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Oil spill response, recovery, and restoration efforts are by necessity an exercise governed by characteristics of the individual spill and involved or affected parties. However, all spills have certain characteristics in common: they impinge upon shared environmental and ecological resources; they involve multiple stakeholders with differing priorities, concerns, and agendas; they must be managed to mitigate, minimize, or remediate deleterious effects; and they will always involve compromises — there will be no strategy that is viewed as superior by all parties. Despite this complexity, most spill response efforts have been guided by simple metrics developed during the event, such as (in the case of clean-up efforts) the total volume of oil recovered. Such simple metrics chosen during the turmoil of an accident will almost certainly drive nonoptimal decisions. There is an acute need to develop and thoroughly vet reliable, verifiable metrics before a major spill occurs. Of course some of the metrics will need to be region specific to adequately reflect geographical differences in ecology or stakeholder preferences. This paper seeks to lay out a plan for a multidisciplinary research program that examines spill management metrics from both a scientific and a stakeholder perspective and establishes a method that can be used by the responsible government agencies (e.g. Coast Guard and NOAA) to establish scientifically sound, pre-existing, region-specific metrics that are communicable and relevant to area stakeholders.

The East Mediterranean is one of the bifurcation Zone of World Stability. The location near the arc of geopolitical conflicts is the main basis for challenges to safety in this region. Environmental terrorism provoked by these conflicts is the main threat as the intensity of tanker traffic and the infrastructure of oil and gas pipelines in this region are very high. So any terrorist act may lead to an ecological catastrophe with unpredictable consequences. How may prevention best be accomplished? How can the effects of terrorist acts on marine ecosystems be minimized? How can the marine environment and water resources of the East Mediterranean be protected from great anthropogenic loads connected with the current stage of Globalization? These are the key questions of strategic management. Their solution is impossible without contemporary mathematical methods. This paper illustrates an application of the mathematical modeling, theory of catastrophes and risk analysis to assess and manage the levels of threats. The results of a mathematical investigation of risk dynamics and its dependence on the intensity of fuel flows in the East Mediterranean are presented.

'Back-to-the-Future’ (BTF) attempts to solve the ‘fisheries crisis’ by using past ecosystems as policy goals for the future. BTF provides an integrative approach to the strategic management of marine ecosystems with policies based on restoration ecology, and an understanding of marine ecosystem processes in the light of findings from terrestrial ecology. BTF employs recent developments in whole ecosystem simulation modelling that allow the analysis of uncertainty, tuning to past biomass estimates, and responses to climate changes. It includes new methods for describing past ecosystems, for designing fisheries that meet criteria for sustainability and responsibility, and for evaluating the costs and benefits of fisheries in restored ecosystems. Comparison of ecosystems before and after major perturbations, including investigation of uncertain ecological issues, may set constraints as to what may or may not be restored. Understanding how climate and ocean changes influence marine ecosystems may allow policies to be made robust against such factors. A new technique of intergenerational discounting is applied to economic analyses, allowing policies favouring conservation, as the same time as addressing economic standard discounting of future benefits. Automated searches maximise values of a range of alternative objective functions, and the methodology includes ways to account for uncertainty in model parameters. The evaluation of alternative policy choices, involving trade-offs between conservation and economic values, employs a range of economic, social and ecological measures. BTF policy also utilizes insight into the human dimension of fisheries management. Participatory workshops attempt to maximise compliance by fostering a sense of ownership among all stakeholders: ideally, collaboration by scientists, the maritime community, managers and policy-makers may build intellectual capital in the model, and social capital in terms of increased trust. BTF may help to reverse the shifting baseline syndrome by broadening the cognitive maps of resource users. Some challenges that have still be met include improving methods for quantitatively describing the past, reducing uncertainty in ecosystem simulation techniques and in making policy choices robust against climate change. Critical issues include whether past ecosystems make viable policy goals, and whether desirable goals may be reached from today's ecosystem. Examples are presented from case studies in British Columbia, Newfoundland and the Gulf of St Lawrence in Canada; the Gulf of California, Mexico; the Bali Strait and Komodo National Park in Indonesia; and the South China Sea.

Comparative risk assessment (CRA) has been used as an environmental decision making tool at a range of regulatory levels in the past two decades. Contaminated and uncontaminated sediments are currently managed using a range of approaches and technologies; however, a method for conducting a comprehensive, multidimensional assessment of the risks, costs and benefits associated with each option has yet to be developed. The development and application of CRA to sediment management problems will provide for a more comprehensive characterization and analysis of the risks posed by potential management alternatives. The need for a formal CRA framework and the potential benefits and key elements of such a framework are discussed.

Decision-making in environmental projects can be complex and seemingly intractable, principally due to the inherent existence of tradeoffs between sociopolitical, environmental, and economic factors. One tool that has been used to support environmental decision-making is comparative risk assessment (CRA). Central to CRA is the construction of a two-dimensional decision matrix that contains project alternatives' scores on various criteria. The projects are then evaluated by either qualitatively comparing the projects' scores on the different criteria or by somehow quantitatively aggregating the criterion scores for each project and comparing the aggregate scores. Although CRA is laudable in its attempts to evaluate projects using multiple criteria, it has at least one significant drawback. That drawback is the unclear or unsupported way in which it combines performance on criteria to arrive at an optimal project alternative. In the case of qualitative comparison of project scores using CRA, it can be unclear why an alternative is chosen if it performs better only on some criteria compared to another alternative. Quantitative CRAs are often unsupported in how they determine the relative importance of each criterion in determining an aggregate score for each alternative.

New technologies face high barriers to adoption compared to existing technologies for several reasons including a perceived sense of increased risk, a lack of experience with the new technologies among managers and/or regulators, or simply the fact that decision makers are not aware of the availability of the technology. Environmental technologies, however, may be especially difficult to move from innovation to commercialization. Partly this may be because environmental resources exist largely in the public domain where private industry may be unable to fully capture the economic benefits of novel technologies. But also, it may be because environmental projects often involve multiple stakeholder groups with competing or mutually exclusive interests. No single technology is likely to emerge which is perceived by all stakeholders as superior to all competing alternatives on all decision criteria. Therefore, novel technologies are likely to involve tradeoffs that engender both support and objections. This chapter provides a review of some of the difficulties in implementing novel contaminated sediments technologies in the marketplace. Brief descriptions of several technologies are provided, and the contrasting objectives and perspectives of different groups essential to environmental innovation are discussed.