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Guidelines for conducting Integrated Environmental Assessments
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Integrated Environmental Assessments (IEA) are a powerful tool to help inform the
development of evidence‐based environmental policy and decision making, bring relevant
scientific findings to a broad audience and raise awareness to changing environmental state and trends as well as identify emerging environmental issues. Integrated Environmental Assessments also provide a forum for stakeholders, including scientists, policy‐makers, and decision‐makers to interact and discuss environmental issues and potential solutions. For these assessments to be most useful, they must be performed in a consistent manner. For this reason, Member States of the United Nations Environment Programme (UN Environment) requested that guidelines be developed for conducting Integrated Environmental Assessments.
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... Being effective means affecting, being needed for, or having relatively low costs for, the achievement of planned targets or desired outcomes (Boileau et al., 2019). Thus, the effectiveness of a PA can be considered as the extent to which the strategy for establishing the PA contributes to the expected environmental or socio-economic change, and the relative cost of achieving the goals (Chen et al., 2023). ...
Protected areas are critical for providing ecosystem services. However, studies on the effect of protected areas on ecosystem service enhancement remain lacking, which restricts efficient protected area management. In this study, a statistical matching approach was used to analyze the role of 637 protected areas in China in enhancing ecosystem services. The drivers that influence the effectiveness of protected areas were also explored. The results show that 94% of the protected areas enhanced at least one type of the selected ecosystem services compared with the controls (unprotected areas), and protected areas in areas with high human activity disturbance or ecological fragility were more effective in enhancing ecosystem services than in other areas. At the national scale, the effectiveness of protected areas for carbon sequestration, soil conservation, and water yield services was mainly influenced by physical geographic variables (e.g., mean annual temperature, annual precipitation), and of habitat quality service also by socioeconomic variables (e.g., road network density, distance to the nearest cropland). The main drivers in the various dry and wet climate regions differed from those operating at national scale, reflecting the spatial heterogeneity of natural and socioeconomic conditions. Our results provide useful information for application in protected area management.
Environmentally-extended input-output (EEIO) analysis provides a simple and robust method for evaluating the linkages between economic consumption activities and environmental impacts, including the harvest and degradation of natural resources. EEIO is now widely used to evaluate the upstream, consumption-based drivers of downstream environmental impacts and to evaluate the environmental impacts embodied in goods and services that are traded between nations. While the mathematics of input-output analysis are not complex, straightforward explanations of this approach for those without mathematical backgrounds remain difficult to find. This manuscript provides a conceptual and intuitive introduction to the goals of EEIO, the principles and mathematics behind EEIO analysis and the strengths and limitations of the EEIO approach. The wider adoption of EEIO approaches will help researchers and policy makers to better measure, and potentially decrease, the ultimate drivers of environmental degradation.
2014. Achieving good environmental status in the Black Sea: scale mismatches in environmental management. Ecology and Society 19(3): ABSTRACT. The Black Sea has suffered severe environmental degradation. Governance of the Black Sea region is complex and results in a series of scale mismatches which constrain management. This paper develops a simple classification of spatial scale mismatches incorporating the driver, pressure, state, welfare, response (DPSWR) framework. The scale mismatch classification is applied to two major environmental problems of the Black Sea, eutrophication and small pelagic fisheries. A number of scale mismatches are described and classified and potential solutions are identified.
