de Diagnostico e Investigacion de la Enfermedad de Chagas "D.M.F. Chaben", Buenos Aires, Argentina.

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Venezuelan Llanos, splitting the country roughly in half. The degree of concentration of the present-day situation of Venezuela is exemplified by the following figures: 958 of the population occupies 108 of the territory, representing 978 of the working force and producing 948 of the country's territorial raw product. In that 108 of the occupied land the population density averages 150 people/km2 but has at its disposal only 5% of the fluvial resources.

2. Physical Setting

The Orinoco--Apure watershed expands over 830,000 km2, of which 640,000 km2 are in Venezuelan territory and the rest belongs to Colombia. The Orinoco River receives 194 main affluents (95 on the right and 99 on the left margin), and more than 2,000 small rivers, ravines and creeks.

The Orinoco River is born in the Sierra de Parima in the south of Venezuela; it describes a wide arch going first to the west, then north, and finally east, collecting water from 15 out of the 20 states of Venezuela along a stretch of 2,063 km, before discharging into the Atlantic Ocean, At its widest point there are 20 kms between the two margins. Transporting 1.4 x 1012m3 of water per year it constitutes the third largest river in the. world. This volume of water carries 200,000 metric tons of sediments into the ocean, after creating the Orinoco Delta, that spans over 20,000 km2. The average annual discharge is in the order of 38,000 m3/sec, with an average minimum during the dry season of 5,000 m3/sec, and an average maximum of 70,000 m3/sec after the rainy season,

3. Environmental Setting

Due to its latitudinal parameters the Orinoco watershed has an isothermic regime with annual averages that go from about 20°C in the high altitude mesas near the source of,the Orinoco River, to near 30°C in some of the flat areas, almost at sea level, in the middle and upper reaches of the river.

Precipitation shows a relatively seasonal pattern with the rainy season between May and November (peak rains in July and August). The average annual precipitation goes from low values of the order of 100mn/year near Ciudad Bolivar, up to almost 4,900 mm/year at the headwaters of the Paragua River, one of the main tributaries of the Orinoco River.

Several vegetation types are present in the Orinoco watershed: various kinds of rainforests (evergreen, deciduous and semideciduous; gallery, cloud forest), chaparral, and various types of savannahs. The wildlife present in the watershed is also very rich, and includes several species under risk of extinction (the Orinoco Caiman - Crocodylus intermedius; the giant nutria - Pteronura brasiliensis; the arrau turtle - Padocnemis expansa; the jaguar - Pantera onca; and the ocelot - Felis pardalis, among others).

3 4. Economic Setting

The Orinoco watershed is a region rich in hydrological and other natural resources, both renewable and non-renewable. Spread over several hundred thousand square kilcmeters, the following are sane of the various economic enterprises either under way or under consideration in the planning scheme of the OAP:

(a) LIVESTOCK AND AGRICULTURE: Several multiple-purpose dams (Guanare-Masparro, Turen II, Uribante-Arauca) and a giant program of water retention earth dams called "modulos", in the Llanos (savannahs).

(b) FORESTRY: Pine plantations and forest reservations.

(c) HYDROELDCTRICITY: Dam constructions in Uribante- Caparo, Bocono-Tucupido and the final stage of the Guri dam.

(d) MINING: Bauxite at "Ws Pijiguaos", expansion of iron mining at Cerro Bolivar, and gold mining at El Callao.

(e) OIL: Exploration and exploitation of the heavy oil strip north of the Orinoco River (about 800 km long and 50 km wide).

(f) NAVIGATION: Maintenance of the navigation canal.between Ciudad Guayana and Boca Grande, and dredging and buoy setting in the upper and middle Orinoco.

(g) FISHERIES: Freshwater fisheries in the main Orinoco River and its flooded banks, as well as oceanic fisheries near the Orinoco Delta.

(h) RECREATION: Tourism developments around the fluvial system, parks, lagoons, reservoirs and historic sites.

