Risks and Decisions for Conservation and Environmental Management

Author: Mark Burgman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521543019
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 516

Book Description
This book outlines how to conduct a complete environmental risk assessment. The first part documents the psychology and philosophy of risk perception and assessment, introducing a taxonomy of uncertainty and the importance of context. It provides a critical examination of the use and abuse of expert judgement and goes on to outline approaches to hazard identification and subjective ranking that account for uncertainty and context. The second part of the book describes technical tools that can assist risk assessments to be transparent and internally consistent. These include interval arithmetic, ecotoxicological methods, logic trees and Monte Carlo simulation. These methods have an established place in risk assessments in many disciplines and their strengths and weaknesses are explored. The last part of the book outlines some new approaches, including p-bounds and information-gap theory, and describes how quantitative and subjective assessments can be used to make transparent decisions.

Risks and Decisions for Conservation and Environmental Management

Author: Mark A. Burgman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Environmental management
Languages : en
Pages : 488

Book Description

Structured Decision Making

Author: Robin Gregory
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1444333410
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 315

Book Description
This book outlines the creative process of making environmental management decisions using the approach called Structured Decision Making. It is a short introductory guide to this popular form of decision making and is aimed at environmental managers and scientists. This is a distinctly pragmatic label given to ways for helping individuals and groups think through tough multidimensional choices characterized by uncertain science, diverse stakeholders, and difficult tradeoffs. This is the everyday reality of environmental management, yet many important decisions currently are made on an ad hoc basis that lacks a solid value-based foundation, ignores key information, and results in selection of an inferior alternative. Making progress – in a way that is rigorous, inclusive, defensible and transparent – requires combining analytical methods drawn from the decision sciences and applied ecology with deliberative insights from cognitive psychology, facilitation and negotiation. The authors review key methods and discuss case-study examples based in their experiences in communities, boardrooms, and stakeholder meetings. The goal of this book is to lay out a compelling guide that will change how you think about making environmental decisions. Visit www.wiley.com/go/gregory/ to access the figures and tables from the book.

Conservation Criminology

Author: Meredith L. Gore
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118935489
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Book Description
This important new text introduces conservation criminology as the interdisciplinary study of environmental exploitation and risks at the intersection of human and natural systems. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the book enhances understanding of the various human and organizational behaviors that pose risks to the environment, humans, and drive conservation crime. As human population growth, global market economies, climate change, deforestation, and illegal exploitation of natural resources continue to increase, academic research from numerous disciplines is needed to address these challenges. Conservation Criminology promotes thinking about how unsustainable natural resources exploitation is a cause and a consequence of social conflict. Case studies profiled in the book demonstrate this cause and effect type situation, as well as innovative approaches for reducing risks to people and the environment. This text encourages readers to consider how humans behave in response to environmental risks and the various mechanisms that constitute effective and ineffective approaches to enforcement of wildlife crimes, including environmental and conservation policy. Case studies from the USA, Latin America, Africa, and Asia highlight corruption in conservation, global trade in electronic waste, illegal fishing, illegal logging, human-wildlife conflict, technology and space, water insecurity, wildlife disease, and wildlife poaching. Taken together, chapters expand the reader’s perspective and employ tools to understand and address environmental crimes and risks, and to provide novel empirical evidence for positive change. With established contributors providing interdisciplinary and global perspectives, this book establishes a foundation for the emerging field of conservation criminology.

Risk Assessment in the Federal Government

Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309033497
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 206

Book Description
The regulation of potentially hazardous substances has become a controversial issue. This volume evaluates past efforts to develop and use risk assessment guidelines, reviews the experience of regulatory agencies with different administrative arrangements for risk assessment, and evaluates various proposals to modify procedures. The book's conclusions and recommendations can be applied across the entire field of environmental health.

Integrated Environmental Management

Author: John Cairns, Jr.
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 9780873712798
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Book Description
Integrated Environmental Management shows how to use integrated environmental management so that demands upon an ecosystem do not exceed its capacity to meet them, and the biological/ecological integrity is preserved. Varieties of disciplines, professions, institutions and federal and state agencies are shown how to integrate their individual objectives in utilizing a natural resource so the beneficial uses of others are not impaired. Valuable for the following groups:

Application of Threshold Concepts in Natural Resource Decision Making

Author: Glenn R. Guntenspergen
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1489980415
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Book Description
Natural resource managers face a complex decision-making environment characterized by the potential occurrence of rapid and abrupt ecological change. These abrupt changes are poorly accommodated by traditional natural resource planning and decision-making processes. As recognition of threshold processes has increased, contemporary models of ecological systems have been modified to better represent a broader range of ecological system dynamics. Key conceptual advances associated with the ideas of non-linear responses, the existence of multiple ecological stable states and critical thresholds are more likely the rule than the exception in ecological systems. Once an ecological threshold is crossed, the ecosystem in question is not likely to return to its previous state. There are many examples and a general consensus that climatic disruptions will drive now stable systems across ecological thresholds. This book provides professional resource managers with a broad general decision framework that illustrates the utility of including ecological threshold concepts in natural resource management. It gives an entry into the literature in this rapidly evolving concept, with descriptions and discussion of the promising statistical approaches for threshold detection and demonstrations of the utility of the threshold framework via a series of case studies.

Viable Populations for Conservation

Author: Michael E. Soulé
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521336574
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Book Description
This book addresses research in the rapidly developing integration of conservation biology with population biology.

Indicators and Surrogates of Biodiversity and Environmental Change

Author: David Lindenmayer
Publisher: CSIRO PUBLISHING
ISBN: 1486304109
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Book Description
Ecological indicators and surrogates are used widely by resource managers to monitor and understand complex biota and ecosystem processes. Their potential to guide complex resource management has meant they have been proposed for use in all ecosystems worldwide. Despite extensive research into indicators and surrogates, there remains much controversy about their use, in addition to major issues and knowledge gaps associated with their identification, testing and application. Indicators and Surrogates of Biodiversity and Environmental Change provides insights into the use of indicators and surrogates in natural resource management and conservation – where to use them, where not to use them, and how to use them. Using an ecological approach, the chapters explore the development, application and efficacy of indicators and surrogates in terrestrial, aquatic, marine and atmospheric environments. The authors identify current gaps in knowledge and articulate the future directions for research needed to close those gaps. This book is written by the world’s leading thinkers in the area of indicators and surrogates. It is the first major synthesis of learnings about indicators and surrogates and will be a critical resource for the vast number of people developing and applying them in ecosystems around the world. It will be an essential resource for scientists, policy makers and students with interests in surrogates and indicators.

Biodiversity in Environmental Assessment

Author: Roel Slootweg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521888417
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 456

Book Description
First of its kind and unique in its blend of theoretical and practical approaches for mainstreaming biodiversity in impact assessment.