Oil spill contingency planners need an improved approach to understanding and planning for the human dimensions of oil spills. Drawing on existing literature in social impact assessment, natural hazards, human ecology, adaptive management, global change and sustainability, we develop an integrative approach to understanding and portraying the human dimensions impacts of stressors associated with oil spill events. Our approach is based on three fundamental conclusions that are drawn from this literature review. First, it is productive to acknowledge that, while stressors can produce human impacts directly, they mainly affect intermediary processes and changes to these processes produce human impacts. Second, causal chain modeling taken from hazard management literature provides a means to document how oil spill stressors change processes and produce human impacts. Third, concepts from the global change literature on vulnerability enrich causal models in ways that make more obvious how management interventions lessen hazards and mitigate associated harm. Using examples from recent spill events, we illustrate how these conclusions can be used to diagrammatically portray the human dimensions of oil spills.

This paper reviews the applicability of the Social Impact Assessment (SIA) process within the framework of US national environmental policy used in New England fishery management. Its aim is to develop a new approach to SIA that goes beyond identifying impacts through guidelines, to include an understanding and portrayal of causality and emergent relationships. The emphasis is on creating a new list of variables identifying social impacts and social change processes. These variables are used in a causal chain model to diagrammatically portray impact dynamics over time and scale. This approach intends to fulfill a need for an accurate and timely methodology used in fishery management to identify potential social impacts of management actions, in order to achieve ecological and socioeconomic sustainability.

Technological hazards research, including that on oil spills and their aftermath, is giving greater attention to human dimension impacts resulting from events and response. While oil spill contingency planners recognize the importance of human dimension impacts, little systematic attention is given to them in contingency plans. We introduce an approach to identifying human dimensions impacts using concepts from hazard and vulnerability assessment and apply it to the Bouchard-120 oil spill in Buzzards Bay, MA. Our assessment covers the spill, emergency response, clean-up, damage assessment, and mid-term recovery. This approach, while still exploratory, did demonstrate that the spill produced a range of positive and negative impacts on people and institutions and that these were mediated by vulnerabilities. We suggest ways in which the framework may help spill managers to learn from events and improve contingency planning by anticipating risks to social systems and identifying strategies to reduce impacts.

Abstract. The fast pace of urbanisation in Southeast Asia has undermined the sustainability of the social, economic and environmental infrastructure of many cities across the region. Urban resilience in Southeast Asian cities is being further impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change. While cities and national governments across the region have developed policies, strategies and programs to re-orient their cities towards more sustainable and resilient development pathways, many cities continue to struggle with the uncontrolled nature of urban development and compounding impacts of crisis events. This article provides an overview of major trends and challenges with urbanisation in Southeast Asia, focusing in particular on Cambodia and Vietnam, as well as the regional, national and sub-national policies and strategies established to address these trends and challenges. Given the current policy implementation gaps and ongoing challenges of urbanisation in Cambodia and Vietnam, the article makes the case for trans-disciplinary research to understand the potential for strengthening urban governance capacities for urban sustainability transformations.