Environmental history: A piece in the puzzle for establishing plans for environmental management

Establishment of plans for environmental planning and management requires that a number of natural and societal factors must be taken into consideration. Insights into the inherent dynamics of nature as well as the role that past human activities have played for establishing the current condition of the landscape and the natural environment in general are essential. Many natural and man-made changes occur over time scales of decades or centuries, and these are difficult to comprehend without a historical perspective. Such a perspective can be obtained using palaeoecological studies, i.e. by geochemical and biological analyses of lake sediment and peat deposits. To illustrate the long-term dynamics of nature and particularly the role of man, we present here five case studies from Sweden concerning pollution, lake acidification, lake eutrophication, biodiversity, and landscape dynamics and conservation – topics of broad interests – and discuss benefits of including a longer time perspective in environmental management.     

Adaptive management in the U.S. National Wildlife Refuge System: science-management partnerships for conservation delivery

Adaptive management is an approach to recurrent decision making in which uncertainty about the decision is reduced over time through comparison of outcomes predicted by competing models against observed values of those outcomes. The National Wildlife Refuge System (NWRS) of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is a large land management program charged with making natural resource management decisions, which often are made under considerable uncertainty, severe operational constraints, and conditions that limit ability to precisely carry out actions as intended. The NWRS presents outstanding opportunities for the application of adaptive management, but also difficult challenges. We describe two cooperative programs between the Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Geological Survey to implement adaptive management at scales ranging from small, single refuge applications to large, multi-refuge, multi-region projects. Our experience to date suggests three important attributes common to successful implementation: a vigorous multi-partner collaboration, practical and informative decision framework components, and a sustained commitment to the process. Administrators in both agencies should consider these attributes when developing programs to promote the use and acceptance of adaptive management in the NWRS.     

U.S. Electric Utilities and Renewable Energy: Drivers for Adoption

Renewable energy can address rising demand for energy, environmental protection, energy security, and job creation. This paper assesses resource, economic, social, and political drivers for the adoption of renewable energy. Analysis of the data collected from over 100 interviews with utility managers reveals that production tax credits significantly influence the percent of renewable energy in a utility's portfolio. The availability of renewable energy resources, economic drivers, social influences, and political drivers such as renewable portfolio standards and government grants are not significant drivers. Understanding these drivers can help electric utilities, governments, and other stakeholders with their efforts to reap the benefits of renewable energy.     

Environmental audit: III. Improving the management of environmental information for toxic substances

Environmental programs have been commonly driven by a preoccupation with the collection of data in the mistaken belief thatdata is synonymous withinformation. The distinction between data (that is, the quantified and qualitative attributes of a particular environment) and information (specifically, data processed so as to focus upon a particular environmental problem) will become far more important to environmental managers. They will increasingly manage their information through use of what has become known as information resource management (IRM) and the attendant use of critical success factors methodology. Environmental managers will thereby move away from concerns about data and specific EDP hardware and applications toward managing information as a valuable agency resource. In applying IRM, they will find it helpful to include a number of planning elements and to resolve early a number of issues critical to its successful use.     

Indicators of carbon storage in U.S. ecosystems: baseline for terrestrial carbon accounting

Policymakers, program managers, and landowners need information about net terrestrial carbon sequestration in forests, croplands, grasslands, and shrublands to understand the cumulative effects of carbon trading programs, expanding biofuels production, and changing environmental conditions in addition to agricultural and forestry uses. Objective information systems that establish credible baselines and track changes in carbon storage can provide the accountability needed for carbon trading programs to achieve durable carbon sequestration and for biofuels initiatives to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions. A multi-sector stakeholder design process was used to produce a new indicator for the 2008 State of the Nation's Ecosystems report that presents metrics of carbon storage for major ecosystem types, specifically change in the amount of carbon gained or lost over time and the amount of carbon stored per unit area (carbon density). These metrics have been developed for national scale use, but are suitable for adaptation to multiple scales such as individual farm and forest parcels, carbon offset markets and integrated national and international assessments. To acquire the data necessary for a complete understanding of how much, and where, carbon is gained or lost by U.S. ecosystems, expansion and integration of monitoring programs will be required.     

