Environmental Law Commons^™

Adaptive Management For Ecosystem Services, J. B. Ruhl, Robin Kundis Craig

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Managing the wildland-urban interface (WUI) is a widely-recognized land use problem plagued by a fractured geography of land parcels, management jurisdictions, and governance mandates and objectives. People who work in this field have suggested a variety of approaches to managing this interface, from informal governance to contracting to insurance. To date, however, none of these scholars has fully embraced the dynamism, uncertainty, and complexity of the WUI—that is, its status as a complex adaptive system. In focusing almost exclusively on the management of this interface to control wildfire, this scholarship largely ignores the fact that rampant wildfire is itself the …

Transboundary Fisheries, Climate Change, And The Ecosystem Approach: Taking Stock Of The International Law And Policy Seascape, Cecilia Engler

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The ecosystem approach to fisheries management is a conceptual and practical framework consistent with, and supportive of, climate change adaptation at the national and regional level. Implementing an ecosystem approach can contribute to climate change adaptation by improving ecosystem resilience and reducing vulnerability to climate change, by providing planning strategies and tools to monitor and assess the impacts of climate change on fisheries, and by relying on precautionary, flexible, and adaptive approaches that account for the uncertainties, surprises, unpredictability, and dynamism of ecosystems in a changing climate.

In this article, I provide an overview of some key considerations framing the …

Rethinking Public Land Use Planning, Mark Squillace

Publications

The public land use planning process is broken. The land use plans of the principal multiple-use agencies—the United States Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management (“BLM”)—are unnecessarily complex, take too long to complete, monopolize the time and resources of public land management agency staffs, and fail to engage the general public in any meaningful way. Moreover, the end result is too often a plan that is not sufficiently nimble to respond to changing conditions on the ground, a problem that appears to be accelerating due to climate change.

It might seem easy to chalk up these problems to …

Adaptive Management For Ecosystem Services At The Wildland-Urban Interface, Robin Kundis Craig, J.B. Ruhl

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Managing the wildland-urban interface (WUI) is a widely-recognized land use problem plagued by a fractured geography of land parcels, management jurisdictions, and governance mandates and objectives. People who work in this field have suggested a variety of approaches to managing this interface, from informal governance to contracting to insurance. To date, however, none of these scholars have fully embraced the dynamism, uncertainty, and complexity of the WUI — that is, its status as a complex adaptive system. In focusing almost exclusively on the management of this interface to control wildfire, this scholarship largely ignores the factor that rampant wildfire is …

Agenda: Flpma Turns 40, University Of Colorado Boulder. Getches-Wilkinson Center For Natural Resources, Energy, And The Environment

FLPMA Turns 40 (October 21)

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) administers approximately 245 million acres of our public lands and yet, for most of our nation's history, these lands seemed largely destined to end up in private hands. Even when the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 ushered in an important era of better managing public grazing districts and "promoting the highest use of the public lands," such use of our public lands still was plainly considered temporary, "pending its final disposal." It was not until 1976 with the passage of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) that congress adopted a policy that …

Regulating For Resilience: Principled Flexibility And Environmental Co-Management In The Mackenzie Valley, Heather L. Potter

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The author examines the environmental regulatory regime in the Mackenzie Valley region of the Northwest Territories which includes the regulatory structure established by the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the private contractual instruments of environmental agreements, impact benefit agreements and socio-economic agreements. The author concludes that these instruments work together to form a complex regulatory system that is sometimes maladapted to the adaptive management framework necessary for effective regulation in an increasingly unstable arctic environment. The author argues that effective environmental management in the Mackenzie Valley requires a regulatory approach grounded in principled flexibility and shared environmental goals across …

Adaptive Management And The Future Of Environmental Law, Eric Biber

Eric Biber

Adaptive management is the new paradigm in environmental law. It is omnipresent in scholarship and management documents and is even starting to appear in court opinions. There have been many calls for environmental law to adapt itself to adaptive management by becoming more flexible and dynamic. But does adaptive management really warrant a revolution in environmental law? Or is it adaptive management that might need to adapt to the world of environmental law? There has been an abundance of scholarship on the strengths of adaptive management, making the case for changing environmental law to embrace adaptive management. But answering the …

