Search

Governments around the world rely on environmental impact assessment (EIA) to understand the environmental risks of proposed developments. To examine the basis for these appraisals, we examine the output of EIA processes in jurisdictions within seven countries, focusing on scope (spatial and temporal), mitigation actions and whether impacts were identified as ‘significant’. We find that the number of impacts characterized as significant is generally low. While this finding may indicate that EIA is successful at promoting environmentally sustainable development, it may also indicate that the methods used to assess impact are biased against findings of significance. To explore the methods used, we investigate the EIA process leading to significance determination. We find that EIA reports could be more transparent with regard to the spatial scale they use to assess impacts to wildlife. We also find that few reports on mining projects consider temporal scales that are precautionary with regard to the effects of mines on water resources. Across our sample of reports, we find that few EIAs meaningfully consider the different ways that cumulative impacts can interact. Across countries, we find that proposed mitigation measures are often characterized as effective without transparent justification, and sometimes are described in ways that render the mitigation measure proposal ambiguous. Across the reports in our sample, professional judgement is overwhelmingly the determinant of impact significance, with little transparency around the reasoning process involved or input by stakeholders. We argue that the credibility and accuracy of the EIA process could be improved by adopting more rigorous assessment methodologies and empowering regulators to enforce their use. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

Determining where environmental management is best applied, either through regulating single sectors of human activities or across sectors, is complicated by interactions between human impacts and the environment. In this article, we show how an explicit representation of human-environment interactions can help, via “impact networks” including activities (e.g. shipping), stressors (e.g. ship strikes), species (e.g. humpback whales) or ecosystem services (e.g. marine recreation). Impact networks can enable the identification of “leverage nodes”, which, if present, can direct managers to the activities and stressors crucial for reducing risk to important ecosystem components. Exploring an impact network for a coastal ecosystem in British Columbia, Canada, we seek to identify these leverage nodes using a new approach employing Bayesian Belief Networks of risks to ecosystems. In so doing, we address three key questions: (1) Do leverage nodes exist? (2) Do management plans for species correctly identify leverage nodes? (3) Does the management of leverage nodes for certain species realize benefits for other species and ecosystem services? We show that there are several leverage nodes across all species investigated, and show that preconceptions about the regulation of risk to species can misidentify leverage nodes, potentially leading to ineffective management. Notably, we show that managing fisheries does not reduce overall risk to herring whereas managing diverse cumulative impacts including nutrient runoff, oil spills, and marine debris can reduce risk to herring, additional species, and related ecosystem services. Thus, by targeting leverage nodes, managers can efficiently mitigate risks for whole communities, ecosystems, and ecosystem services.

Increasingly, conservation organizations are conducting conservation activities with local communities. Many conservation organizations now position their work as contributing to sustainable development initiatives, and local involvement in conservation is understood to increase conservation and sustainability success. Aside from communities, however, conservation organizations are accountable to funders and partners, and values and priorities vary across actor type. Mismatched goals combine with power imbalances between conservation actors, and create decision-making conflict throughout conservation processes, from objective setting through implementation and evaluation. As a result, communities may lose local decision-making power or face new negative consequences, trust in organizational/community partnerships may be undermined, and conservation organizations’ reputations (and the reputation of the sector as whole) may suffer. In this commentary we point out processes and conditions that can lead conservation organizations to privilege accountability to funders and others over accountability to communities, thereby undermining community-level success. We follow with suggestions for how funders, conservation organizations and others may improve community engagement and community-level outcomes, and improve their reputations in general and in their work with communities, by actively leveraging accountability to the community and involving local community members in decision-making.

