Climate change risk management: a Mental Modeling application

The potential impacts of climate change are varied and highly uncertain, and pose a significant challenge to agencies charged with managing environmental risks. This paper presents a comprehensive and structured Mental Modeling approach to elicit, organize and present relevant information from experts and stakeholders about the factors influencing environmental risk management in the face of climate change. We present and review an initiative undertaken by the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) to characterize climate change challenges to USACE environmental risk management activities, and to identify gaps with respect to science, engineering, and organizational processes for addressing these challenges. By employing Mental Modeling, the research has characterized the influences of climate change on USACE environmental risk management, and aggregating recommendations from 28 experts. In addition, the study identifies the most important opportunities to improve organizational response to climate change, ranging from focused research and development of technical capabilities to broad paradigm shifts and systemic organizational improvements within the USACE environmental risk management programs. This study demonstrates that Mental Modeling is a useful tool for understanding complex problems, identifying gaps, and formulating strategies, and can be used by a multitude of organizations and agencies.     

Economic use value of the Belize marine ecosystem: Potential risks and benefits from offshore oil exploration

The announcement of plans for exploratory oil drilling at a number of offshore sites in Belize raised concerns about the risks associated with drilling, particularly given the socio‐economic importance of the marine ecosystem. The current economic value of fisheries and marine ecotourism is estimated, along with the potential revenue from offshore oil and potential economic losses stemming from oil pollution, under various assumptions on risk and uncertainty. Marine fisheries and ecotourism are estimated to generate around US$ 183 million per year. Single‐year estimated maximum revenue is higher for oil extraction initially but quickly declines; during a 50 year (two generation) period, total discounted benefits from marine fisheries and ecotourism are estimated at US$ 5.1 billion, compared to US$ 3.2 billion from offshore oil revenue. Following a hypothetical oil spill, discounted losses in marine fisheries and ecotourism due to perception and ecological impacts are estimated at US$ 912 million, with clean‐up costs and capital losses of US$ 6.1‐10.4 billion. Considering the short extraction life of oil resources compared to fisheries and ecotourism, the difference in benefits increases substantially in favour of the latter with a longer time horizon. A recent public referendum resulted in a 98% vote against oil exploration and a subsequent annulment of oil concessions pending environmental impact assessments.     

Building blocks of economic resilience to climate change: a south east Australian fisheries example

Climate change will impact on ecological, social, and economic elements of fisheries; however, the three are seldom considered in an integrated fashion. We develop a fishery-level assessment of economic resilience to climate change for the Tasmanian rock lobster fishery, a linked social–ecological system. We outline the main climate change forcing influences that link climate change to the fishery via changes in lobster abundance, distribution, and phenology. Using a bottom-up approach, we identify twelve economic attributes strongly related to the fisheries’ economic resilience to climate change. Resilience attributes are grouped according to the level of the economic domain (business, sectoral, and governance). Attributes are then evaluated to determine the overall economic resilience of the rock lobster fishery in the context of the specific nature of predicted climate change effects. We identify areas of low resilience in the economic sub-system for this fishery. Evaluating the economic resilience of regional fisheries using this integrated, interdisciplinary framework provides a practical, parsimonious, and conceptually sound basis for undertaking comprehensive and contextually tailored assessments of climate change impacts and economic vulnerability. The framework can be extended to include a broader range of climate change impacts and the social domain of the human sub-system.     

Combining motions into complex displays: playbacks with a robotic lizard

Complex displays composed of multiple, seemingly independent, units can result from sexual selection for increasingly variable, but redundant, displays and from potentially opposing selective pressures imposed by use of the display in multiple contexts. Our playback results support the latter, multireceiver hypothesis by confirming that two aspects of the sagebrush lizard headbob display (number of headbobs and use of display-specific body postures) are independently-meaningful components that are interpreted differently by different receivers. Male receivers use species-typical body postures to distinguish between aggressive and broadcast forms of the display, whereas female receivers are more attentive to the number of headbob motions, using these to distinguish male courtship from a challenge from a female competitor. Thus, display components are likely subject to different selective pressures and the display as a whole is evolving in response to a complex selective regime. Our example differs from other complex signals that have been considered in that both display elements involve dynamic motions (turned on and off by the display producer) as opposed to static signal elements (e.g., color, size). In addition, we found evidence that display structure is highly malleable, and that lizards both produce and respond to artificial displays that violate syntactic rules identified from field observations. Finally, our experiments demonstrate that a robotic lizard can be used effectively in playback studies of visual display behavior in lizards.Electronic Supplementary Material: S1. Movie clip of the robotic lizard producing a species-typical headbob display as in Fig. 1a.     

Beyond water data: benefits to volunteers and to local water from a citizen science program

Survey results of citizen science water data collection volunteers are presented, indicating personal benefits (e.g., being in nature, helping local water quality), and suggesting potential long-term benefits of improved watershed health (e.g., behavior change). These results can inform citizen science program development and contribute to watershed planners’ understanding of the broad benefits of such programs. We suggest that respondents’ positive feelings toward the watershed's major river and desire to learn about science and nature are place-specific elements that watershed and citizen science program managers could utilize in program development. Moreover, we explore the potential of social diffusion and behavior change and suggest the need for further research in these areas. We conclude that citizen science has potential not just as a means to collect large amounts of data (cheaply), but as a means to engage citizens to make environmentally friendly decisions.     

The circular economy potential of urban organic waste streams in low- and middle-income countries

Environment, Development and Sustainability - There is growing recognition of the potential environmental and socio-economic benefits of applying a circular approach to urban organic waste...     

Organizational networks in road safety: Case studies of U.S. Vision Zero cities

Objective: Each year, more than 30,000 deaths occur on U.S. roads. Recognizing the magnitude and persistence of this public health problem, a number of U.S. cities have adopted a relatively new approach to prevention, termed Vision Zero (VZ). VZ has been adopted by more than 30?U.S. cities and calls for creating a transportation system that ensures that no road traffic crash results in death or serious injury. A core component of VZ is strong multidisciplinary and multisector stakeholder engagement, and cities adopting VZ often establish a VZ coalition to foster stakeholder collaboration. However, there is little information on the structure, development, and functioning of coalitions working to achieve VZ and on tools available to study and evaluate such coalition functioning. We sought to describe the characteristics of prominent U.S. VZ city coalitions and context surrounding VZ uptake and advancement in these cities. Moreover, we demonstrate use of network analysis as one tool for exploring the structure of interorganizational relationships in coalitions.

Methods: We conducted case studies of 4 prominent U.S. VZ city coalitions in 2017–2018. We summarized coalition members’ characteristics and responses to questions about their cities’ VZ adoption, planning, and implementation. We asked each coalition member to provide information on their contact frequency, perceived productivity, and resource sharing with every other coalition member in their city and used network analysis techniques in 2 cities to understand the structures and relationships in coalitions.

Results: Findings indicated that government agencies generally constituted the majority of coalition members and often played central roles in terms of coalition network contact, productivity, and resource flow. Other emerging similarities regarding coalition establishment and VZ implementation included the need for political support, the importance of formal plan development, and increased collaboration and cooperation among partners.

Conclusions: Organizational network analyses, enriched with coalition member interviews, can elucidate key aspects of coalition creation, attributes, and relationship structure. The case studies of leading VZ coalition networks presented here highlight the use of these tools. Ultimately, understanding associations between VZ network structures and attributes and road safety outcomes could help inform effective coalition adoption, implementation, and maintenance to optimize safety outcomes.