| Abstract/Description or Keywords |
A Cumulative Effects Toolkit developed to support cumulative effects analysis at the landscape-scale in British Columbia (BC), Canada was adapted and expanded for assessing the impacts of development, natural disturbance and climate change on wildlife, salmon and hydrology in the Morice River area of northwestern BC. Landscapes are complex systems that consist of many elements and interactions, across multiple spatial and temporal scales, and with time lags. In addition to historic issues and values, newly emerging issues, such as climate change adaptation and carbon management, increase the complexity of managing landscapes. As a consequence, to effectively assess cumulative effects over broad areas requires a system perspective of the socio-ecological system of a study landscape. Simply put, cumulative effects can be defined as the combined effects of past, present and foreseeable natural processes and human activities over time, on environmental and social values in a particular place. This implies a planning perspective rather than a project perspective. Key steps and challenges include _ Scale: selecting spatial grain and extent of study area, and time horizon for which to assess effects _ Scoping: identifying values deemed to be important in a landscape (i.e. the things for which society is concerned may have negative impacts) _ Efficiency: how to bound the assessment to make practical use of time and existing tools _ Specificity: how to address unique aspects of a study area (which may require development of new tools and methods) _ Uncertainty: how to address uncertainty in base information and key processes, as well as natural variability In our “toolkit approach”, we decompose analysis of a landscape system into relatively independent parts or “components” (e.g. glacier dynamics, wildfire, coarse sediment loading, logging, pipeline layout, road networks, grizzly bear habitat). Where feedback between parts can be assumed negligible (e.g. we might assume that grizzly bears have no effect on wildfire, or that logging has little effect on pipeline layout), separate analysis tools can be developed, in which the output of one component may be used as the input to another. In this way, a “network” of toolkit components can be constructed (i.e. a metamodel). |
