Suchergebnisse

In the last 15 years, conservation has shifted increasingly towards perspectives based on the instrumental value of nature, where what counts is what provides benefits to humans. The ecosystem services framework embraces this vision of nature through monetary valuation of the environment to correct market failures and government distortions that hinder efficient allocation of public goods, including goods and services provided by biodiversity and ecosystems. The popularity of this approach is reflected in different countries legislation; for instance, US, EU and UK have introduced economic criteria for comparing costs and benefits of environmental policies in protecting ecosystem services. From an operational perspective, the ecosystem services framework requires ecologists to estimate how the supply of services is affected by changes in the functionality and/or the extent of ecosystems; and economists to identify how changes in the supply affect the flow of direct and indirect benefits to people. However, this approach may be simplistic when faced with the complexity of social-ecological systems. We investigated this for three different marine services: assimilative capacity of waste, coastal defense and renewable energy. We find that economic valuation could provide efficient and fair allocations in the case of assimilative capacity, but leads to social clashes between outputs generated by cost benefit analysis and citizens' expectation in the case of coastal defense. In the case of renewable energy, controversies can be generated by regulatory mechanisms that are not necessarily aligned with the interests of industry or important social groups. We conclude that there is a need to integrate perspectives arising from utilitarian allocation of resources with those involving legislation and communal values in order to reconcile conflicting interests and better sustain marine social-ecological systems.

In the last 15 years, conservation has shifted increasingly towards perspectives based on the instrumental value of nature, where what counts is what provides benefits to humans. The ecosystem services framework embraces this vision of nature through monetary valuation of the environment to correct market failures and government distortions that hinder efficient allocation of public goods, including goods and services provided by biodiversity and ecosystems. The popularity of this approach is reflected in different countries legislation; for instance, US, EU and UK have introduced economic criteria for comparing costs and benefits of environmental policies in protecting ecosystem services. From an operational perspective, the ecosystem services framework requires ecologists to estimate how the supply of services is affected by changes in the functionality and/or the extent of ecosystems; and economists to identify how changes in the supply affect the flow of direct and indirect benefits to people. However, this approach may be simplistic when faced with the complexity of social-ecological systems. We investigated this for three different marine services: assimilative capacity of waste, coastal defense and renewable energy. We find that economic valuation could provide efficient and fair allocations in the case of assimilative capacity, but leads to social clashes between outputs generated by cost benefit analysis and citizens' expectation in the case of coastal defense. In the case of renewable energy, controversies can be generated by regulatory mechanisms that are not necessarily aligned with the interests of industry or important social groups. We conclude that there is a need to integrate perspectives arising from utilitarian allocation of resources with those involving legislation and communal values in order to reconcile conflicting interests and better sustain marine social-ecological systems

Much work had been undertaken on tracking change in the condition of marine pelagic ecosystems and on identifying regime shifts. However, it is also necessary to relate change to states of good ecosystem health or what the European Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) calls 'Good Environmental Status' (GES). Drawing on existing scientific and legislative principles, including those of OSPAR's 'Strategy to Combat Eutrophication', we propose a framework for assessing the status of what the MSFD calls the 'pelagic habitat' in temperate coastal seas. The framework uses knowledge of local ecohydrodynamic conditions, especially those relating to the stratification and optical environment, to guide expectations of what would be recognised as healthy in terms of ecosystem 'organisation' and 'vigour'. We apply this framework to the seasonally stratified regime of the Western Irish Sea, drawing on published and new work on stratification, nutrient and phytoplankton seasonal cycles, zooplankton, and the implications of plankton community structure and production for higher trophic levels. We conclude that, despite human pressures including nutrient enrichment, and the food-web effects of fisheries, the pelagic ecosystem here is in GES, and hence may be used as a reference for the 'Plankton Index' method of tracking change in state space in seasonally stratified waters.

The need for more sustainable sources of food, chemicals, and energy, combined with the European Union's Blue Growth Agenda and national policies of European Economic Area member states, has facilitated increasing interest in the cultivation of seaweed in European waters. There have been several research projects looking at the economic and environmental feasibility of seaweed cultivation as a low carbon commercial endeavour, however there is very little in the way of contextual social research. Given mounting evidence of a decline in social acceptability of aquaculture activities (both shellfish and finfish) at a site level, it is imperative to improve understanding of where seaweed cultivation might fit within this picture. The aim of this study is to explore site-scale social interactions of seaweed cultivation using social license to operate as the analysis framework. Two in-depth case studies in were chosen to cover a developing commercial seaweed cultivation industry (France) and an embryonic one (Scotland) in addition to a survey of seaweed cultivation organisations across five European countries. The findings show that interpersonal relationships, perceptions of environmental risk, scale of decision-making and of operations, and communication were key to local perceptions of seaweed cultivation operations in both case studies. The views of seaweed cultivation organisations on social interactions and the usefulness of the social license to operate concept for this emergent industry is discussed.

24 pages, 17 figures, 1 table.-- Printed version published in issue Aug-Sep 2004.-- Issue title: "The Canary Islands Coastal Transition Zone - Upwelling, Eddies and Filaments". ; Full-text version available Open Access at: http://www.iim.csic.es/~barton/html/pdfs.html ; The physical background to a suite of biological studies carried out in the Canary Islands upwelling region is presented. The area is unique in that the coastal transition zone is spanned by an archipelago of islands that shed mesoscale eddies of diameter 50–100 km into the alongshore flow. A recurrent filament and eddy system was sampled intensively to study the changing properties of waters as they are advected towards the open ocean in the filament and to investigate the exchanges between filament and eddies. The system was more complex than previously revealed. In early August, a single filament extended offshore from near Cape Juby. Two weeks later, a second filament had developed slightly farther north and extended offshore to merge with the first at 100 km offshore. The merged filament was entrained around a recurrent, topographically trapped cyclonic eddy and interacted with transient cyclonic and anticyclonic eddies shed from the island of Gran Canaria. Between the two filaments and the coast, a pair of counter-rotating eddies re-circulated water parcels for several weeks. Surface layer drifters cycled around this near-shore re-circulation several times before following convoluted paths that demonstrate significant exchange between continental shelf and open ocean waters. ; This work has been supported by the European Union (Project CANIGO, MAS3.CT96-0060). We thank the officers and crew of the BIO Hespérides, as well as the staff of the UTM (CSIC, Spain) for their invaluable help at sea. Analysis and writing up was supported by Catedra Patrimonial EX-010009 (Conacyt) while E.D.B. was on sabbatical leave at CICESE, Mexico. ; Peer reviewed