کاستی در اصول اروپا از مدیریت یکپارچه مناطق ساحلی: ارزیابی از پیامدهای برای جهت گیری محلی مدیریت ساحلی با استفاده از تجزیه و تحلیل سبد سرمایه گذاری بیومز

EU policy geared towards the sustainable development of European coastal areas has incorporated Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) as one of its primary mechanisms to achieve its goal. However, critical shortcomings in the ICZM paradigm have emerged. In particular, incoherence in the European Commission's ICZM principles with respect to local and strategic objectives remains an issue. Additionally, a lack of scientific certainty about environmental processes when determining the environmental pros and cons of alternative coastal-management decisions undermines environmentally protective decisions that may otherwise hinder local regional development. With these issues in mind, a Biodiversity Portfolio Analysis (BPA) is applied to Iarras Aithneach, a peninsula on the west coast of Ireland, to test its suitability as tool for ICZM. In addition, the paper uses the BPA methodology to explore the contrast between scientific/strategic and local attitudes towards the management of a coastal area of environmental importance. Pronounced differences between the two are found and the implications for both BPA and ICZM are discussed. The spatial and participatory nature of the BPA process and the explicit treatment of risk the framework exhibits suggest there is scope for it to become a useful tool for ICZM. It also has the potential to act as a routine way of quantifying the “attitude gap” between the scientific community and the local community when managing a unique coastal area.

Despite the initial incorporation of Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) as one of the primary mechanisms of environmental policy geared towards sustainable development of European coastal areas, further evaluations have lead to an awareness of the need for an updated ICZM initiative. In particular, the development of a Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) and an overarching Maritime Policy [1] and [2] is likely to assist in the European adoption of ICZM, since they may well provide the medium through which ICZM is shaped, implemented, and brought into legislation. The MSFD [3] in particular recommends environmental and ecological indicators as a means of assessing current environmental status and to track effectiveness of Directive's measures. The ability to update directive measures according to their performance across the marine regions is also outlined under the principles relating to adaptive management and spatial considerations. As such, the MFSD and the nature of the EU Commission's maritime policy very much reflect developments in the existing literature on what form ICZM should take and how it should be implemented [4], [5], [6], [7] and [8]. In sum, what is emerging is the requirement of an integrated, spatially based form of coastal management which inherently addresses the issue of risk and uncertainty and is adaptive over time to allow for improvements which were not foreseeable in earlier versions of ICZM. In this paper Biodiversity Portfolio Analysis (BPA) [9] is put forward as a management format which attempts to incorporate all of these requirements into its approach. At first glance, it may seem unusual for a methodology stemming from the management of financial assets to have an application in the field of biodiversity conservation, but in recent years, researchers in that field have highlighted the suitability of the concept, due to its explicit trade-off between expected payoffs and exposure to potential risks/losses [10]. Markowitz [11] developed a quantitative definition of the relationship between the riskiness of an investment, and the expected return. Asset managers compose portfolios of assets such that both objectives (minimising risk but achieving a desired level of expected return) can be optimised. In a similar way, society must balance between two alternative decisions. One of these is to ensure healthy environmental status allowing society to consume the wide array of services that flow from healthy ecosystems. The other is allowing human activities which are economically necessary, to proceed. Limiting one to promote the other is at the heart of all environmental decision making. As Figge [10] points out, ‘the expected benefit which society derives from species, genes or ecosystems is uncertain, but this risk can be partially diversified away by combining various species, genes or ecosystems in a biodiversity portfolio’. In this way, rather than making isolated environmental management decisions, society's decisions between the two alternatives would focus on aggregate values of services and risks, aiding the decision making process and allowing for optimality in the tradeoff between the two societal goals. Aside from the need to update ICZM and tailor it to recent policy recommendations, more critical problems exist for the ICZM paradigm as a whole. ICZM is steeped in the notion that stakeholder participation in environmental decision making can improve the effectiveness of environmental management initiatives. When the failure of environmental management initiatives is due to a lack of coordination between various stakeholders and centralised coastal managers, there is truth to this latter notion. However, there may be instances where a lack of coordination is not the source of the problem. Environmental problems, and the failure of management responses to solve them, may arise not out of poor coordination, but out of entirely contradictory environmental/societal and economic/stakeholder goals. Simply put, there may exist, economic incentives for stakeholders to act against the environmental goals of society. In such an instance, environmental problems may not be solvable by group discussion and consensus, but by prioritisation of, in all likelihood, centralised coastal management decisions. While management integration may be desirable, deciding between top-down (managerially centralised) and bottom-up (locally based) management decisions is not only a methodological issue, but a political, legislative and philosophical one. To explore this issue further, this paper analyses the differences in the attitudes of marine scientists and local stakeholders towards an environmentally sensitive area of the Irish/European coastline. BPA is employed as the format through which to explore some of these problems in this study. In this way the validity of BPA as a tool for ICZM is tested (given the updated status of European maritime policy) but it also serves as a medium for highlighting the extent of the implications of having contradictory ICZM principles in EU policy recommendations. Section 2 discusses the emergence of ICZM and some of the literature which identifies specific problems with the concept. Section 3 outlines the BPA methodology. Section 4 presents the background to the case study and Section 5 presents the results. Section 6 includes a discussion and the conclusion of the paper.

