Limits of acceptable change caused by local activities in Ny-Ålesund. Report from a pre-project, containing a proposal for a main project

Summary

The mandate for this project has been to update information from and revise the implementation of the Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) for Ny-Ålesund, and to plan for how to define the environmental limits that should guide the operation of the research station. The broader environmental work in Ny-Ålesund A major conclusion from the most recent EIA in 2006 was that there is a need for a more systematic approach to the environmental work in Ny-Ålesund. It recommended that an Environmental Plan should be elaborated every fifth year, with specific objectives, monitoring against these objectives and periodic assess¬ments of performance that should guide the development of an Environmental Action Programme. This framework is still not in place and should be established. It is suggested that this situation may be due to unclarity regarding responsibilities for the environmental work and insufficient dedicated resources. Activities at the station have increased over the last years, potentially leading to increased pressures on the local environment. Kings Bay has implemented several measures to reduce negative impacts, like extensive waste management and good information to visitors. New initiatives recent years include successful reduction of energy consumption, measurements of local air emissions, registration of research projects and start of a GIS-system for the activities. Coordination of research projects and local initiatives to reduce their impacts seems modest. Procedures for acceptance and management of research projects should be evaluated as a basis for proposing improvements. It is hard to evaluate the effectiveness of the measures implemented due to a lack of monitoring of the most likely environmental impacts from the station activities. The lack of systematic information on how the situation has changed since 1998 also makes it difficult to assess status and trends. It should be noted, however, that disturbance of air measurements primarily caused by emissions from the power plant and visiting ships is still a problem. Project proposal: Limits of acceptable change in Ny-Ålesund The first EIA from 1998 proposed to set a precautionary upper limit on the total activity or number of people at the research station. However, there is no simple linkage between any number of people at the research station and the resulting environmental impacts; impacts depend on type of activity, its timing and location and the mitigating measures introduced. Specific analyses of how environ-mental qualities are affected by discrete station activities are therefore needed. This may reveal factual cause-effect relationships, but will not determine what is acceptable or not; for this purpose, there is a need for normative judgements and decisions as well. Such deliberations have led to the use of “limits of acceptable change” in the title of the proposed main project. This refers to a management system that uses adaptive management led by objectives and is a parallel to the approach proposed for the Environmental Plan in the last EIA. A main project that will lay the foundation for a future knowledge-based environ¬mental management of the activities in Ny-Ålesund is described. The proposed project consists of a coordinating module and three sub-projects addressing air quality, vegetation and birds respectively. These qualities are likely to be most negatively affected by station activities according to the first EIA. (Follow URL for the rest of the summary)