| “These tools won’t give resource managers the answers or tell them what decision they should make, but they should assist managers in designing and conducting the stakeholder process and leading talks that more meaningfully and concretely include trade-offs.” | |
| Stephanie Moura, SeaPlan | |
New tools to help analyze the trade-offs required for multiple ocean users are being developed in Massachusetts with the hopes that they will aid coastal resource managers with making decisions for offshore wind energy siting and other ocean-based services.
“During our work in Massachusetts, coastal managers showed interest in developing tools to better understand, visualize, and communicate with stakeholders about trade-offs in ocean management,” says Stephanie Moura, executive director of SeaPlan, a private nonprofit that is leading the development of the tools.
In 2010, the commonwealth of Massachusetts released the nation’s first comprehensive ocean management plan that provided new protections for critical environmental resources while setting aside approved areas and creating standards for the development of renewable energy facilities and other offshore infrastructure.
Offshore renewable energy was “the essential driver” for coastal and marine spatial planning efforts in Massachusetts, says Moura, whose organization was created to advance ecosystem-based management of the commonwealth’s coastal ocean waters and is now expanding to other regions.
“The tools we’re working on would provide two different approaches to solving the same problem,” Moura says.
Multiple Users
The problem, Moura says, is that offshore wind farms, liquefied natural gas pipelines, fiber-optic cables, desalination plants, aquaculture, commercial fishermen, and others are all calling dibs on using the ocean, and coastal resource managers have to make decisions that take into account the multiple natural resource (or ecological) and economic trade-offs involved to reduce conflicts and optimize marine management.
“Our goal is to develop tools that would allow people to have a greater ability to visualize and compare scenarios and have a more robust scenario analysis,” Moura says.
Coastal managers broke ground with the Massachusetts Ocean Management Plan by going through an extensive 18-month stakeholder process and creating “spatially explicit” GIS maps that depicted the relative compatibility of specific uses and ecological resources to outline a regulatory and implementation framework.
The intention behind creating the tools is to offer resource managers ways to make the process of describing relationships among natural and human system components, and quantifying trade-offs, clearer in the future, says Les Kaufman, a professor of biology at the Boston University Marine Program, and the lead on one of the tools.
“The next level is to create more sophisticated equations showing what people need from nature and calculating the likely consequences of policy changes in terms of all the ecosystem services you can expect from an area,” Kaufman says.
Making the trade-offs more explicit could help managers improve communication about decision-making, avoid unnecessary conflicts, and focus debate on finding the most efficient solutions, says Crow White, a postdoctoral research fellow for the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Sustainable Fisheries Group and the team leader behind one of the tools.
Moura adds, “These tools won’t give resource managers the answers or tell them what decision they should make, but they should assist managers in designing and conducting the stakeholder process and leading talks that more meaningfully and concretely include trade-offs.”
Another caveat is that all models are simplifications of reality, and model results are further impacted by the quality of data that goes into them.
Tool Time
While there are a number of efforts going on around the country to develop tools to aid ocean planning, SeaPlan developed its pilot study to test two tools using “real-life” data from Massachusetts, such as whale and fisheries data, and sites for offshore wind potential.
“The research teams worked on the two tools side by side using the same data sets,” Moura says.
The method that is easiest to share with coastal managers was developed by Crow’s team at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
This method takes trade-off analysis used in economics since the 1950s and translates its use for the ocean environment to simultaneously assess multiple ecosystem services and the values they provide to sectors or stakeholder groups using a quantitative framework, Crow explains.
“Economics has a rich history of quantifying and balancing trade-offs, and resource economics has done this with ecosystem services for over a decade,” Crow says. “It’s just now beginning to be done in the ocean environment.”
It’s important to note, he says, that the framework can be applied even when sectors—such as conservation—aren’t measured in dollars.
While White’s method is ready to be used by resource managers, he says the average coastal manager would need additional technical support to implement it.
Currently, White’s team is focused on further research and improvements in the method that will help capture the ocean system more realistically by expanding the number of stakeholder groups and natural resource considerations.
Bookkeeping System
The second tool is the more sophisticated and data-intensive Multi-scale Integrated Models of Ecosystem Services (MIMES) developed by Kaufman’s team from Boston University.
“Our idea,” says Kaufman, who is also a senior marine scientist for Conservation International, “was to take everything we know about the coastal ecosystem and human economy and use a model as a type of bookkeeping system for this knowledge that enables us to visualize likely consequences of any change in policy.”
The model is so robust, Kaufman says, that it could eventually incorporate Crow’s trade-off analysis framework.
While the model is ready, “one final piece we’re working on,” Kaufman says, “is creating a user interface like a computer game to make it easier for managers to engage with MIMES and understand the potential consequences of a policy change. We’ll be beginning trial use of the model within a few months.”
Next Phase
While both tools still need development before they’re “fully portable and applicable for use by coastal managers,” Moura says, “both are sufficiently developed to help guide stakeholder engagement efforts to discuss trade-offs.”
“We think it’s promising, and we’re supportive of exploring the concept,” says Bruce Carlisle, director of the Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management. “We are interested in getting our heads around the mechanics, underpinnings, and assumptions of these models to better understand their potential for future applications.”
Moura says she’s excited about the potential of the tools to provide pragmatic assistance to coastal managers working on ocean management. “One of the reasons we’re excited about the innovation of the trade-offs approach is because we’re really aiming towards a healthy economy and a healthy ocean, and we need both those things.”
She adds, “We need jobs, we need food, and we need a healthy economy, and in order to have that, we have to have a healthy ocean. Improving our ocean planning tools will help us get at all of those things.”
For more information on the trade-off analysis tools, contact Stephanie Moura at (617) 737-2600, ext. 101, or smoura@seaplan.org. For more information on the tools themselves, contact Crow White at (808) 265-6868 or cwhite@bren.ucsb.edu, or Les Kaufman at (617) 407-3685 or lesk@bu.edu. You may also contact Bruce Carlisle at (617) 626-1205 or bruce.carlisle@state.ma.us. To read a paper on White’s tool that appeared in the “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America,” go to www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/02/27/1114215109.full.pdf+html. To see other tools that have been applied to trade-offs in the ocean, go to www.centerforoceansolutions.org/news-events/featured-stories/new-decision-guide-details-rigorous-analysis-decision-support-tools-marine-spatial-planning.