One of the major weaknesses of the European ICZM initiative described by McKenna et al. [14] was that the strategic principles, which require management to take a wide view of spatial and temporal factors, are incompatible with local principles which focus on the “specific needs of specific people in specific places”. This incoherency, arising out of two conflicting objectives, will affect any coastal management initiative so long as the issue is not resolved at the policy level. Indeed, BPA generally requires that a panel of various stakeholders and scientific experts, representing diverse interest groups, reach consensus about the value of each ecosystem service in a biome, as well as the scale of any threats to that biome's function. Yet Billé [12] suggests that the idea that all conflicts can be resolved with a consensus agreement is a simplistic belief and that “such misconceptions are partly responsible for the inability of numerous participatory processes to adequately take charge of the environmental problems that justified their inception”. This raises a question: If Billé is right, is BPA not then redundant? From this analysis, it appears not. While the Hills et al. [9] vision of BPA was that of a tool which could arrive at consensus values across a diverse groups, this analysis supports a variation of their theme. Rather than grouping scientists with local stakeholders and struggling to attain some form of consensus, the methodology could be used to evaluate the perspectives of both groups separately, after which, the data can be used to draw distinctions and understand where attitude gaps and similarities lie. This would appear to be a far more arming process for coastal managers, for as the literature clearly indicates the real challenge for the future of European coastal management will be balancing the various objectives of multiple interests. To do this, coastal managers need to understand what those interest groups are and how their attitudes toward biome use and management compare. Despite the proposition that defining an “attitude gap” is a more useful function for BPA, there is still scope for it to assist in deciding between alternative management decisions on a qualitative basis when sufficient quantitative data to do so does not exist. This scope is limited however by the incoherent nature of the ICZM principles at present and until such incoherency is resolved, any management format based on participation and consensus is undermined. This weakness is a feature of ICZM policy as opposed to management frameworks like BPA, which are framed by the policy context they are applied to. A further point is worth noting. The entire process of categorising a management area by biome types, risks and returns plays the role of informing policy makers about the diversity of environmentally important spaces an area possesses (as well as the derivative ecosystem services and environmental and man-made risks to those services). An additional point to note from the results presented in this paper is that apparently similar biome valuations from both the scientific and local survey participants acquired value from contradicting services, for example, conservation and peat extraction. While commonality in the value assigned to biomes′ total return may indicate convergence (which is attractive from a management perspective since it suggests that strategic and local objectives are aligned), similar total biome return values may not reflect consensus at all. In fact, they can represent the very opposite; a completely opposite point of view on the value of the services delivered by the biome, and as a consequence, a completely opposite point of view on how that biome should be managed into the future. It is recommended that BPA always be carried out by defining categorical groups such as local, strategic, stakeholder, relevant interest group etc, so that the risk-return values of each group for each biome can be compared and assessed, and the sources of biome value can be identified. The contribution of a service to biome portfolio return was also found to be heavily affected by the size of the biome it arose out of. Certain ecosystem services, for example carbon sequestration, need to arise out of large spatial areas to provide a meaningful service. In such a case, considering biome size is highly relevant when calculating which biome best provides that service. However, there are many cases where ecosystem services, in particular biodiversity and existence value, are of priority, yet are linked to relatively small biomes. It is not ideal that a methodology designed to evaluate risks and services relating to sensitive ecological areas should understate these risks and services when a biome is small relative to other biomes in the study area. If anything, small biomes are more responsive to threat factors and this should be represented in the methodology. One way of factoring heterogeneity in risk sensitivity (due to biome size differences) into the BPA methodology would be to structure area dependent risk elasticities into the methodology. In this case, the greater the supply of any biome, i.e. the larger it is, the less responsive it would be to risk exposure. Diminishing the size of any biome, or dealing with a biome which is in lesser supply than other biomes, would mean increasing its responsiveness to any threat in the modelling procedure. This adaption of the methodology would be in keeping