Abstract
The purpose of damage determination and quantification is to quantify the lost resources and/or resource services that should be offset by remediation projects. Damage determination and quantification might involve studies to determine the causes, degree, spatial and temporal extent, and nature of damages. In other cases, existing data and/or models may suffice. Damage studies should be designed to produce scientifically rigorous, high quality data and to answer questions relevant to the equivalency analysis. Studies should not be designed primarily to answer questions that are of purely scientific interest. However, analysts should not hesitate to conduct investigations of an exacting scientific nature, because without correct quantitative information about damages, equivalency analysis is unlikely to provide for the ‘right’ amount of remediation.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The term cascading harms refers to indirect or secondary effects that may occur as a result of an incident. For example, a chemical spill may affect primary producers or prey species directly. Secondary producers or predators that rely on these species, but are not directly exposed to the spilled chemical, might then be damaged through indirect, food-chain responses.
- 2.
The terms ‘migration route’ and ‘flyway’ are to some extent theoretical concepts. Migration routes may be defined as the lanes of individual travel from any particular breeding ground to the non-breeding quarters of the species (e.g. birds, fish) that use them. Flyways, on the other hand, may well be conceived as those broader areas in which related bird migration routes are associated or blended in a definite geographic region. They are wide arterial highways to which the routes are tributary. Except along the coasts, flyway boundaries are not always sharply defined.
- 3.
Risks to human health can result from direct physical contact with contaminated resources (e.g., soil, water), ingestion of contaminated land or food sources (e.g., soil, plants, fish, meat), or inhalation of contaminants. Risks can be associated with both lethal and sub-lethal effects such as reduced reproductive capacity, reduced mental capacity, or increased respiratory disease. The ELD defines any damage with a proven effect on human health as significant.
- 4.
Using a compound metric necessarily implies a weight to the importance of each of the individual components (e.g., uniqueness and evenness). Because a metric should be the same on the debit and credit side of an equivalency analysis, special consideration must be taken when that metric is an index value (i.e., dimensionless), because the offsetting remediation project should not only provide an increase in the index (metric) but also maintain the original proportional weights between the individual components (e.g., uniqueness and evenness).
- 5.
Services here refer to ecosystem services including those that affect human use, i.e. ecosystem services. As noted previously, natural resources themselves often serve as the metric for quantification and the reliance on an integrated measure of services is not universally accepted.
- 6.
This example is simple in that it assumes the lost services recover naturally (without the need for primary remediation). Thus, we do not have to account for the benefits of primary remediation or any collateral damage.
- 7.
In our simple example we assume the fisherman stay at home. More complex cases may involve traveling to another, less preferable site and the costs (losses) associated with this.
References
Babut, M. P., Wolfgang, A., Graeme, B. E., Camusso, M., de Deckere, E., & den Besten, P. J. (2005). International overview of sediment quality guidelines and their uses. In R. J. Wenning (Ed.), Use of sediment quality guidelines and related tools for the assessment of contaminated sediments. Pensacola: SETAC.
CCME. (1999). Canadian environmental quality guidelines. Winnipeg, MB: CCME, Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment (CCME).
Crane, M. (2003). Proposed development of sediment quality guidelines under the European water framework directive: A critique. Toxicology Letters, 142(3), 195–206.
Efroymson, R. A., Will, M. E., & Suter, G. W. (1997a). Toxicological benchmarks for contaminants of potential concern for effects on soil and litter invertebrates and heterotrophic process: 1997 revision. Washington: US Department of Energy.
Efroymson, R. A., Will, M. E., Suter, G. W., & Wooten, A. C. (1997b). Toxicological benchmarks for screening contaminants of potential concern for effects on terrestrial plants: 1997 Revision. Washington: US Department of Energy.
GeneWatch UK. (2005). Notes for Defra in relation to GMOs and the implementation of the environmental liability directive. UK: GeneWatch.
Hin, J. A., Osté, L. A., & Schmidt, C. A. (2010). Guidance document for sediment assessment. Methods to determine to what extent the realization of water quality objectives of a water system is impeded by contaminated sediments. Netherlands: Rijkswaterstaat Centre for Water Management.
Lipton, J., Galbraith, H., Burger, J., & Wartenberg, D. (1993). A paradigm for ecological risk assessment. Environmental Management, 17(1), 1–5.
Long, E. R., Field, L. J., & MacDonald, D. D. (1998). Predicting toxicity in marine sediments with numerical sediment quality guidelines. Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, 17(4), 714–727.
MacDonald, D. D., Ingersoll, C. G., & Berger, T. A. (2000). Development and evaluation of consensus-based sediment quality guidelines for freshwater ecosystems. Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology, 39, 20–31.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). (1999). Sediment quality guidelines developed for the National Status and Trends Program, USA.
Ott, W. R. (1978). Environmental indices, theory and practice. Ann Arbor Science Publishers.
Strange, E., Galbraith, H., Bickel, S., Mills, D., Beltman, D., & Lipton, J. (2002). Environmental assessment: Determining ecological equivalence in service-to-service scaling of saltmarsh restoration. Environmental Management, 29(2), 290–300.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Lipton, J., LeJeune, K. (2018). Step 2: Determining and Quantifying Environmental Damage. In: Lipton, J., Özdemiroğlu, E., Chapman, D., Peers, J. (eds) Equivalency Methods for Environmental Liability. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9812-2_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9812-2_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-9811-5
Online ISBN: 978-90-481-9812-2
eBook Packages: Earth and Environmental ScienceEarth and Environmental Science (R0)