U.S. Natural Resources and Climate Change: Concepts and Approaches for Management Adaptation

Public lands and waters in the United States traditionally have been managed using frameworks and objectives that were established under an implicit assumption of stable climatic conditions. However, projected climatic changes render this assumption invalid. Here, we summarize general principles for management adaptations that have emerged from a major literature review. These general principles cover many topics including: (1) how to assess climate impacts to ecosystem processes that are key to management goals; (2) using management practices to support ecosystem resilience; (3) converting barriers that may inhibit management responses into opportunities for successful implementation; and (4) promoting flexible decision making that takes into account challenges of scale and thresholds. To date, the literature on management adaptations to climate change has mostly focused on strategies for bolstering the resilience of ecosystems to persist in their current states. Yet in the longer term, it is anticipated that climate change will push certain ecosystems and species beyond their capacity to recover. When managing to support resilience becomes infeasible, adaptation may require more than simply changing management practices—it may require changing management goals and managing transitions to new ecosystem states. After transitions have occurred, management will again support resilience—this time for a new ecosystem state. Thus, successful management of natural resources in the context of climate change will require recognition on the part of managers and decisions makers of the need to cycle between “managing for resilience” and “managing for change.”     

Screening of environmental pressure from products in the Swedish railway infrastructure: Implications for strategic environmental management

This paper proposes a method to be used in environmental reviews as an initial tool for estimating upstream environmental pressures from material use in organisations dealing mostly with construction materials. Upstream environmental pressures are often omitted in environmental reviews from organisations and instead tend to be site specific, with a limited life-cycle perspective. This paper uses the Swedish National Rail Authority as a case to present the approach. An energy indicator is used to estimate the environmental pressure of material use.In the studied building project, a small set of products contribute to a major part of the material use and the material-related energy use. The energy use is almost exclusively of nonrenewable energy carriers. The three most important products are all homogenous and non-complex, which makes the energy indicator well suited for the analysis. The organisation can use the results to focus on the most important products and also to see which parts of the organisation contribute to the material-related energy use. Rail traffic in Sweden is almost exclusively from non-fossil-based energy carriers. This highlights the importance of the infrastructure to the overall environmental pressure of the railway. Consequently, if road transport were to shift away from fossil fuels, railways earlier environmental advantages would diminish, since research suggests that railway infrastructure is more energy intensive than road infrastructure.     

Habitat Conservation Plans Under the U.S. Endangered Species Act: The Legal Perspective

Habitat Conservation Plans under the federal Endangered Species Act have become an increasingly popular tool for resolving conflicts between land development and species conservation. Their primary purpose, however, is legal and regulatory rather than biological. They are what landowners must prepare in order to obtain a permit to "take" animals listed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as threatened or endangered. Unfortunately, many professionals involved in the HCP process aren't sufficiently cognizant of the legal and regulatory functions and the purposes and limitations of HCPs. I provide an overview of the regulatory structure of the ESA, the role HCPs play in that structure, and the specific legal requirements associated with HCPs. I then discuss the practice of crafting an HCP and the most common issues that arise in the process. Finally, I assess several very fundamental current problems with the HCP program, problems that threaten to undermine the HCP program to such a degree as to end its utility to landowners and thereby end the tremendous conservation opportunities the HCP program represents.     

Daily Updating of Operational Statistical Seasonal Water Supply Forecasts for the western U.S.1

Abstract: Official seasonal water supply outlooks for the western United States are typically produced once per month from January through June. The Natural Resources Conservation Service has developed a new outlook product that allows the automated production and delivery of this type of forecast year‐round and with a daily update frequency. Daily snow water equivalent and water year‐to‐date precipitation data from multiple SNOTEL stations are combined using a statistical forecasting technique (“Z‐Score Regression”) to predict seasonal streamflow volume. The skill of these forecasts vs. lead‐time is comparable to the official published outlooks. The new product matches the intra‐monthly trends in the official forecasts until the target period is partly in the past, when the official forecasts begin to use information about observed streamflows to date. Geographically, the patterns of skill also match the official outlooks, with highest skill in Idaho and southern Colorado and lowest skill in the Colorado Front Range, eastern New Mexico, and eastern Montana. The direct and frequent delivery of objective guidance to users is a significant new development in the operational hydrologic seasonal forecasting community.     