Leveraging Federal Land Plans Into Landscape Conservation, Robert L. Fischman

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Professor Fischman’s article suggests several ways in which a mandated unit-level (e.g. an individual national forest) plan can better contribute to goals of a larger region (e.g. the Willamette River watershed) and of federal agencies (e.g. mandates to maintain ecological integrity). The scientific literature is largely in agreement that achieving ecological integrity, adaptive management, and climate change resiliency all require large-scale coordination across property boundaries and jurisdictions. The author takes these widely accepted findings as a starting point and shows how public agencies can implement effective practices. The article attempts to integrate traditional regulatory analysis with actual planning practices as …

Managing Unconventional Oil And Gas Development As If Communities Mattered, Mark Squillace

Publications

The advent of horizontal oil and gas drilling into relatively impermeable shale rock, and the companion technological breakthrough of high-pressure, multi-stage fracking that frees hydrocarbons along the substantial length of these horizontal wells, has fundamentally altered the oil and gas industry. The Energy Information Administration has gone so far as to predict that North America could become a net energy exporter as early as 2019, largely as a result of the explosive growth of this “unconventional” oil and gas development. Despite its promise, managing unconventional oil and gas development has proved challenging, and many of the communities that find themselves …

Finding The Adequate Legal Framework For The Deployment Of Ocean Renewable Energy Through Area-Based Management, Xiao Recio-Blanco

Xiao Recio-Blanco

The world runs on electricity, but its global distribution is uneven and incomplete. The lack of access to electricity denies some people the most basic benefits, from healthcare and sanitation to security and economic development.

To increase access to electricity, most developing nations have relied on traditional sources of energy, namely fossil fuels, and the extension of a central electrical grid. Scholars and specialized International Organizations suggest that the implementation of renewable energy technologies through small-to-mid scale grid projects could be a reliable alternative. However, renewable energy technologies must overcome three formidable hurdles: low reliability, uneven availability, and the high …

Adaptive Management And The Future Of Environmental Law, Eric Biber

Akron Law Review

Adaptive management is the new paradigm in environmental law. It is omnipresent in scholarship and management documents and is even starting to appear in court opinions. There have been many calls for environmental law to adapt itself to adaptive management by becoming more flexible and dynamic. But does adaptive management really warrant a revolution in environmental law? Or is it adaptive management that might need to adapt to the world of environmental law? There has been an abundance of scholarship on the strengths of adaptive management, making the case for changing environmental law to embrace adaptive management. But answering the …

Economics-Based Environmentalism In The Fourth Generation Of Environmental Law, Donald J. Kochan

Donald J. Kochan

Environmental protection and economic concerns are not mutually exclusive. This article explores some of the issues of economic analysis that might arise as we approach the fourth generation of environmental law. It explains ways that economic analysis can be employed to generate the best environmental rules, including measures under what this article terms as "economics-based environmentalism." Economics-based environmentalism contends that the advantages of using economic principles within a “polycentric toolbox” of environmental law come from the benefits available in private ordering, markets, property rights, liability regimes and incentives structures that will better protect the environment than alternatives like state-based interventionist, …

Stumbling Toward Success: A Story Of Adaptive Law And Ecological Resilience, Mary Jane Angelo

Mary Jane Angelo

For decades, scientific and legal scholars alike have promoted the concept of "adaptive management" as a necessary approach to meaningful environmental management, restoration, and regulation. Unfortunately, adaptive management success stories are few and far between. The Lake Apopka Restoration Project provides a real-world illustration of adaptive management at work. This article uses adaptive management theory to explore mechanisms to make environmental law better able to address the uncertainties and changing nature of natural systems to restore and protect ecological resilience.

