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"How Much is Enough? The Need for Local Watershed Goals"
Dr. Hoenicke is a systems ecologist and has spent a good part of his career on making science relevant to decision-makers.
He received his B.S. in Agricultural Sciences from the University of Bonn, Germany, and his Ph.D. in Ecology from the University of California at Davis. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, he coordinated field logistics for EPA’s National Acid Precipitation Program and subsequently helped expand the National Estuary Program to Southern California at the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board. He served as lead scientist for the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Project until he first joined the San Francisco Estuary Institute in 1994. After a two-year stint in the Office of the California Resources Secretary, where he spearheaded the development of a comprehensive landscape assessment program and the use of scientific criteria in making conservation investment decisions, he returned to the Institute in 2004.
Keynote:
Much of modern environmental science is about managing uncertain futures. The growing uncertainty is matched by uncertain policies. How will environmental laws designed to alter people’s relationship to a relatively stable environment work when the environment changes faster than people? How will environmental planners deal with ongoing changes in climate and all the environmental consequences foreseen or not that are far outside the range of experience but well within the planning timeframe?
There is a growing sense that environmental laws have to be better coordinated at larger scales or become irrelevant. There is a growing interest to integrate the Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, Food Securities Act, and all other federal, state, regional, and local environmental policies, programs, and projects while providing essential flood control, soil conservation, and water supplies. There is renewed awareness that watersheds present themselves as the natural template for the coordinated environmental planning and management that is needed.
But, there is no watershed government. No agency is clearly in change of watershed planning or protection. The job is spread over numerous agencies at all levels of government that defend their budgets based on overlapping missions with little or no accountability for their combined effect on the environment. If we all did everything we're all supposed to do, met every law and implemented all the best technical recommendations, what would our watersheds look like? What should they look like?
This is the fundamental question: how much of what kinds or environmental conditions are needed where to secure essential ecological services for the future? Now is the time for all the agencies of government, concerned citizens, and scientists to agree on quantitative goals for local watersheds. Now is the time to begin replacing piecemeal environmental management with comprehensive watershed designs to meet shared goals for watershed services.
Once goals are set, all the public policies, programs, and projects can be aligned to achieve the goals, and monitoring can focus on measuring progress toward the goals. Goals “cap” a watershed by indicating the minimum downstream supplies of water and sediment that the watershed must provide, and identifying the land use practices needed to sustain the needed supplies of water and sediment. Under this cap, credits for water and sediment quantity and quality can be traded along the drainage network. Downstream polluters might purchase credits from upstream restoration projects. Water consumers might build credits by using less water or recharging aquifers. Based on the "goals approach", watershed permits might be issued to local councils of stakeholder agencies to achieve their goals through all legal means and opportunities, relieving them from expensively inefficient project-by-project permitting, and enabling them to track the cumulative performance of their policies and programs. The regulatory agencies can shift from processing piles of permit applications and related paperwork to assessing progress toward large-scale environmental goals.
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The Lost Gate
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