Risk Tradeoffs in Adaptive Ecosystem Management: The Case of the U.S. Forest Service

Natural resource planning processes on public lands in the United States are driven in large part by the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which dictates general processes for analyzing and disclosing the likely impacts of proposed actions. The outcomes of these processes are the result of multiple factors, many related to the manifold smaller incremental decisions made by agency personnel directing the processes. Through interviews with decision makers, team leaders, and team members on five NEPA processes within the U.S. Forest Service, this study examines those incremental decisions. Risk, in particular external relationship risk, emerged as a dominant lens through which agency personnel weigh and make process-related decisions. We discuss the tradeoffs associated with agency actors’ emphasis on this form of risk and their potential implications for adaptive ecosystem management and organizational performance.     

Reducing Nonpoint Source Pollution Through Collaboration: Policies and Programs Across the U.S. States

Nonpoint source (NPS) pollution has emerged as the largest threat to water quality in the United States, influencing policy makers and resource managers to direct more attention toward NPS prevention and remediation. In response, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) spent more than $204 million in fiscal year (FY) 2006 on the Clean Water Act’s Section 319 program to combat NPS pollution, much of it on the development and implementation of watershed-based plans. State governments have also increasingly allocated financial and technical resources to collaborative watershed efforts within their own borders to fight NPS pollution. With increased collaboration among the federal government, states, and citizens to combat NPS pollution, more information is needed to understand how public resources are being used, by whom, and for what, and what policy changes might improve effectiveness. Analysis from a 50-state study suggests that, in addition to the average 35% of all Section 319 funds per state that are passed on to collaborative watershed groups, 35 states have provided financial assistance beyond Section 319 funding to support collaborative watershed initiatives. State programs frequently provide technical assistance and training, in addition to financial resources, to encourage collaborative partnerships. Such assistance is typically granted in exchange for requirements to generate a watershed action plan and/or follow a mutually agreed upon work plan to address NPS pollution. Program managers indicated a need for greater fiscal resources and flexibility to achieve water quality goals.     

Priority screening of toxic chemicals and industry sectors in the U.S. toxics release inventory: a comparison of the life cycle impact-based and risk-based assessment tools developed by U.S. EPA

Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) and Risk Assessment (RA) employ different approaches to evaluate toxic impact potential for their own general applications. LCIA is often used to evaluate toxicity potentials for corporate environmental management and RA is often used to evaluate a risk score for environmental policy in government. This study evaluates the cancer, non-cancer, and ecotoxicity potentials and risk scores of chemicals and industry sectors in the United States on the basis of the LCIA- and RA-based tools developed by U.S. EPA, and compares the priority screening of toxic chemicals and industry sectors identified with each method to examine whether the LCIA- and RA-based results lead to the same prioritization schemes. The Tool for the Reduction and Assessment of Chemical and other environmental Impacts (TRACI) is applied as an LCIA-based screening approach with a focus on air and water emissions, and the Risk-Screening Environmental Indicator (RSEI) is applied in equivalent fashion as an RA-based screening approach. The U.S. Toxic Release Inventory is used as the dataset for this analysis, because of its general applicability to a comprehensive list of chemical substances and industry sectors. Overall, the TRACI and RSEI results do not agree with each other in part due to the unavailability of characterization factors and toxic scores for select substances, but primarily because of their different evaluation approaches. Therefore, TRACI and RSEI should be used together both to support a more comprehensive and robust approach to screening of chemicals for environmental management and policy and to highlight substances that are found to be of concern from both perspectives.     

Using Canonical Correlation Analysis to Identify Environmental Attitude Groups: Considerations for National Forest Planning in the Southwestern U.S.

