Operationalizing risk-based cumulative effect assessments in the marine environment

Twelve Recommendations for Advancing Marine Conservation in European and Contiguous Seas

“…To improve current practices, assessing the effectiveness of management measures and how they can reduce the risk of negative impacts from cumulative effects is essential, but challenging for future research (Borja et al, 2020). It seems difficult to achieve a 'good environmental status' across European seas, without changing governance structures to integrate ecosystem considerations across multiple sectoral policies (Cinnirella et al, 2014;Stelzenmüller et al, 2020). This is a difficult task, but we argue that well-framed and structured CEA can function as a strategic tool in this direction.…”

“…Cumulative effects assessments need to be well-framed to contribute in integrated planning, and function as tools that bridge different management objectives (Stephenson et al, 2019). Thus, applying the risk-based CEA framework proposed in MarCons (Stelzenmüller et al, 2018) and defining a strategy to communicate uncertainty is key for the operationalization of CEA (Stelzenmüller et al, 2020). This can contribute to overcome imperfect knowledge on the sensitivity of ecosystem components to distinct pressures, and embrace uncertainty around the scientific evidence (Cormier et al, 2017).…”

“…In practice, clear guidance and political support for transboundary marine conservation is generally lacking (Mackelworth et al, 2019). Even though there has been a global increase of cumulative effects assessments, member states and neighboring countries have not been effective in guiding management or conservation efforts in a multiple impact context (Stelzenmüller et al, 2018(Stelzenmüller et al, , 2020. For instance, despite the recognition that invasive alien species and neonatives (sensu Essl et al, 2019) may substantially compromise conservation efforts (Giakoumi et al, 2019a), biological invasions are rarely taken into account in conservation plans (Giakoumi et al, 2016;Mačić et al, 2018).…”

“…Expert knowledge elicitation techniques were applied to evaluate and prioritize management actions (Giakoumi et al, 2019c). Participants offered their knowledge and experience on a national level through a large number of targeted case studies assessing how states have interpreted and utilized different legislative mechanisms over the governance of marine resources or maritime space, evaluating the implementation of conservation tools in Europe and beyond, their effectiveness and regional differences, and testing the operationalization of a risk-based cumulative effects assessment framework (Fraschetti et al, 2018;Mackelworth et al, 2019;Stelzenmüller et al, 2020). EU Member States Programs of Measures designed for the implementation of EU marine environmental policies and recent European Marine Spatial Plans were critically examined (Rilov et al, 2020).…”

Past and Future Grand Challenges in Marine Ecosystem Ecology

“…The role of these microbes in organismal function, performance, interaction and ecological context is grossly underappreciated and hence poorly understood; (S7) Assessing cumulative effects to guide management, since such assessments are increasingly used to inform environmental policy and guide ecosystem-based management but are inherently complex and seldom linked to management processes (Stelzenmüller et al, 2018). There is a need for developing best practices for the operationalization of cumulative effects assessments in a management context (Greenwood et al, 2019;Stelzenmüller et al, 2020); and (S8) Investigating emerging pollutants (e.g., plastics and additives, pharmaceuticals), artificial light at night, noise and toxin effects on coastal and marine species, habitats and ecosystems (Chae and An, 2017;Rako-Gospić and Picciulin, 2019), including monitoring and assessment.…”