Harnessing The Power Of Science In Environmental Law: Why We Should, Why We Don't, And How We Can, Mary Jane Angelo

Mary Jane Angelo

To illustrate how legal scholars, lawmakers, environmental agencies, and practicing lawyers have attempted to incorporate new scientific developments into environmental law, particularly in the administrative context, this Article traces the journeys of three distinct scientific developments -- risk assessment, adaptive management, and emergy synthesis -- from scientific academia to environmental administrative law. The Article concludes by making observations about what types of scientific developments are most likely to be incorporated into the law and suggesting ways for improving the likelihood that new beneficial developments will be adopted to inform the law.

Slides: Arctic Ecosystem Services Measurement And Modeling Project, Eric Biltonen

Best Management Practices (BMPs): What? How? And Why? (May 26)

Presenter: Eric Biltonen, PhD, Environment Economist, Houston Advanced Research Center

8 slides

General Design Principles For Resilience And Adaptive Capacity In Legal Systems--With Applications To Climate Change Adaptation, J.B. Ruhl

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

No force has put more pressure on the legal system than is likely to be exerted as climate change begins to disrupt the settled expectations of humans. Demands on the legal system will be intense and long-term, but is the law up to the task? If it is, it will at least in part be because the legal system proves to be resilient and adaptive. The question this Article explores, therefore, is how to think about designing legal instruments and institutions now with confidence they will be resilient and adaptive to looming problems as massive, variable, and long-term in scale …

Can The Law Track Scientific Risk And Technological Innovation?: The Problem Of Regulatory Definitions And Nanotechnology, David A. Dana

Faculty Working Papers

The functioning of a regulatory regime often turns on what is defined to be included in the scope of regulation and what is defined to be outside. In constructing the definitions of what is regulated, two key challenges are to align the defintions with the risks that motivated the establishment of the regulatory regime and to build in dynamism into the defintions so that they adapt to changes in scientific understanding and technology. This Chapter of a forthcoming book from Cambridge University Press (David Dana, ed., The Nanotechnology Challenge), explores these challnegs in the context of nanotechnology.

Adaptive Management In The Courts, Robert L. Fischman, J. B. Ruhl

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Adaptive management has become the tonic of natural resources policy. With its core idea of “learning while doing,” adaptive management has infused the natural resources policy world to the point of ubiquity, surfacing in everything from mundane agency permits to grand presidential proclamations. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to suggest that these days adaptive management is natural resources policy. But is it working? Does appending “adaptive” in front of “management” somehow make natural resources policy, which has always been about balancing competing claims to nature’s bounty, something more and better? Many legal and policy scholars have asked that question, with …

Governing For Sustainable Coasts: Complexity, Climate Change, And Coastal Ecosystem Protection, J.B. Ruhl, Robin K. Craig

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The world’s coastal ecosystems are among the most complex on Earth, and they are currently being governed unsustainably, by any definition. Climate change will only add to this complexity, underscoring the necessity of finding new ways to govern for these ecosystems’ sustainable use. After reviewing the problems facing coastal ecosystems and innovations in their governance, this article argues that governance of coastal ecosystems must move to place-based adaptive management regimes that incorporate innovative and flexible regulatory mechanisms, such as market-based incentives.

The Evolution Of Natural Resources Law And Policy, Lawrence J. Macdonnell, Sarah F. Bates

Books, Reports, and Studies

This digital resource contains only an abstract, cover image and table of contents information from the published book.

Print copy of book is available in the University of Colorado’s Wise Law Library: http://lawpac.colorado.edu/record=b444104~S0

Contents: Introduction / Bruce Babbitt -- PART I : REFLECTIONS ON NATURAL RESOURCES LAW AND POLICY: Historical evolution and future of natural resources law and policy / Sally Fairfax, Helen M. Ingram, Leigh Raymond -- Ethical perspectives on resources law and policy : global warming and our common future / Sarah Krakoff -- Why care about the polar bear? : economic analysis of natural resources law and …

Slides: Delta Overview, Leo Winternitz

Western Water Law, Policy and Management: Ripples, Currents, and New Channels for Inquiry (Martz Summer Conference, June 3-5)

Presenter: Leo Winternitz, The Nature Conservancy, California Water Program, Sacramento, CA

17 slides

Slides: Groundwater Declines, Climate Change And Approaches To Adaptation, Katharine Jacobs