As public land management agencies pursue region-specific resource management plans, with meaningful consideration of public attitudes and values, there is a need to characterize the complex mix of environmental attitudes in a diverse population. The contribution of this investigation is to make use of a unique household, mail/internet survey data set collected in 2007 in the Southwestern United States (Region 3 of the U.S. Forest Service). With over 5,800 survey responses to a set of 25 Public Land Value statements, canonical correlation analysis is able to identify 7 statistically distinct environmental attitudinal groups. We also examine the effect of expected changes in regional demographics on overall environmental attitudes, which may help guide in the development of socially acceptable long-term forest management policies. Results show significant support for conservationist management policies and passive environmental values, as well as a greater role for stakeholder groups in generating consensus for current and future forest management policies.     

Wavelet- and SVM-based forecasts: An analysis of the U.S. metal and materials manufacturing industry

This article compares four non-linear forecasting methods: multiplicative seasonal ARIMA, unobserved components (UC), wavelet-based and support vector machines (SVM). Whereas the first two methods are well known in the time series field, the other two rely on recently developed mathematical techniques. Based on forecasting accuracy and encompassing tests applied to shipments data of the U.S. metal and material manufacturing industry for 1958–2000, we conclude that that these two novel forecast techniques can either outperform the traditional ones or provide them with extra forecast information. In particular, based on the Granger–Newbold test, it appears that wavelets may be a promising new technique.     

Air pollution control by economic incentives in the U.S.: Policy,problems, and progress

This paper deals with cost-effectiveness of the economic incentive policies of the bubble concept and offset credits relative to the policy of direct regulations of air emissions. The second section discusses single- and multi-plant bubbles, their adoption across regions and industries, the methods used to control emissions and the extent of savings in costs. We conclude that despite the delay resulting from duplication of review of state implementation plans by both the state and the Environmental Protection Agency, the required technological commands, the requirement to model air quality and the restrictions to permit bubbling only in the attainment areas, the policy is progressing successfully and should be encouraged by eliminating the restrictions. The third section analyzes the policy of emission offset credit, trading, and banking which can permit economic growth in nonattainment areas. It reviews the available literature, which deals only with aggregation of offsets across cities instead of individual offset trades. Progress by individual offset trades is analyzed in terms of the number of offsets, their acceptance across regions, the extent of reductions in emissions, and the classification of the offsets into internal and external trades. Comparison of estimated capital costs and prices of individual offsets with direct regulation costs reveals that the former are economical. We conclude that despite the problems of high tradeoff ratios, the short and uncertain life of the emission offset credits and the technological commands, the policy is progressing successfully and should be encouraged further by relaxing restrictions.This paper represents the author's personal views. Neither the Commission nor any member of its staff is in any way responsible for these views.     

In-stand scenic beauty of variable retention harvests and mature forests in the U.S. Pacific Northwest: The effects of basal area, density, retention pattern and down wood

Tensions between amenity- and timber-based economies in the U.S. and Canadian Pacific Northwest motivated a study of scenic beauty inside mature forests and timber harvests. A diverse sample of regional forests, measures of forest structure, and large, representative samples of photographs and public judges were employed to measure scenic beauty inside un-harvested mature and old-growth forests, and timber harvests. The latter varied systematically in down wood levels and retention level and pattern. Scenic beauty tended to be optimized at a basal area of 110–155 m³/ha and/or 700–900 trees/ha. Older forests and those with larger trees were perceived to be more beautiful. In harvests, greater retention levels, less down wood, and dispersed rather than aggregated retention patterns contributed to aesthetic improvements. Green-tree retention harvests offer considerable potential gains in perceived scenic beauty compared to perceived very ugly clearcuts, particularly at higher retention levels. These gains are more reliable from dispersed retention patterns. The silvicultural parameters studied change strength in affecting scenic beauty with changes in retention level. These interactions are explored in relation to a range of scenic quality objectives as an aid to planners, visual impact analysts, and silviculturists.