Strategic environmental assessment and monitoring: Arctic key gaps and bridging pathways

• Published in: Environmental Research Letters
• Main Authors: Juan Azcárate, Berit Balfors, Arvid Bring, Georgia Destouni
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: IOP Publishing 2013
• Subjects: Arctic; strategic environmental assessment; hydroclimatic change; climate change; environmental change; environmental observation; Environmental technology. Sanitary engineering; TD1-1066; Environmental sciences; GE1-350; Science; Q; Physics; QC1-999; Climate change
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/8/4/044033; https://doaj.org/article/d4e8b84be6344730b49fa75f1cd78533

The Arctic region undergoes rapid and unprecedented environmental change. Environmental assessment and monitoring is needed to understand and decide how to mitigate and/or adapt to the changes and their impacts on society and ecosystems. This letter analyzes the application of strategic environmental assessment (SEA) and the monitoring, based on environmental observations, that should be part of SEA, elucidates main gaps in both, and proposes an overarching SEA framework to systematically link and improve both with focus on the rapidly changing Arctic region. Shortcomings in the monitoring of environmental change are concretized by examples of main gaps in the observations of Arctic hydroclimatic changes. For relevant identification and efficient reduction of such gaps and remaining uncertainties under typical conditions of limited monitoring resources, the proposed overarching framework for SEA application includes components for explicit gap/uncertainty handling and monitoring, systematically integrated within all steps of the SEA process. The framework further links to adaptive governance, which should explicitly consider key knowledge and information gaps that are identified through and must be handled in the SEA process, and accordingly (re)formulate and promote necessary new or modified monitoring objectives for bridging these gaps.