GGS was supported by NSERC Canada Graduate Scholarship and a Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions doctoral grant, as well as by funding from the Nereus Program; AEP gratefully acknowledges generous support from the Canada Research Chairs program; VFF is partially supported by CNPq grants; EA is supported by the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (grant ECF1090229); and KMAC is supported by an SSHRC Insight Grant (#435-2017-1071). Maintaining the continued flow of benefits from science, as well as societal support for science, requires sustained engagement between the research community and the general public. On the basis of data from an international survey of 1092 participants (634 established researchers and 458 students) in 55 countries and 315 research institutions, we found that institutional recognition of engagement activities is perceived to be undervalued relative to the societal benefit of those activities. Many researchers report that their institutions do not reward engagement activities despite institutions’ mission statements promoting such engagement. Furthermore, institutions that actually measure engagement activities do so only to a limited extent. Most researchers are strongly motivated to engage with the public for selfless reasons, which suggests that incentives focused on monetary benefits or career progress may not align with researchers’ values. If institutions encourage researchers’ engagement activities in a more appropriate way – by moving beyond incentives – they might better achieve their institutional missions and bolster the crucial contributions of researchers to society. Publisher PDF

The United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021–2030, henceforth the Ocean Decade) aims to galvanize the international community to acquire and apply scientific knowledge of the ocean. The Ocean Decade is specifically intended to help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including its promise to “leave no one behind,” which includes coastal Least Developed Countries and Small Island Developing States, and will undoubtedly influence research agendas and financing well beyond 2030. This focus is captured in the phrase “the science we need for the ocean we want” (1). This first-of-its-kind UN Decade will require ambition and commitment, especially during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) crisis. Researchers hoping to help deliver the “ocean we want” as a society-first principle need to understand how science can benefit ocean-dependent people. This requires a science model that co-designs and co-delivers solutions in collaboration with people whose livelihood depends on the ocean, such as the Madagascar fishers pictured here. Image credit: ©artush/123RF.com. The current draft of the Ocean Decade Implementation Plan establishes a framework of outcomes, actions, and objectives, acknowledging the need for interdisciplinary approaches to design and deliver solution-oriented research alongside ocean-dependent people (1). Recent proposals from the academic literature for the Ocean Decade emphasize increasing our global biophysical understanding through exploration and observation of, and experimentation on, the ocean (2⇓⇓–5). But will understanding the ocean lead to “the ocean we want”? We argue that proposals for the UN Decade should consider a crucial point: To achieve the ocean we want, we must better understand the needs and priorities of ocean-dependent peoples and evaluate potential solutions for them. Advancements in marine scientific knowledge and technological innovation have brought myriad benefits to people and the planet. They include: understanding global environmental change; assessing effects of anthropogenic … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: geralds{at}mun.ca. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1

Achieving the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) results in many ecological, social, and economic consequences that are inter-related. Understanding relationships between sustainability goals and determining their interactions can help prioritize effective and efficient policy options. This paper presents a framework that integrates existing knowledge from literature and expert opinions to rapidly assess the relationships between one SDG goal and another. Specifically, given the important role of the oceans in the world's social-ecological systems, this study focuses on how SDG 14 (Life Below Water), and the targets within that goal, contributes to other SDG goals. This framework differentiates relationships based on compatibility (co-benefit, trade-off, neutral), the optional nature of achieving one goal in attaining another, and whether these relationships are context dependent. The results from applying this framework indicate that oceans SDG targets are related to all other SDG goals, with two ocean targets (of seven in total) most related across all other SDG goals. Firstly, the ocean SDG target to increase economic benefits to Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and least developed countries for sustainable marine uses has positive relationships across all SDGs. Secondly, the ocean SDG target to eliminate overfishing, illegal and destructive fishing practices is a necessary pre-condition for achieving the largest number of other SDG targets. This study highlights the importance of the oceans in achieving sustainable development. The rapid assessment framework can be applied to other SDGs to comprehensively map out the subset of targets that are also pivotal in achieving sustainable development.