The condition and trend of 196 marine environment components were assessed for Australia's national 2011 State of the Environment Report using professional judgements derived by expert elicitation. The judgements from the diverse group of field-experienced scientists and practitioners were assembled within a single framework common to all components to provide an integrated system-level assessment. Components assessed included the natural environmental assets and values in biodiversity, ecosystem health, and the pressures. A high level of agreement was achieved amongst the disciplines and experts on the decision structure and the scores or grades, even though many components are data-poor at the national scale. The assessment confirmed the clear association between human development history and extant condition of the biodiversity and ecosystem health. Overall, the marine environment was considered to be in good condition relative to conditions prior to European colonisation of the Australian mainland. However, more components of the biodiversity were considered to be deteriorating than improving, inferring that the overall quality of ecosystems is in decline. Combined present-day pressures were considered to be greatest in the temperate and the coastal waters (<200 m depth) adjacent to more developed areas of the coast in the South-east region. Here, condition of biodiversity and ecosystem health was considered to be poor, and in some places very poor. Condition in the North region, where there is only limited human development, was considered to be good. The process identified environmental components considered to be in the 'best of the best' and 'worst of the worst' condition, providing focus for subsequent prioritisation in national environment policies. Gaps identified include a lack of national-scale data on the condition and trend in almost all biodiversity components other than fished species, for which most knowledge is skewed towards resource use. Also, there is a lack of monitoring of the links between national pressures, such as port development, and regional biodiversity condition in response to policy settings and management activity. The assessment process deployed here provides a model for repeatable integrated system-level assessment and reporting at the national and regional scales in data-poor marine situations. (C) 2014 The Author. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
There is a pressing need to integrate biophysical and human dimensions science to better inform holistic ecosystem management supporting the transition from single species or single-sector management to multi-sector ecosystem-based management. Ecosystem-based management should focus upon ecosystem services, since they reflect societal goals, values, desires, and benefits. The inclusion of ecosystem services into holistic management strategies improves management by better capturing the diversity of positive and negative human-natural interactions and making explicit the benefits to society. To facilitate this inclusion, we propose a conceptual model that merges the broadly applied Driver, Pressure, State, Impact, and Response (DPSIR) conceptual model with ecosystem services yielding a Driver, Pressure, State, Ecosystem service, and Response (EBM-DPSER) conceptual model. The impact module in traditional DPSIR models focuses attention upon negative anthropomorphic impacts on the ecosystem; by replacing impacts with ecosystem services the EBM-DPSER model incorporates not only negative, but also positive changes in the ecosystem. Responses occur as a result of changes in ecosystem services and include inter alia management actions directed at proactively altering human population or individual behavior and infrastructure to meet societal goals. The EBM-DPSER conceptual model was applied to the Florida Keys and Dry Tortugas marine ecosystem as a case study to illustrate how it can inform management decisions. This case study captures our system-level understanding and results in a more holistic representation of ecosystem and human society interactions, thus improving our ability to identify trade-offs. The EBM-DPSER model should be a useful operational tool for implementing EBM, in that it fully integrates our knowledge of all ecosystem components while focusing management attention upon those aspects of the ecosystem most important to human society and does so within a framework already familiar to resource managers.
The elicitation of scientific and technical judgments from experts, in the form of subjective probability distributions, can be a valuable addition to other forms of evidence in support of public policy decision making. This paper explores when it is sensible to perform such elicitation and how that can best be done. A number of key issues are discussed, including topics on which there are, and are not, experts who have knowledge that provides a basis for making informed predictive judgments; the inadequacy of only using qualitative uncertainty language; the role of cognitive heuristics and of overconfidence; the choice of experts; the development, refinement, and iterative testing of elicitation protocols that are designed to help experts to consider systematically all relevant knowledge when they make their judgments; the treatment of uncertainty about model functional form; diversity of expert opinion; and when it does or does not make sense to combine judgments from different experts. Although it may be tempting to view expert elicitation as a low-cost, low-effort alternative to conducting serious research and analysis, it is neither. Rather, expert elicitation should build on and use the best available research and analysis and be undertaken only when, given those, the state of knowledge will remain insufficient to support timely informed assessment and decision making.
Policies that encourage the use of more efficiency irrigation technology are often viewed as effective, politically feasible methods to reduce the consumptive use of water for agricultural production. Despite their widespread use, these policies have not been subject to empirical evaluation. In this article, we evaluate the effect on groundwater extraction of a widespread conversion from traditional center pivot irrigation systems to higher efficiency dropped-nozzle center pivot systems that has occurred in western Kansas. State and national cost-share programs subsidized the conversion. We find that the programs have not had the intended effect; the shift to more efficient irrigation technology has not decreased the amount of water applied to a given crop, and has actually increased groundwater extraction through changing cropping patterns.