Lynn Scarlett

Enhanced Adaptive Management: Integrating Decision Analysis, Scenario Analysis and Environmental Modeling for the Everglades

We propose to enhance existing adaptive management efforts with a decision-analytical approach that can guide the initial selection of robust restoration alternative plans and inform the need to adjust these alternatives in the course of action based on continuously acquired monitoring information and changing stakeholder values. We demonstrate an application of enhanced adaptive management for a wetland restoration case study inspired by the Florida Everglades restoration effort. We find that alternatives designed to reconstruct the pre-drainage flow may have a positive ecological impact, but may also have high operational costs and only marginally contribute to meeting other objectives such as reduction of flooding. Enhanced adaptive management allows managers to guide investment in ecosystem modeling and monitoring efforts through scenario and value of information analyses to support optimal restoration strategies in the face of uncertain and changing information.

Risk Management Practices: Cross-Agency Comparisons with Minerals Management Service

This paper reviews implementation of the risk management frameworks used by eight federal and foreign agencies—including the Minerals Management Service (MMS, now the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement, or BOEMRE)—and summarizes the features of a robust tolerable risk (TR) framework. A TR framework conceptually breaks risk into three categories—acceptable, unacceptable, and tolerable—separated by numerical boundaries. Most of the agencies surveyed in this review have adopted a TR or modified TR framework, but MMS (BOEMRE) generally has not (although the agency does use an Oil Spill Risk Model to assess spill probabilities and possible trajectories). The study argues that while numerical thresholds are not essential to risk management, they provide a transparent goal against which to benchmark practices, equipment, standards, and facilities, and would be a valuable tool for BOEMRE. We also recommend that BOEMRE develop better risk assessment and management guidance; identify and more systematically collect information for understanding and evaluating risks and safety performance; and strengthen performance-based risk management by adopting proven approaches, such as those used in Norway and the United Kingdom for offshore oil and gas development.

Transcending Boundaries: The Emergence of Conservation Networks

Over the past century, public land management has unfolded as a saga of tensions and challenges at the delicate interface of people and place. Many of these challenges test the endurance of our governing institutions. An institutional discovery process is unfolding with the emergence of new forms of governance – the rules and processes by which formal and informal groups of people make decisions regarding matters in which they have intersecting responsibilities and interests. Networks, collaboration, shared stewardship, and partnerships characterize these new forms of governance. These emergent collaborative endeavors are creating new bundles of ownership rights through easements, contracts, compacts, and cooperative agreements. Lying as a backdrop to the emergence of these new forms of governance are four policy and decision making puzzles. These include information challenges, incentive challenges, accountability challenges, and coordination challenges. Examining examples of network governance illuminate how they address these four decision making challenges and their implications for law, policy, and management skills.

Synthesis: Developing the Institutions to Coordinate Science, Politics, and Communities for Action to Restore and Sustain Lands

Making a leap forward in restoring and sustaining lands requires more than refining conventional approaches for formulating environmental policy and making natural resource decisions. We are in a period of transition and evolution with regard to managing the dynamics of coupled natural and human systems. New forms of governance are emerging. We need institutions that will distill and harness the wisdom residing in diverse societies, facilitate dialogue, and enhance mutual learning about shared problems. We need governance regimes and processes that bridge the gaps among disciplines, methods, and current institutions that include public, private, and academic participants. New institutions and governance regimes will enable an ongoing process of collaborative action and shared decision making that supports durable environmental policy and land use decisions that sustain communities, economies, and the environment.

Restoring and Sustaining Lands—Coordinating Science, Politics, and Community for Action

We propose that a new conceptual framework is needed for conservation and land restoration to achieve sustainability. We present two conceptual models—Static Productive Harmony and Dynamic Productive Harmony—for formulating environmental policy and making natural resource management decisions. The static model seeks a balance among ecological, social, and economic systems through compromises that require trade-offs that often end up satisfying no one. The dynamic model represents a fundamentally different approach to restoring and sustaining lands. In this model, healthy ecosystems are the foundation for thriving communities and dynamic economies. The dynamic model aims to generate resource management approaches that add value to each of the systems for a mutual gains outcome. Restoring and sustaining lands is a wicked problem. New institutions need to be shaped that support ongoing collaborative and participatory processes to achieve durable and equitable environmental policy.

Introduction: Natural Resource Management – Framing Governance Challenges

In 1969, six miles off the coast of Santa Barbara, a blow-out at an offshore oil-drilling platform spewed crude oil into the sea and onto shores. I joined volunteers to tend birds coated in oil. Some survived; thousands died. A few years earlier, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring described a natural world in peril from the chemical potions intended to stamp out malaria, improve crop yields, and, generally, serve mankind. Together – a book and an event – form the foundations of America’s modern environmental policy journey. During four decades, that journey has unfolded in fits and starts, with an accumulating toolkit and an evolving narrative. That narrative began as a series of wake up calls. It developed into a basket of statutes – the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and others. It matured – and debates unfolded.

Adapting to Changing Climate: Exploring the Role of the Neighborhood

Climate change adaptation is local and place-based. Local places are often heterogeneous with respect to a number of elements that include geography, infrastructure, culture, economics, politics, and ethnicity. Neighborhoods in large cities and metropolitan complexes reflect this diversity. Thus, it seems to us that climate change adaptation planning should take into account the peculiarities, vulnerabilities, and assets for building resilience of each neighborhood. We suggest that neighborhood climate change adaptation plans should be developed through a consensus seeking, participatory process in collaboration with and guided by a comprehensive city-wide planning process. We examine the city of Boston, Massachusetts in this light.