Environmental Engineering Reference
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ively monitored. How could this monitoring be done? One possibility was to find a way in
which all the issues could be compressed. While mulling over this possibility, I was asked
to review a funding proposal to use a process called
adaptive environmental assessment
and management
(AEAM) that had been developed by C. S. Holling and C. J. Walters at
the University of British Columbia and at the International Institute of Applied Systems
Analysis (IIASA) in Vienna. The proposal was not related to the Beaufort and it was not
funded, but I was fascinated by their methods. I arranged to meet the proponents - Alan
Birdsall, Robert Everitt and Nicholas Sonntag, together with Bill Brackel of Environment
Canada - and we began to develop a funding and management regime for the BEMP using
the AEAM methodology.
We held a number of workshops that involved the hunter-and-trapper associations of
all the indigenous communities on the Beaufort coast, representatives of industry opera-
tions (such as drilling engineers, drill ship and icebreaker captains and spill countermeas-
ures people), wildlife biologists, toxicologists and oceanographers. I will call these people
“the team”. Work began by compiling a list of valued ecosystem components (VECs),
which were those entities society (particularly indigenous society) would be very upset
about if they were damaged. Next, the team created a long list of all the identified potential
or purported impacts (at this stage, not necessarily linked to VECs). The team then built a
conceptual model of the Beaufort Sea ecosystem and superimposed on it a similar model
of the industrial activity. The next step was to create a series of impact hypotheses. These
linked specific industrial activities through items on the potential impact issues list step-
by-step through the ecosystem model to the purported unwanted effect on the “vulnerable”
VEC or VECs. When the team evaluated each hypothesis in this way, there were three pos-
sible outcomes: (1) We could decide that more information was needed, requiring modific-
ation to our research or monitoring for that hypothesis; (2) we could judge the hypothes-
is valid, which would require a change in the relevant industrial activity; or (3) we could
judge the hypothesis to be invalid and deem that the purported impact issues required no
further attention.
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