Environmental art and the production of publics : responding to environmental change

Environmental crises around the world have inspired an outpour of creative response. As the effects of climate change increasingly manifest, environmental! art is being politically and pedagogically mobilised for ameliorative strategies. The rubric that instrumentalist, techno-scientific approaches to environmental stress (and attendant social distress) cannot solely provide solutions to this challenge has found increasing acceptance. The concern of this paper, however, is the limited understanding of public art's capacity that is perpetuated bv certain trends in environmental art in which the work is charged with communicative responsibility,. Connected to the representational and instructive traditions of public art, this tendency is further informed by the influence of the 'information-deficit model' in environmental conmunication research: a concept that asserts a straightforward connection between information provision, indiyidual awareness and collective action on a concern. The idea that public art can function as a conduit for knowledge,.which in turn will inspire new moral positions and behaviours, absents the art work from the process of knowledge-making and the production of conditons that enable new practice. Arguing for a revised approach to the environmental possibilities of public art, this paper will propose that in thinking aboutl environmental transformation as essentially unrepresentable, a dfferent mode of public engagement with the issue is enabled.

Watching clouds over country : reconsidering Australian indigenous perspectives about environmental change and climate change

This paper considers an Indigenous perspective on the rapidly transforming Australian environment and the impact of world climate change. It is largely based upon a National Climate Change Adaptation and Research Facility (NCCARF) research project, in progress, that is seeking to translate a south-eastern Australian Indigenous perspective of how climate change affects 'country'. The project involves direct community consultation and workshops, framed by a literature review and longstanding author involvements with Indigenous communities in planning, design and native title projects, and will discuss conclusions being raised. Importantly, this discourse is being formulated with peri-urban based Indigenous communities whom are well educated and deeply involved with statutory and strategic planning processes and native title debates.

Unhealthy landscapes: policy recommendations on land use change and infectious disease emergence

Anthropogenic land use changes drive a range of infectious disease outbreaks and emergence events and modify the transmission of endemic infections. These drivers include agricultural encroachment, deforestation, road construction, dam building, irrigation, wetland modification, mining, the concentration or expansion of urban environments, coastal zone degradation, and other activities. These changes in turn cause a cascade of factors that exacerbate infectious disease emergence, such as forest fragmentation, disease introduction, pollution, poverty, and human migration. The Working Group on Land Use Change and Disease Emergence grew out of a special colloquium that convened international experts in infectious diseases, ecology, and environmental health to assess the current state of knowledge and to develop recommendations for addressing these environmental health challenges. The group established a systems model approach and priority lists of infectious diseases affected by ecologic degradation. Policy-relevant levels of the model include specific health risk factors, landscape or habitat change, and institutional (economic and behavioral) levels. The group recommended creating Centers of Excellence in Ecology and Health Research and Training, based at regional universities and/or research institutes with close links to the surrounding communities. The centers' objectives would be 3-fold: a) to provide information to local communities about the links between environmental change and public health ; b) to facilitate fully interdisciplinary research from a variety of natural, social, and health sciences and train professionals who can conduct interdisciplinary research ; and c) to engage in science-based communication and assessment for policy making toward sustainable health and ecosystems.

Security as an element in environmental assessment and decision making

he prominence of global warming as an environmental issue has illustrated the close relationship between natural resources, ecosystems and global security. Whilst environmental decision making often uses techniques such as economic valuation and risk management, the security component is often not considered, at least not from a security analyst’s perspective. Yet environmental security considerations can be global, regional and/or national in impact. Environmental change and policy can effect human health and well being as well as initiating conflict; it can affect the existence of life itself. These aspects are firmly in the domain of the security discipline although the protection of the global ecosystem has not traditionally been considered by those who create security policy. The idea of environmental/ecological security ranges from the eco-centric approach which examines the impact of human activities that impact on the security of the natural systems to the more traditional anthropocentric perspectives that look at varied issues such as conflict caused by natural resource competition and environmental degradation, and the greening of military operations. This paper will assert that the inclusion of the security factor in policy creation and environmental assessments is essential to give richer solutions to these complex socio-economic and ecological situations. Systems theory over the last few decades has emphasised the inclusion of as many perspectives on messy problems as possible to provide truly systemic outcomes. It is posited that the addition of such concepts as threat analyses will produce more effective and sustainable outcomes.

Estimating survival and movements using both live and dead recoveries : a case study of oystercatchers confronted with habitat change

1. Animals facing partial habitat loss can try to survive in the remaining habitat or emigrate. Effects on survival and movements should be studied simultaneously since survival rates may be underestimated if emigrants are not considered, and since emigrants may experience reduced survival.

2. We analysed movements and survival of adult wintering oystercatcher Haematopus ostralegus in response to the 1986–1987 partial closure of the Oosterschelde in the Dutch Delta. This reduced by one-third the tidal area of this major European wintering area for waders.