Comprehensive marine management approaches, such as ecosystem based management and marine spatial planning, would benefit from quantitative, spatially explicit estimates of the cumulative impact of human activities on marine ecosystems. In this study, a method to map and quantify cumulative impact was applied to estimate the combined impact of multiple stressors on Tauranga Harbour, a large estuary in New Zealand. The impact of eight stressors on seven ecosystems was assessed at a 100 m resolution, using New Zealand-specific expert judgement on the vulnerability of different ecosystems to each stressor. Estimated cumulative impact tended to be highest in the southern basin and inner estuaries, corresponding with sensitive ecosystems and multiple stressors and reflecting what is known about the distribution of pressures in Tauranga Harbour. Using benthic community data as an independent estimate of ecological condition, we had the novel opportunity to validate cumulative impact predicted from the model. Only a weak relationship was found between the estimated cumulative impact and measured ecological condition and several reasons for this are considered. Substitution of a more realistic sediment layer improved model outputs, highlighting the importance of accurate input data, particularly for stressors or ecosystems with high impact weights. Different standardisation methods did not greatly affect the spatial distribution of cumulative impact patterns in the harbour. The study highlights some fundamental issues for consideration when using this cumulative impact mapping approach, such as the importance of involving the expert panel throughout the course of the study and the availability and quality of the data used to construct the model.

There is increasing recognition in academic circles of the importance of adaptive governance for the sustainability of social-ecological systems, but little examination of specific implications for the 34% of land-use where human activities are pervasive but potentially commensurate with functioning ecosystems: agricultural production systems. In this paper, we argue for the need to view food systems and agro-ecosystems as multi-scalar complex adaptive systems and identify five key challenging characteristics of such systems: multi-causality; cumulative impacts; regime shifts; teleconnections and mismatch of scales. These characteristics are necessary features of multi-scalar adaptive systems, and apply equally to social and natural subsystems. We discuss the implications of these characteristics for agricultural production systems and consider how governance can rise to these challenges. We present five case studies that highlight these issues: pollinator declines; payments for ecosystem services; pest control and pesticide resistance; downstream aquatic systems in Tasman Bay, New Zealand; and riparian buffers in Puget Sound, USA. From these case studies we derive recommendations for managing agricultural systems, both specific and general. Ultimately, adaptive governance of agro-ecosystems will likely hinge upon three paradigm shifts: viewing farmers and ranchers not only as food producers but also as land and water managers; seeking not yield maximization but rather resilient management of food ecosystems; and critically, as it transcends the production-system literature, engaging broad audiences not only as consumers but also citizens.

Coastal environments are some of the most populated on Earth, with greater pressures projected in the future. Managing coastal systems requires the consideration of multiple uses, which both benefit from and threaten multiple ecosystem services. Thus understanding the cumulative impacts of human activities on coastal ecosystem services would seem fundamental to management, yet there is no widely accepted approach for assessing these. This study trials an approach for understanding the cumulative impacts of anthropogenic change, focusing on Tasman and Golden Bays, New Zealand. Using an expert elicitation procedure, we collected information on three aspects of cumulative impacts: the importance and magnitude of impacts by various activities and stressors on ecosystem services, and the causal processes of impact on ecosystem services. We assessed impacts to four ecosystem service benefits — fisheries, shellfish aquaculture, marine recreation and existence value of biodiversity—addressing three main research questions: (1) how severe are cumulative impacts on ecosystem services (correspondingly, what potential is there for restoration)?; (2) are threats evenly distributed across activities and stressors, or do a few threats dominate?; (3) do prominent activities mainly operate through direct stressors, or do they often exacerbate other impacts? We found (1) that despite high uncertainty in the threat posed by individual stressors and impacts, total cumulative impact is consistently severe for all four ecosystem services. (2) A subset of drivers and stressors pose important threats across the ecosystem services explored, including climate change, commercial fishing, sedimentation and pollution. (3) Climate change and commercial fishing contribute to prominent indirect impacts across ecosystem services by exacerbating regional impacts, namely sedimentation and pollution. The prevalence and magnitude of these indirect, networked impacts highlights the need for approaches like this to understand mechanisms of impact, in order to develop strategies to manage them.

