Environmental perverse incentives in coastal monitoring

Highlights

• Environmental management should be underpinned by quantitative management information.

• Monitoring the marine environment is expensive.

• As a result, many governments have outsourced monitoring obligations.

• This can lead to inadvertent perverse incentives for activities that impact the environment.

Abstract

It can be argued that the intensity of monitoring of coastal marine environments lags behind the equivalent terrestrial environments. This results in a paucity of long-term time series of key environmental parameters such as turbidity. This lack of management information of the sources and sinks, and causes and impacts of stressors to the coastal marine environment, along with a lack of co-ordination of information collection is compromising the ability of environmental impact assessments of major coastal developments to discriminate between local and remote anthropogenic impacts, and natural or background processes. In particular, the quasi outsourcing of the collection of coastal information can lead to a perverse incentive whereby in many cases nobody is actively or consistently monitoring the coastal marine environment effectively. This is particularly the case with regards to the collection of long-term and whole-of-system scale data. This lack of effective monitoring can act to incentivise poor environmental performance.

Introduction

Private ownership, management and exploitation rights to the coastal marine zones around the world have largely not been allocated and hence these environments mostly remain as common pool resources. This also means that Government, who manage common pool resources of behalf of the citizens of nations also retain the obligation to effectively manage these resources and environments. The majority of management efforts in these coastal marine zones often focus on the management of living marine resources, in particular commercial and increasingly recreational fishery resources. By contrast sessile benthic habitats and pelagic habitats in general are mostly unmanaged with the exception of habitats enclosed within some form of marine protected area.

Management of any system requires time series information of key management performance indicators. By contrast to the terrestrial environment, the acquisition of relevant and timely management information in the marine environment is costly and logistically difficult (Gibbs, 2012a). For example whilst data returned from airborne or satellite sensors has high utility in the marine environment, this utility focuses on the sea surface and is poor by comparison of the utility of the same data streams for terrestrial environments. Similarly, remotely sensed data is often less accurate in the coastal zone by comparison to oceanic waters (Mao et al., 2013). In addition, the physical size of many EEZ’s (Exclusive Economic Zones) by comparison to the population and tax base can be substantial for many nations, limiting the pool of funds for marine monitoring and management. This means that for the marine environment, wherever possible environmental management information must be used to the fullest potential and any opportunities to subsidize information collection must be investigated.

A number of government agencies have taken up this latter challenge by seeking ways of using the private sector to collect relevant environmental information that can be used to underpin generic management of the coastal marine zone. The most obvious example is piggybacking off environmental impact assessment legislation where it exists. For example, owners and operators of large coastal infrastructure must comply with environmental management legislation and this commonly involves the assessment of impacts of specific operations, in addition to often sporadic background coastal monitoring. Given these requirements it is therefore not surprising that a number of government agencies have sought to use data acquired from privately funded environmental impact assessments (EIAs) or associated background monitoring implicitly or explicitly undertaken to partly or completely fulfil coastal management information requirements.

For example, in New Zealand statutory regional authorities in the form of Regional Councils undertake some State of the Environment reporting that includes sampling water quality, although these efforts tend to focus on operational considerations in terms of monitoring swimming water quality rather than monitoring and analysis programs that aim to identify the impacts of catchment point and non-point sources over time. Major marine monitoring programs are undertaken by large coastal facilities such as the Manapouri power station that discharges into the coastal zone (Gibbs et al., 2000) although this program covers a small spatial area by comparison to the size of the marine environment that is managed. Similarly, the 2007 Western Australian State of the Environment assessment (WA Govt., 2007) highlights that “Monitoring of the condition of Western Australia’s marine environment is extremely limited”. In Western Australia, the substantial offshore oil and gas industry lies within Commonwealth Government managed waters yet the same situation applies in that the majority of marine environmental data acquired is privately collected by this industry. This is common across both industrialised and developing nations, and seems to be an increasing trend as many governments seek to outsource operations, and in some cases obligations.

However, as argued here, this practice can embed perverse incentives which act to undermine the sound management of coastal marine ecosystems and environments. The objective of the work presented here is therefore to demonstrate the existence of perverse incentives by considering the case of turbidity or suspended sediment in the coastal zone.

The scientific literature contains a large number of studies that have investigated the behaviour and dynamics of turbidity in coastal zones around the world. It is clear that turbidity levels in coastal zones vary according to short term events such as rainfall events, and seasonal and inter-annual timescales that correlate with changes to local land use policies and larger-scale processes such as El Nino/La Nina oscillations (Aalto et al., 2003). Our understanding of especially the spatial variability of suspended sediments has also increased over recent decades as a result of remote sensing platforms and sensors such as MODIS (Saldías et al., 2012).

By contrast, it is becoming increasingly apparent that turbidity levels in many iconic coastal regions increased dramatically sometimes over 100 years ago in response to large scale land clearance and the introduction of industrial fishing activities (i.e. Houziaux et al., 2011). Such changes are mostly not recorded in instrument records since recording turbidity instruments are only a relatively recent innovation, and still today the majority of instrument records of coastal turbidly extend back only short periods in time. Therefore in effect, the context and path dependency underpinning the state and trends in coastal turbidity levels remains unclear in many, if not in most coastal regions around the globe despite recent advances in remote sensing technology. This lack of path understanding and context pre-conditions the development of perverse incentives when we consider the interaction and cross-dependency of privately and publicly funded environmental monitoring data, as discussed below.