An Ecosystem Services Approach to Assessing the Impacts of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico (2013) / Chapter Skim
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1 Introduction
1 Introduction
Pages 13-20
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From page 13... ...
, numerous commissions, committees, and panels have focused on the causes of the explosion, reviewed the immediate response procedures, and offered suggestions for changes in practice, policy, and regulatory regimes to help minimize the likelihood that a disaster like the DWH oil spill could happen again (IOM, 2010; National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, 2011; NRC, 2011)
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From page 14... ...
. It is a central element in the recently released National Ocean Policy Implementation Plan3 as well as an evolving theme in current fisheries management efforts in the United States (Sissenwine and Murawski, 2004)
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From page 15... ...
By taking a more holistic view of ecosystem interactions and then following these interactions through all relevant trophic levels and spatial connections to their ultimate impact on human well-being, an ecosystem services approach to damage assessment enables formation of a more complete picture of potential impacts and a broader range of restoration options. This is particularly relevant to a spill the size, duration, depth, and complexity of the DWH oil spill, during which oil and dispersants were released at 1,500-m depth into a relatively poorly understood deep-sea ecosystem that includes deep-sea corals and chemosynthetic communities (organisms that derive their energy from oxidizing inorganic molecules)
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From page 16... ...
It then introduced the concept of ecosystem services and an "ecosystem services approach" for estimating the impact of an event such as the DWH oil spill, contrasting this approach with the current NRDA process and its use of habitat or resource equivalency as a means to "make the environment and the public whole." Designed to overcome the challenges involved in estimating harm to natural resources, the equivalency approaches have become, in effect, surrogates for estimating how to make the environment and the public whole. By and large, they focus on estimating the implicit value of an injured habitat or organism rather than on its ultimate value to people.
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From page 17... ...
The Interim Report offered specific illustrative examples of several types of measurements that would augment and complement standard NRDA measurements and would facilitate application of an ecosystem services approach to estimating the impact of the spill. In closing, the Interim Report acknowledged that, although it offers great potential for more complete and realistic estimates of both short- and long-term impacts of an event such as the DWH oil spill, the ecosystem services approach is still very early in its development and faces many challenges to its implementation, the most serious of which is the lack of comprehensive ecosystem models.
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From page 18... ...
The Interim Report and this Final Report identify many areas for which data collection or a fundamental understanding of system processes are lacking, highlighting the need for additional research to take full advantage of the potential that an ecosystem services approach offers for damage assessment in the GoM. Chapter 6 reviews the post-spill actions that led to a 18
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From page 19... ...
The DWH oil spill differs in many important aspects from the Exxon Valdez spill (e.g., the Exxon Valdez spill originated from a tanker in shallow water and impacted coastal and rocky beaches in a cold environment)
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