The elicitation of expert judgment is an important tool for assessment of risks and impacts in environmental management contexts, and especially important as decision-makers face novel challenges where prior empirical research is lacking or insufficient. Evidence-driven elicitation approaches typically involve techniques to derive more accurate probability distributions under fairly specific contexts. Experts are, however, prone to overconfidence in their judgements. Group elicitations with diverse experts can reduce expert overconfidence by allowing cross-examination and reassessment of prior judgements, but groups are also prone to uncritical "groupthink" errors. When the problem context is underspecified the probability that experts commit groupthink errors may increase. This study addresses how structured workshops affect expert variability among and certainty within responses in a New Zealand case study. We find that experts' risk estimates before and after a workshop differ, and that group elicitations provided greater consistency of estimates, yet also greater uncertainty among experts, when addressing prominent impacts to four different ecosystem services in coastal New Zealand. After group workshops, experts provided more consistent ranking of risks and more consistent best estimates of impact through increased clarity in terminology and dampening of extreme positions, yet probability distributions for impacts widened. The results from this case study suggest that group elicitations have favorable consequences for the quality and uncertainty of risk judgments within and across experts, making group elicitation techniques invaluable tools in contexts of limited data.

Ecosystem services research has been focused on the ways that humans directly benefit from goods and services, and economic valuation techniques have been used to measure those benefits. We argue that, although it is appropriate in some cases, this focus on direct use and economic quantification is often limiting and can detract from environmental research and effective management, in part by crowding out other understandings of human—environment relationships. Instead, we make the case that the systematic consideration of multiple metaphors of such relationships in assessing social—ecological systems will foster better understanding of the many ways in which humans relate to, care for, and value ecosystems. Where it is possible, we encourage a deliberative approach to ecosystem management whereby ecosystem researchers actively engage conservationists and local resource users to make explicit, through open deliberation, the types of metaphors salient to their conservation problem.

The multi-scalar complexity of social-ecological systems makes it challenging to quantify impacts from human activities on ecosystems, inspiring risk-based approaches to assessments of potential effects of human activities on valued ecosystem components. Risk assessments do not commonly include the risk from indirect effects as mediated via habitat and prey. In this case study from British Columbia, Canada, we illustrate how such "indirect risks" can be incorporated into risk assessments for seventeen ecosystem components. We ask whether (i) the addition of indirect risk changes the at-risk ranking of the seventeen ecosystem components and if (ii) risk scores correlate with trophic prey and habitat linkages in the food web. Even with conservative assumptions about the transfer of impacts or risks from prey species and habitats, the addition of indirect risks in the cumulative risk score changes the ranking of priorities for management. In particular, resident orca, Steller sea lion, and Pacific herring all increase in relative risk, more closely aligning these species with their "at-risk status" designations. Risk assessments are not a replacement for impact assessments, but-by considering the potential for indirect risks as we demonstrate here-they offer a crucial complementary perspective for the management of ecosystems and the organisms within.

The authors are involved in an interdisciplinary research initiative addressing the factors influencing scientists’ level of engagement in public policy and science-based advocacy. They invite all attendees of the ESA Annual Meeting, 7–12 August in Austin, Texas, to contribute to this effort by taking a short survey that will be distributed during poster sessions and breaks in the scheduled program.

Scientists are increasingly called upon to engage in policy formulation, but the literature on engagement is strong on speculation and weak on evidence. Using a survey administered at several broadly “ecological” conferences, we investigated: (1) the extent to which respondents engage in policy-related activities (including reporting scientific results, interpreting science for policy makers, integrating science into decision making, taking a position on a policy issue, and acting as a decision maker); (2) what factors best explain these types of engagement; and (3) whether respondents' activity levels match their stated beliefs on such activities. Different factors explain different forms of participation. Past negative experience was identified as a barrier to taking part in policy, while self-perceived competence in navigating the science–policy interface was consistently important in explaining activity across all engagement types, highlighting the importance of training programs linking scientists to policy. Many respondents believed that scientists should interpret, integrate, and advocate, which contrasts with previous research and relatively low levels of self-reported participation in policy.

We thank Orenstein for discussing our recent article in BioScience (Raymond et al. 2013).