Western Water Law, Policy and Management: Ripples, Currents, and New Channels for Inquiry (Martz Summer Conference, June 3-5)

Presenter: Katharine Jacobs, Director of the Arizona Water Institute, University of Arizona

37 slides

Stumbling Toward Success: A Story Of Adaptive Law And Ecological Resilience, Mary Jane Angelo

UF Law Faculty Publications

For decades, scientific and legal scholars alike have promoted the concept of "adaptive management" as a necessary approach to meaningful environmental management, restoration, and regulation. Unfortunately, adaptive management success stories are few and far between. The Lake Apopka Restoration Project provides a real-world illustration of adaptive management at work. This article uses adaptive management theory to explore mechanisms to make environmental law better able to address the uncertainties and changing nature of natural systems to restore and protect ecological resilience.

Slides: Beyond Rethinking: Redoing Western Water Law, Janet Neuman

Shifting Baselines and New Meridians: Water, Resources, Landscapes, and the Transformation of the American West (Summer Conference, June 4-6)

Presenter: Professor Janet Neuman, Lewis & Clark Law School

17 slides

Harnessing The Power Of Science In Environmental Law: Why We Should, Why We Don't, And How We Can, Mary Jane Angelo

UF Law Faculty Publications

To illustrate how legal scholars, lawmakers, environmental agencies, and practicing lawyers have attempted to incorporate new scientific developments into environmental law, particularly in the administrative context, this Article traces the journeys of three distinct scientific developments -- risk assessment, adaptive management, and emergy synthesis -- from scientific academia to environmental administrative law. The Article concludes by making observations about what types of scientific developments are most likely to be incorporated into the law and suggesting ways for improving the likelihood that new beneficial developments will be adopted to inform the law.

Slides: Dam Building And Removal On The Elwha: A Prototype Of Adaptive Mismanagement And A Tribal Opportunity, William H. Rodgers, Jr.

The Future of Natural Resources Law and Policy (Summer Conference, June 6-8)

Presenter: William H. Rodgers, Jr., Stimson Bullitt Professor of Environmental Law, University of Washington School of Law

77 slides

A Tale Of Two Imperiled Rivers: Reflections From A Post-Katrina World, Sandra Zellmer

Nebraska College of Law: Faculty Publications

Hurricanes are a natural, predictable phenomenon, yet the Gulf Coast communities were devastated by the hurricanes of 2005. One year after Hurricane Katrina struck, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers responded to a congressional request for an accounting by admitting culpability for the destruction of New Orleans. Its structural defenses failed not because Congress had authorized only moderate Category 3 protection, which in turn let floodwaters overtop the city's levees, but because levees and floodwalls simply collapsed. The so-called network of federal and local structures was a haphazard system in name only, where floodwalls and levees of varying heights utilized …

Maieusis Through A Gated Membrane: "Getting The Science Right" In Public Decisionmaking, Deborah Hussey Freeland

Deborah M. Hussey Freeland

Law meets science in a remarkable variety of contexts. While their interactions are often studied in particular contexts, general theories of their interaction are wanting. This paper presents a general model of an interface between law and science that identifies how their interaction must be structured to promote effective interdisciplinary collaboration, and then demonstrates how this model can be used to analyze problems as diverse as: a large-scale intergovernmental attempt at ecosystem restoration; and the effects of a method of science-based alternative dispute resolution on science and negotiated outcomes. In both cases, the model features of a properly functioning law-science …

Slides: Lessons Learned From The Development And Implementation Of An Adaptive Management Plan At Three Hydropower Plants In Northeastern Washington State, Bob Dach

Best Management Practices and Adaptive Management in Oil and Gas Development (May 12-13)

Presenter: Bob Dach, Federal Activities Specialist, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Mountain-Prairie Region, Lakewood, CO

11 slides

Slides: Lessons From The Pinedale Anticline Adaptive Management Process, Peter Aengst

Best Management Practices and Adaptive Management in Oil and Gas Development (May 12-13)

Presenter: Peter Aengst, Regional Associate, The Wilderness Society, Northern Rockies Office

24 slides