Planning for the Human Dimensions of Oil Spills and Spill Response

Abstract

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.

Rigor in social life cycle assessment: improving the scientific grounding of SLCA

“…SIA practitioners gather empirical impact data to support projections of potential impacts (Burdge et al 1995), and CSR expectations drive increasingly widespread and consistent disclosure of social impact by diverse businesses, perhaps especially in industries like mining that generate significant public concern about social and environmental performance (Higgins et al 2015;Jenkins and Yakovleva 2006;Peck and Sinding 2003). Some examples of potential data sources include commentary on data availability and reporting (e.g., Higgins et al 2015) and case studies focused impacts at various life cycle phases, including extraction, production, use, waste disposal, and lowprobability events (e.g., Karnani 2007;Lockie et al 2009;Slovic et al 1991;Webler and Lord 2010;Wolsink 1988;Yu 2008). While SIA and CSR, like SLCA, continue to struggle with issues like data quality, consistency, and robustness given resource constraints, they provide substantial additional experience and case studies that can contribute to advancement of SLCA inventories.…”

The social values at risk from sea-level rise

“…To develop a list of lived values at risk, we began by considering variables that have appeared in past lists in the SIA (see Vanclay, 2002;van Schooten et al, 2003;Webler and Lord, 2010), climate adaptation (see Barnett, 2010;O'Brien and Wolf, 2010) and psychology literatures (see Kahle and Timmer, 1983;Veroff, 1983). We identified items that were consistent with our definition of lived values and that may be impacted by sea-level rise, resulting in a preliminary list of 33 items.…”

Consequences of oil spills: a review and framework for informing planning

“…1), including interrelated impacts on health of individuals, well-being of communities, and the economy. Webler and Lord (2010) provided taxonomies of processes, impacts, and vulnerabilities associated with human dimensions of oil spills. Broadly speaking, they noted that humans can be affected by oil spills in three major ways: oil can affect ecological processes that cause direct harm, e.g., health impacts from eating seafood with bioaccumulated oil toxins; oil spill stressors can change intermediary processes, e.g., economic impacts to fishers from oil spill impacts to fish; and stressors can directly harm humans, e.g., health impacts from breathing oil vapors.…”

“…Investigations of other technological and natural disasters in coastal cities are needed to augment the knowledge base; for example, examining imagerelated impacts on tourism and other sectors. Such studies could be complemented by local interviews to identify causal chains of human dimension impacts (Webler and Lord 2010). An audit of actual spill response capacity on the West Coast of Canada is needed to identify potential gaps and inform preparedness planning.…”