| 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 meta-model). This document describes the cumulative effects toolkit adapted and extended the Morice River area, and describes the general concepts of the toolkit and basic information on toolkit modules. More specifically, we describe the set of components (analysis tools and models) and how they were combined in the study landscape. The main body of the document focuses on general concepts, the study area, and how the toolkit can be efficiently adapted to other study areas. Appendices provide details of toolkit components (individual models or associated groups of models). This toolkit approach to cumulative effects assessment supports a multi-faceted perspective on exploring landscape-scale risks and scenarios, and a structured flow of information among decision-makers, stakeholders, experts and analysts. Part of the design process for components added to the toolkit is to aim for generality and to facilitate transfer and adaptation to other study areas. This approach builds upon, and extends, the approach to collaborative landscape analysis in Fall et al. (2001). |
