Implications of global climate change for natural resource damage assessment, restoration, and rehabilitation.

Various international and national regulations hold polluters liable for the cleanup of released hazardous substances and the restoration/rehabilitation of natural resources to preincident baseline conditions, a process often referred to as natural resource damage assessment and restoration (NRDAR). Here, we, the authors, describe how global climate change (GCC) will challenge each of the steps of NRDAR processes and offer eight recommendations to improve these processes in light of GCC. First, we call for a better understanding of the net effects of GCC and contaminants on natural resources. Second, we urge facilities and environmental managers to plan for GCC-related factors that are expected to increase the probability of contaminant releases. Third, we suggest re-evaluating definitions of baseline and reference conditions given that GCC will alter both their trajectories and variability. Fourth, we encourage long-term monitoring to improve the quantification of baseline conditions that will change as climate changes. This will enhance the accuracy of injury assessments, the effectiveness of restoration, and the detection of early warning signs that ecosystems are approaching tipping points. Fifth, in response to or anticipation of GCC, restoration projects may need to be conducted in areas distant from the site of injury or focused on functionally equivalent natural resources; thus, community involvement in NRDAR processes will be increasingly important. Sixth, we promote using NRDAR restoration projects as opportunities to mitigate GCC-related impacts. Seventh, we recommend adaptive management approaches to NRDAR processes and communication of successes and failures widely. Finally, we recommend focusing on managing the stressors that might be exacerbated by GCC, such as pollution and habitat loss, because there is a long history of successfully mitigating these stressors, which can be more easily managed on local scales than climate change. We believe that adoption of these recommendations will lead to a more efficacious NRDAR process, despite the challenges posed by climate change.

Translating ecological risk to ecosystem service loss.

Hazardous site management in the United States includes remediation of contaminated environmental media and restoration of injured natural resources. Site remediation decisions are informed by ecological risk assessment (ERA), whereas restoration and compensation decisions are informed by the natural resource damage assessment (NRDA) process. Despite similarities in many of their data needs and the advantages of more closely linking their analyses, ERA and NRDA have been conducted largely independently of one another. This is the 4th in a series of papers reporting the results of a recent workshop that explored how ERA and NRDA data needs and assessment processes could be more closely linked. Our objective is to evaluate the technical underpinnings of recentmethods used to translate natural resource injuries into ecological service losses and to propose ways to enhance the usefulness of data obtained in ERAs to the NRDA process. Three aspects are addressed: 1) improving the linkage among ERA assessment endpoints and ecological services evaluated in the NRDA process, 2) enhancing ERA data collection and interpretation approaches to improve translation of ERA measurements in damage assessments, and 3) highlighting methods that can be used to aggregate service losses across contaminants and across natural resources. We propose that ERA and NRDA both would benefit by focusing ecological assessment endpoints on the ecosystem services that correspond most directly to restoration and damage compensation decisions, and we encourage development of generic ecosystem service assessment endpoints for application in hazardous site investigations. To facilitate their use in NRDA, ERA measurements should focus on natural resource species that affect the flow of ecosystem services most directly, should encompass levels of biological organization above organisms, and should be made with the use of experimental designs that support description of responses to contaminants as continuous (as opposed to discrete) variables. Application of a data quality objective process, involving input from ERA and NRDA practitioners and site decision makers alike, can facilitate identification of data collection and analysis approaches that will benefit both assessment processes. Because of their demonstrated relationships to a number of important ecosystem services, we recommend that measures of biodiversity be targeted as key measurement endpoints in ERA to support the translation between risk and service losses. Building from case studies of recent successes, suggestions are offered for aggregating service losses at sites involving combinations of chemicals and multiple natural resource groups. Recognizing that ERA and NRDA are conducted for different purposes, we conclude that their values to environmental decision making can be enhanced by more closely linking their data collection and analysis activities.