5. Institutional Setting

The OAP is administratively dependent on the Planning Division of the Venezuelan Ministry of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources. However, it operates as an element of technical support to an Interinstitutional Ccnmittee constituted by the following seven governmental institutions: (a) the Ministry of Energy and Mines, (b) the Ministry of Transportation and Cannunications, (c) the Venezuelan Corporation of Guayana, (d) the Electric Ccxnpany of Caroni (EDELCA), (e) the National Dredging Institute, (f) the Autonomous Institute of State Railroads, and (g) the Ministry of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources. These institutions signed, on July 18, 1980, the "Agreement for the Coordination and Execution of Studies for the Exploitation of the Orinoco River and its Affluents".

4 The Environmental Impact Preassessment Workshop

During several years the OAP had been funding field research projects to gather data (hydrological, physical and biological) in order to anticipate environmental impacts of some of the above-mentioned developments. As hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent and a mass of incoherent information started to pour in, the funding procedure was questioned, and a preassessment workshop was requested. A two day workshop was organized with the following objectives;

(a) GENERAL OBJECTIVE: to provide coordination and coherence to the field environmental studies carried out at that time and to be carried out in the future in relation to the OAP. (b) SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES; (i) Preassessment of environmental impacts of some of the main developments in the OAP. (ii) Ranking of those impacts

(iii) Identification of field research projects associated with the ranked impacts.

(c) A PARTICULAR OBJ CTIVE: to facilitate the interaction of investigators active in the research problems associated with the OAP.

1. Workshop Effort

Although the workshop itself was only a two-day effort, the total time used in preparing for the workshop plus the analysis of results and report writing involved about 4 months; the effort was distributed in the following way:

(a) Pre-workshop phase: it lasted 2 months and involved 500 man-hours of work; the workshop was structured, the agenda prepared, the participants selected and contacted, and special forms developed. A 120 page-long document to serve as support for the participants was elaborated with descriptions and quantative information on the developments, the environment and the economics. (b) The workshop itself: in addition to the 5 workshop staff,18 participants were present representing the following fields of endeavour: ecology, botany, wildlife, systems analysis, air pollution, planning, agronomy, land use, navigation, fisheries, sociology, hydrology, hydrochemistry,and industrial engineering. A soil specialist that was invited did not show up. A total of 450 man-hours of©effort was invested in the workshop. (c) Post-workshop phase: for two months the results were analyzed and synthesized and the final reports to the Ministry of the Environment were written. The reports covered two aspects separately: a volume with results (and Annexes) and a volume with an analysis and evaluation of the workshop methodology (also with Annexes). A total of 500 man-hours was invested in this phase. 5 The total effort spanned over four months and involved about 1500 man- hours.

2. Workshop Procedures

The idea behind the workshop was to have a highly structured activity so that all participants would be yielding as much as possible in such a short time. The essence of the procedures are shown in Figure 2. Same of the tasks were performed sequentially and some simultaneously by dividing the workshop participants into subgroups.

The dimensionality of the problem was actually performed by the staff organizing the workshop and was delivered as a given fact to the participants upon arrival. The spatial dimensions were limited to the fluvial axis of the Orinoco River (with a narrow band of, say, 50 km on each side) ; the time horizon limited to 25 years; the developments involved were reduced to the following six: (a) a plant for processing of heavy oils, (b) a pulp and paper plant (to process the trees from the pine plantation), (c) bauxite mining, (d) an alumina plant (e) a dam at a site called "El Infierno", and (f) navigation of the Orinoco River. The environmental categories used were very broad in nature: (a) soils, (b) water, (c) atmosphere, (d) fauna, (e) flora, (f) land use, and (g) socioeconcmics.

The participants were requested to perform the following tasks (Figure 2): (a) to give weight to several criteria with which to evaluate impacts, (b) to identify impacts for each development in each environmental category, and (c) to identify specific field research projects for assessing those impacts.

The criteria and their weights were used to rank the impacts, and as the field research projects were associated with specific impacts, the latter were also automatically ranked. A final screening of the field research projects was performed on the basis of the feasibility of each development.

