Integrating climate change in Environmental Impact Assessment: A review of requirements across 19 EIA regimes.

The contribution of human activities to climate change is well understood. Yet the integration of climate change considerations into local decision making tools designed to govern activities affecting the environment, such as Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs), remains underdeveloped and inconsistently applied for proposed policies, programs, plans and projects. This study reviews progress across a range of 19 EIA regimes and identifies and assesses regulations and guidelines that have been established to promote the integration of climate change considerations within EIAs. A typology of levels of integration is developed to guide analysis across multiple EIA regimes. The findings identify a global and growing requirement for climate change aspects to be considered within EIAs and describe the range of ways this is done across the regimes selected. Climate change is typically concerned with the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions from proposed developments in EIAs. Fewer regimes are concerned with climate change adaptation, and in general, an integration deficit is identified for regimes where climate change is only partially considered. Examples of high integration indicate that EIA holds the potential to play a substantive role in climate change governance at project level decision making, suggesting the tools hold promise for local level climate governance. However, many domestic obstacles can militate against integration, including political, socio-technical, and economic imperatives, particularly for exemptions of sector and scope. Nevertheless, examples also indicate advances can be made through jurisprudence during the EIA review stage to establish new precedents of how climate should be considered in EIAs. Potential future research and practice directions are identified, and recommendations include the development of regulations and practice guidelines; inclusion of climate change adaptation; strengthening post-decision monitoring; application to all relevant sectors and activities; alignment with SEA; and integration across all stages of the EIA process.

Making a network of patches, gaps, and spaces: marine and coastal governance in Stilbaai, South Africa.

Based on research conducted by myself and colleagues as part of the Southern Cape Interdisciplinary Fisheries Research Project, I present an overview of residents' perspectives on the Stilbaai Marine Protected Area, located on the Southern Cape coast of South Africa. Currently, South Africa's marine governance sector is often fraught with politicking, inefficiencies, and other effects that strain the social-ecological system. This research shows that despite some fragmentation of governance, there are opportunities, and a general willingness, to engage in activities that take care of the local environment on the behalf of residents, that serve to educate about ocean-positive behaviours and engage visitors more meaningfully on the benefits and value of the Stilbaai Marine Protected Area. Problems that residents perceive to be associated with the Marine Protected Area are noted, and suggestions are made to enhance a sense of caretaking, or sorgskap, within the community to fill the gaps of certain governance or regulation inadequacies. Indeed, I argue that in lieu of efficient formal governance structures and collaborations, it is the informal characteristic of caretaking activities by the community that renders these activities more sustainable, long term, and effective in building a "culture" of caretaking.

Being well-governed: Including inspectors in a systems approach to fisheries management.

Based on 18-months of ethnographic fieldwork in South Africa's Western Cape province, we suggest ways in which marine resource law enforcement activities can be evaluated at the level of individual fisheries compliance inspectors, to gain a more accurate understanding of the state of marine resource law enforcement. We show that these individual assessments can be scaled up to speak about specific compliance stations, and further, that these local-level assessments can be scaled up to the regional and provincial levels, without losing sight of the needs and value of the individual inspector. This paper contributes to the broader conversation on compliance in marine resource governance, as well as opening a new avenue of discussion: how to incorporate inspector-focussed social indicators. We show that this can be done in ways that take the overlap of the ecological, economic and social dimensions into account, while still being practical in terms of application and evaluation.