with economic theory related to the increasing substitution price effect of any good as it diminishes in supply. Such an adaption may be justified on the basis that if a biome is decreased in size, its potential to absorb negative impacts is reduced and the costs of damaging the biome's function (to supply ecosystem services) is likely to be higher, hence risks are higher. The key to structuring risk elasticity into the methodology would be to correctly associate various risk sensitivity levels to particular categories of biome size. This is an important avenue for future research in the area of BPA. Finally, the PIS of the biome portfolio was highly dependent on which study group the data was based upon; the scientific group providing data which lead to a far higher PIS value. While BPA can only highlight where the two domains differ, the incoherence in local and strategic objectives in EU policy is a problem that coastal manager's face. Because there has been no prioritisation of either set of principles, there is no guidance or legislation off of which coastal managers can base their decisions. During the stakeholder analysis the negative attitude of stakeholders towards the perceived risk of over-regulation became evident. It is likely that this attitude contributed to the low values assigned by the stakeholder analysis participants for risks across all biomes. In recent decades, regulation, especially with respect to coastal livelihoods like fishing, aquaculture, and shellfish harvesting have reduced the capacity of local stakeholders to harvest, profit or gain employment from such local economic activity. Recently, prohibitive regulation on peat extraction in peat bogs has also been brought into legislation. Over-regulation is a very real concern for local inhabitants of coastal areas of environmental importance and tackling the development of such negative perceptions is an important part of an integrated approach to coastal management. A vital part of tackling such negative perceptions must be the identification of areas where the negative impact of regulation on regional economic development can be mitigated and sustainable enterprise and development is promoted at the policy level. It is clear that the nature of the irreconcilable differences in EU ICZM objectives will require some controversial decisions to be made regarding prioritisation of principles. With respect to BPA, one possibility for consideration is that coastal manager's would base decisions on data from local participatory stakeholder groups and data from scientific consultations. Because locally based data will be likely to have lower risk values and therefore a lower PIS value, any management decisions based on achieving local objectives would first have to be analysed through the scientific consultation data. Where no predetermined “red lights” with respect to the scientifically based PIS values were set off, local development orientated decisions could be proceeded with. Further case studies demonstrating this type of analysis are needed. There is a wider debate taking place on this topic in relation to the justification of basing environmental management decisions on the value assessments of consumer preferences when many individuals do not understand the various environmental and ecosystem processes which provide the services society consumes. If non-market values are to be used within cost-benefit analysis (CBA) to inform public policy choice and the management of environmental assets, then the main tenet of welfare economics on which CBA is based – namely, the primacy of consumer preferences – creates problems for many when these preferences are based on very incomplete understanding of how ecosystems work, of the importance of ecosystem services to well-being, and of the importance of different aspects of biodiversity. As Atkinson and Mourato [29] point out, ‘to the extent that groups or individuals are poorly informed about the environment, there are too many risks to allowing uninformed views to hold sway over decisions’. In this study, the “attitude gap” between scientific and local views was pronounced. Of the various reasons why this may be so, a disparity in the level of knowledge of participants about ecosystem processes, benefits and biodiversity in general, is likely to account for much of this. The assessments indicate that BPA may be a useful format for helping environmental manager's and policy makers understand where local views stray from scientific views about ecosystem services and risks and how the coastline should be managed. Such a procedure could be an ideal “first step” in any coastal management initiative. Clearly, there are two states of thought regarding environmental decision making; one favouring consumer preferences (local), the other preferring reliance on expert opinion for strategic development. Be it for the purposes of attempting to make optimal tradeoffs between coastal development, conservation, risk and return, or simply to categorise the differences in outlook between local and strategic views, there is scope for development and application of BPA. In situations where strategic and local objectives are closely aligned, BPA is especially suitable for application. There is also scope in future applications of the BPA framework to apply non-market values from the literature to biomes as a measure of return (instead of using Likert scale values) in a benefit type transfer type exercise.