3. Workshop Results

EVALUATION CRITERIA

To weigh the criteria, the participants were told to assign a score between 0 to 100 to each criterion in such a way that the sum of all of them should be 100. Table 1 shows the results of this first workshop activity; it also identifies the type of criteria used. This process was repeated twice, using a Delphi approach, to obtain a product with smaller variation between participants. From Table 1 we see that not only the coefficient of variation is slightly reduced, but that there is a change in the ranks of some criteria. As averages do not necessarily add up to 100, they were scaled to 100.

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ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS

A total of 260 impacts were identified by the participants; they were grouped as follows: by developments: oil plant = 52, pulp and paper = 39, bauxite mining = 48, alumina plant = 34, dam = 49, navigation = 38; by environmental categories; soil = 24, water = 37, atmosphere = 42, flora = 29, land use = 22, socio- economics = 73.

Many of these impacts were redundant, others were erroneously stated, and some did not make sense or were contradictory; thus, during the first evening, the workshop staff, aided by same volunteer participants made a synthesis of the 260 impacts that resulted in only 82, as shown in Table 2 by development and by environmental category.

Table 2: Final numbers of impacts identified by the workshop after synthesis. The percent reduction refers to the reduction from the original number of impacts before synthesis. The participants also filled in special forms in which - only for those categories considered by them to be their specialty - they scored each impact (for all developments) according to the 10 criteria of Table 1 (criterion 11 was used by the wkshop staff in some calculations). This task was the participants` final activity. The staff worked in the evening calculating an index of "seriousness" for each impact in each entry of Table 2. Three different indices were tried, and finally a simple weighted sum was preferred.

n

I j,k,l = ∑ SiWi i=i

where Si and Wi are the scores and weights for criterion i, respectively; and n = number of evaluation criteria = 11).

The results of such a process are given in Table 3. The entries show the "seriousness" of each impact in a 1--100 scale; each cell may have up to 4 indices, for the synthesis reduced the number of impacts in each crossing to,that figure. The most serious effects, by developments, were caused by the dam on soil (64), water (71), fauna (70), flora (62), land use (60), socio-economic (65), and by the heavy oil plant on the atmosphere (66).

The indices of seriousness of the environmental impacts were classified in absolute and relative categories (5 categories each). Table 4 shows the 11 impacts that (out of 85) resulted in the category of maximum relative seriousness.

FIELD RESEARCH NEEDS

During the morning of the second day the participants filled out a special form to propose those environmental research projects that they thought should be developed in relation to the 8 2 impacts previously identified. A key detail in this process was that the participants still did not know the final values of the amalgamation indices, thus ignoring yet the ranking of the impacts.

A total of 287 research projects were proposed, and these were also subjected to a synthesis process to avoid duplication, ambiguity and excess generality, as well as to eliminate straight-forward incongruent projects. The result was a reduction to 88 projects, grouped as follows by developments: oil plant = 17, paper and pulp plant = 10, bauxite mining = 13, alumina plant = 12, dam = 21, and navigation = 15; by environmental categories: soil = none, water = 13, atmosphere = 10, fauna = 15, flora = 16, land use = 2, socio-economic = 31.

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When the 88 projects were associated to the 11 impacts of maximum seriousness the number was reduced to 17 field research projects: 3 associated with impacts produced by the oil plant, 12 associated with the impacts produced by the dam, and 2 associated with the impacts produced by the navigation developments.

Conclusions

The main objectives were achieved. The Ministry of the Environment obtained a hierarchical ranking of impacts and research projects that, depending upon the funds available, could eventually be used to establish priorities. However, both frcm the part of the workshop staff as well as frcm the Ministry of the Environment, two basic aspects were clear: (a) many numerical evaluations are weak and figures should be taken with reservations (this resulted, among other things, frcm difficulties in having all participants agree conceptually on evaluation criteria), and (b) the whole process is essentially subjective. The workshop staff analyzed, for example, the weighing©of criteria by professional backgrounds and found interesting differences; so score of the impacts and their seriousness would have been different if a different group of participants had been selected.

Due to these factors both workshop staff and the Ministry of the Environment were aware that the results obtained were only a rough preassessment, pretending only to give a general orientation on how to direct future efforts for a detailed environmental impact assessment.