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ReVA Approach
Even though past protection has been effective, current science indicates future efforts must address problems that are just emerging or are on the horizon. These problems are subtle and cumulative, with widespread, regional effects and poorly understood implications. Regional Vulnerability Assessment (ReVA) is an approach to regional-scale environmental assessment that is currently under development by ORD. The pilot assessment will be done for the Mid-Atlantic region and builds on data collected for EMAP. ReVA is being developed to identify those ecosystems most vulnerable to being lost or permanently harmed in the next 5 to 25 years and to elucidate which stressors are likely to cause the greatest risk. The goal here is not exact predictions, but an early warning system to identify the undesirable environmental changes we should expect over the next few decades. As such, ReVA represents a new risk paradigm for EPA that will require innovative approaches to combine existing knowledge, focus new research, and synthesize many types of information into a meaningful assessment designed to inform environmental decision-makers about future environmental risk.
EPA's Office of Research and Development's (ORD) Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program (EMAP), combined with the regional office and other federal and state monitoring efforts in the Mid-Atlantic region, have produced the most complete set of data on regional environmental condition and trends in the United States. As part of the Mid-Atlantic Integrated Assessment (MAIA), EMAP, the regional office, and state and local partners have produced environmental report cards on the health of highland streams, estuaries, and a landscape assessment.Work is ongoing to evaluate the health of forests and groundwater and to complete an initial evaluation of the major stressors within the region. This work has been accomplished with input from regional decision-makers and a diverse group of stakeholders. These efforts have underscored both the need for continuing partnerships between ORD and its clients to ensure applicability of ORD products and the client's interest in bringing existing knowledge together with the newest technologies to predict where future environmental problems are likely to occur.
To develop the regional assessment will involve four interacting functions:
- Data on stressors and effects from many sources must be placed into the spatial context and synthesized using the capabilities of Geographic Information Systems (GIS).
- Research must fill critical gaps in our ability to apply the data at the landscape and regional scale and to understand how socioeconomic drivers affect environmental condition.
- An assessment component must keep the project grounded in the real world by applying the data and risk assessment techniques to specific regions.
- Data and analytical tools, the final step is critical to assuring that the results of the research can be applied to continuing regional assessments, must be transferred into the hands of regional managers.
One of the most important components of ReVA is to evaluate what we - the scientific community - know and how well what we know fits into a regional comparative risk assessment. Accomplishing this evaluation will require integrating many different types of information from many different sources. Partnerships with other federal and state agencies as well as non-government organizations (NGOs) and academia will be required. The spatial and temporal distributions and magnitudes of environmental stressors will be estimated using pollutant monitoring data and models that predict stressor behavior (e.g. atmospheric deposition, pest distribution, land use change).
ReVA will determine the spatial distribution of sensitive ecosystems (receptors) by analyzing known distributions of plant and animal populations or communities within ecosystems. Modern methods in landscape ecology and characterization will then be used to further identify the locations of ecosystems that are vulnerable to future stress through features such as topography (i.e. increased erosion potential) and habitat patch configurations. Existing sensitivity and stress-response models of important ecological communities developed by ORD ecosystems protection research and others will be used to quantify potential exposures and tested for their ability to provide cause-effect information on a regional scale. Monitoring data collected at several scales will further refine estimates of exposure by providing information on current condition, known stressors, and effects; issues of scale and the ability to extrapolate data regionally will be carefully evaluated. Information on socioeconomic drivers will be integrated into the assessment to gain an understanding of which factors have contributed to current environmental condition and this will form the conceptual basis for predicting future condition and vulnerability. Successful integration of all available information is only a first step in producing a comprehensive assessment of regional environmental vulnerability.
Past research has focused on single stressor-receptor relationships and currently little is known about cumulative and synergistic effects of multiple stressors. Similarly, most effects research has focused on small spatial scales primarily because of the infeasibility of doing controlled experiments on a large scale and applicability of this small spatial-scale research to regional problems often is limited. New approaches, primarily in the areas of landscape ecology and characterization, will be used to estimate vulnerability on a regional scale. Currently this research includes ongoing efforts in metapopulation modeling, cumulative effects, economic geography, integrative indicators of ecosystem condition (i.e. breeding birds), scale issues, and landscape dynamics. Improved models of multiple-stressor exposures developed as part of the Multimedia Integrated Modeling System (MIMS) will also be incorporated as they become available. New research in the area of socioeconomic drivers and resource valuation will constitute a major focus within ReVA. Projections of future conditions will be done thru integration of socioeconomic models that predict changes in consumption of ecological goods and services with projected trends in ecosystem sensitivity.
A key component to identifying the forces of change, socioeconomic modeling will provide high resolution growth profiles of emissions, infrastructure needs, and future land use with its associated changes in habitat fragmentation, runoff and erosion, and wetland conversion. These profiles will be derived from models of regional resource economics, development desirability, planned development and population projections as well as higher resolution transportation and new employment growth models. Research into resource valuation is expected to refine predictions of environmental vulnerability by providing a means to communicate opportunity costs associated with alternative management decisions.
Concurrent with the development of an integrated approach to regional risk assessment, ReVA will be testing techniques for their applicability to real-world environmental issues. This will be done through close interactions with EPA Region 3 and through periodic review by a diverse group of regional stakeholders. Effective communication of the implications of alternative management actions on future environmental condition as well as communication of the uncertainty associated with future projections will be critical to the successful implementation of ReVA as a decision-making tool. Working closely with regional decision-makers throughout the development of the assessment methodology will ensure that the appropriate questions are posed and that research results are more widely disseminated than has traditionally been done. This approach will support EPA's initiatives "Americans' Right to Know" and Community-Based Environmental Protection by providing improved access to comprehensive information and utilizing continuous stakeholder input into the development of the decision-support tools. It is anticipated that ReVA will enable place-based decision-making at the local up to the regional scale. Identification of the most critical stressors and spatial distribution of exposures will help guide future restoration efforts. As ReVA evolves over time and informed decision-making is implemented, the integrated assessment approach should also provide feedback to ORD on the success of its research and development activities in terms of actual improvement in environmental quality as stated in goals established for the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA).
The final function for ReVA will be technology transfer to the Region. As ORD's role is in research and technology development, rather than continuing assessment work, it will be necessary to ensure that the Region has the capability to further refine projected conditions as new information becomes available and as environmental management actions are implemented that may change future conditions. ReVA will have two basic arms; the first being the research arm that will develop the assessment technology through focused research and development of integration techniques, the second arm functioning as the application group that works directly with the region to pose alternative "what if" questions and demonstrate use of the final decision-support tool. Depending on existing capabilities within the region, ReVA may provide analytical support by detailing part of the applications team to work within the Region until sufficient capabilities are developed within the regional office. The goal is to provide user support that will enable the region to fully utilize the resulting tool while ORD scientists continue to explore new research questions as future issues emerge.