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cumulative effects of activities from undermining ecosystem health that
equivalent provision should be made for reaction where the behaviour of
the system at large diverges from what was expected.
7.3.3 Enabling responsiveness to systemic reactions
There are a number of dif
culties with accurate prediction of the impacts
that human interventions in ecosystems may give rise to. Even if our
understanding of ecosystems and how activities affect them improves
signi
cantly, a residual core of uncertainty will remain as an inevitable
consequence of their complexity and tendency to non-linear responses
to disturbance. In light of this, there is a need for
exibility in legal
structures for ecological protection that allows policies, proposals for
their implementation and decisions on projects to be revisited in the
event that they affect ecosystems in ways that were not anticipated.
This
exibility can be provided by imposing requirements for mon-
itoring activities that have been permitted and for reconsidering how
they should be controlled when it becomes apparent from monitoring
data that this is necessary. Collectively, their application would create a
platform for what Fabra and Gascon call the
of
natural resources in which information concerning the effects of devel-
opment and exploitation allows the adjustment of management meas-
ures before irreversible change occurs.
35
They refer to the use of such an
approach under the 1980 Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic
Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) to modify controls on
'
feedback management
'
shing for
krill, an important component of Antarctic ecosystems.
36
The primary means by which law might be used to ensure adaptation
of controls over activities in a regime for protecting ecosystems is
through strengthening provision for post-assessment monitoring. As is
considered in the
following section
, procedures for decision-making
might also be used to add force to this strengthened provision by
requiring that an appropriate programme for monitoring should be in
place, and that decision-makers should be satis
ed as to the feasibility of
its implementation before a proposed activity can proceed.
35
A. Fabra and V. Gascon,
The Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine
Living Resources (CCAMLR) and the EcosystemApproach
'
'
(2008) 23 The International
98.
36
Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, Canberra, 20
May 1980, in force 7 April 1982, 1329 UNTS 47, 19 ILM 841 (1980).
Journal of Marine and Coastal Law,567
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