Volume 23, Issue 3 1998 November/December 1998

REMEDIAL ACTION PLAN RAPSHEET

Adaptively Managing Remedial Action Plans: Hope Is Not a Method

by Dena Owens

The future of the Remedial Action Plan (RAP) program is uncertain. Resources in some Areas of Concern (AOCs) are devastatingly low and, after ten years, several researchers have found that RAPs have produced few tangible changes in ecosystems. A growing number of RAP practitioners and policymakers, including members of the International Joint Commission's Water Quality Board, are hailing adaptive management as the way to take practical steps to restore AOCs. What is adaptive management? How can it help RAPs in the future?

Originally conceived by a group of natural resources managers in the late 1970s, adaptive management assumes there is much that environmental managers do not understand about the environmental systems they attempt to manage, thus they should treat policies as scientific experiments and learn from them.

Traditional environmental management rests on the hope that environmental policies will produce cumulative, system-wide changes. In contrast, the premise of adaptive management is that hope is not a method. Instead, adaptive management is an iterative learning process, rooted in the scientific method and involving continuous cycles of hypothesizing, acting, monitoring and evaluating (figure 1).

Five fundamental features characterize adaptive management:

1. It is holistic, ecosystem-based management. Actual ecosystems are the units of management and laboratories for large-scale experimentation. Thus, its management organizations must have the power to manage over large geographic areas, crossing media (e.g., air, water, and soil) as well as political boundaries.

2. Organizations must have the stability to manage long enough to learn about environmental systems. For example, if fish populations are known to fluctuate in a decade-long cycle, they must be studied for several decades to detect reliable patterns.

3. Models or systems of models are crucial. They help managers and stakeholders to view multiple sub-systems as a whole and to explore "what if" scenarios.

4. To be experiments, actions must produce changes that can be measured.

5. Relevant monitoring of the spatial and temporal patterns in the system is necessary.

RAPs and other Great Lakes programs could use these features to outline practical steps for restoring ecosystems. A recent look at the Buffalo River and Rochester Embayment RAPs in New York state found adaptive management applicable to the complex restoration challenges and long-term, iterative nature of the RAPs. However, in a strict sense, the five adaptive management features are not utilized in either RAP on a large scale. This is not surprising. To date, adaptive management has not been a goal or primary tool of the RAP program. Yet, this study does provide insight into the barriers and potential opportunities for the use of adaptive management in RAPs.

On one hand, the AOCs are not defined or managed as ecosystems. Both RAPs need tools, such as models, to visualize larger ecosystems and to link restoration of the AOCs to the health of these larger systems. Even small-scale modeling efforts in the AOCs established relationships that were previously unknown and enhanced management decisions. The overall nature of the RAP program emphasizes remedial action, not long-term management. Consequently, the only actions produced by the two case-study RAPs have been small in scale and have continued existing, regulatory programs. Political barriers, such as inadequate resources and limited authority, constrained the scale and comprehensiveness of RAP management capabilities. In particular, project-by-project funding separated modeling, action, and monitoring efforts into disjointed projects rather than continuous learning cycles. Also, actors were unwilling to take risks associated with experimentation, especially when common goals had not been reached and when scarce resources were at stake.

On the other hand, cooperative agreements between local governments are leading to shared management of larger ecosystems, such as watersheds, in both AOCs. Key leaders, together with other local actors, developed support for acting in the face of uncertainty and pushed forward experimental actions on varying scales. A core group of committed actors and stakeholders formed stable learning groups. At the same time, turnover of other actors brought in new ideas and energy for the learning processes in both case study AOCs. This study supports findings that the RAP stakeholder groups provide an arena for debating issues and for developing common visions for the future of AOCs.

Adaptive management is a germ of an idea -- it provides a framework for deliberate learning that may enhance understanding of environmental problems and increase management capabilities. However, adaptive management itself must be adapted to the setting of the RAPs, and it must be tested. Proponents of adaptive management assume we can ask the right questions and that science can help us find the answers. To move forward with RAP implementation, we can only hope that they are correct.

Dena Owens received a masters degree in environmental science from the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry in May 1998. For more information, contact the author at (202) 512-5959.

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Gestion adaptative des plans d'action correctrice : l'espoir n'est pas une méthode

L'avenir du programme des plans d'action correctrice (PAC) est incertain. Dans certains secteurs préoccupants, les ressources sont désespérément basses, et, après 10 ans, plusieurs chercheurs ont constaté que les PAC n'ont entraîné que peu de modifications tangibles dans les écosystèmes. Un nombre croissant de praticiens et de décideurs des PAC, notamment les membres du Conseil de la qualité de l'eau de la CMI, saluent gestion adaptative comme une solution pratique à la restauration des secteurs préoccupants. Qu'est-ce que la gestion adaptative? Comment peut-il aider les PAC?

Imaginée à la fin des années 1970 par un groupe de gestionnaires des ressources naturelles, la gestion adaptative pose comme hypothèse qu'un grand nombre de gestionnaires de l'environnement ne comprennent pas les systèmes écologiques qu'ils tentent de gérer : ils devraient donc considérer les politiques comme des expériences scientifiques et en tirer des leçons.

La gestion classique de l'environnement repose sur l'espoir que les politiques de l'environnement produiront des changements cumulatifs à la grandeur des systèmes. Par contraste, la prémisse de la gestion adaptative est que l'espoir n'est pas une méthode. La gestion adaptative est plutôt un processus d'apprentissage itératif, enraciné dans la méthode scientifique et comportant des cycles continus de formulation d'hypothèses, d'action, de surveillance et d'évaluation (fig. 1).

La gestion adaptative a cinq caractéristiques :

1. Elle est holiste, axée sur l'écosystème. Dans la réalité, les écosystèmes sont des unités de gestion et des laboratoires où se déroule une expérimentation à grande échelle. Les organismes de gestion doivent pouvoir gérer de vastes territoires englobant divers milieux (p. ex. l'air, l'eau et le sol) et traversant les frontières politiques.

2. Les organisations doivent avoir la stabilité qui leur permettra d'agir assez longtemps pour tirer des leçons des systèmes de l'environnement. Par exemple, si on sait que les populations de poissons fluctuent selon des cycles décennaux, il faut les étudier pendant plusieurs décennies pour déceler des caractéristiques significatives.

3. Les modèles ou les systèmes de modèle ont une importance cruciale. Ils aident les gestionnaires et les intervenants à considérer les nombreux sous-systèmes comme un ensemble et à examiner des scénarios de simulation.

4. Pour constituer des expériences, les actions doivent produire des changements mesurables.

5. La surveillance pertinente des configurations spatio-temporelles du système est nécessaire.