3. We developed a novel variant of a multistate capture–recapture model allowing simultaneous estimation of survival and movement between sites using a mixture of data (live recaptures and dead recoveries). We used a two-step process, first estimating movements between sites followed by site-specific survival rates.

4. Most birds were faithful to their ringing site. Winter survival was negatively affected by winter severity and was lowest among birds changing wintering site (i.e. moving outside of the Oosterschelde).

5. During mild winters, survival rates were very high, and similar to before the closure in both changed and unchanged sectors of the Oosterschelde. However, the combined effect of habitat loss with severe winters decreased the survival of birds from changed sectors and induced emigration.

6. The coastal engineering project coincided with three severe winters and high food stock, making assessment of its effects difficult. However, the habitat loss seems to have had less impact on adult survival and movements than did winter severity.

7. Synthesis and applications. Human-induced habitat change may result in population decline through costly emigration or reduced survival or reproduction of individuals that stay. Long-term monitoring of marked individuals helps to understand how populations respond to environmental change, but site-specific survival and movement rates should be integrated in the same model in order to maximize the information yield. Our modelling approach facilitates this because it allows the inclusion of recoveries from outside the study area.

Seabird and marine mammal management options in the face of climate change

Climate change is already impacting Australia’s oceans. Responses by marine life to both climate variability and change have been documented for low trophic levels, however, responses for Australia’s iconic higher trophic level marine taxa are poorly understood, including for many conservation-dependent seabirds and marine mammals. We report initial results from a national study evaluating impacts an adaptation options. Individual time series and combined analyses show consistent responses to historical climate signals, however, improved monitoring protocols are needed to maximize detection of any climate-related demographic signals. Despite difference in sampling , the development of regional multi-species-indices of environmental change provides robust climate indicators over large regions.

Climate change and non-Indigenous belonging in postcolonial Australia

The constitution of climate change as an ‘emergency’ invites an appeal to sovereign
power that is troubling in the context of Australia’s colonial history. Climate change is
an unsettling and dispossessing force that, while unprecedented in many ways, can be situated among a series of environmental and social crises that have shaped a discourse of anxious or insecure non-Indigenous belonging in this country. This discourse seeks to render non-Indigenous Australian place as secure and absolute, and understands environmental change as a threat to this goal. This threat appeals to an emergency framing, and in turn to a reassertion, in line with the insights of Agamben, of an exclusive sovereignty that rehearses the foundational dispossessions of colonization. At the same time, climate change is initiating new ways of conceptualizing human relations with place that challenge the value of sovereign status. It enacts realities that refuse a singular emergency and instead generate community from a reorientation of places, times and more-than-human relations. Thought in this way as a creative force that is shaping communities and environments, climate change becomes a source of critical insight for the possibilities of a decolonized future.

Metrics to assess ecological condition, change, and impacts in sandy beach ecosystems

Complexity is increasingly the hallmark in environmental management practices of sandy shorelines. This arises primarily from meeting growing public demands (e.g., real estate, recreation) whilst reconciling economic demands with expectations of coastal users who have modern conservation ethics. Ideally, shoreline management is underpinned by empirical data, but selecting ecologically-meaningful metrics to accurately measure the condition of systems, and the ecological effects of human activities, is a complex task. Here we construct a framework for metric selection, considering six categories of issues that authorities commonly address: erosion; habitat loss; recreation; fishing; pollution (litter and chemical contaminants); and wildlife conservation. Possible metrics were scored in terms of their ability to reflect environmental change, and against criteria that are widely used for judging the performance of ecological indicators (i.e., sensitivity, practicability, costs, and public appeal). From this analysis, four types of broadly applicable metrics that also performed very well against the indicator criteria emerged: 1.) traits of bird populations and assemblages (e.g., abundance, diversity, distributions, habitat use); 2.) breeding/reproductive performance sensu lato (especially relevant for birds and turtles nesting on beaches and in dunes, but equally applicable to invertebrates and plants); 3.) population parameters and distributions of vertebrates associated primarily with dunes and the supralittoral beach zone (traditionally focused on birds and turtles, but expandable to mammals); 4.) compound measurements of the abundance/cover/biomass of biota (plants, invertebrates, vertebrates) at both the population and assemblage level. Local constraints (i.e., the absence of birds in highly degraded urban settings or lack of dunes on bluff-backed beaches) and particular issues may require alternatives. Metrics - if selected and applied correctly - provide empirical evidence of environmental condition and change, but often do not reflect deeper environmental values per se. Yet, values remain poorly articulated for many beach systems; this calls for a comprehensive identification of environmental values and the development of targeted programs to conserve these values on sandy shorelines globally.

Population-level perspectives on global change : genetic and demographic analyses indicate various scales, timing, and causes of scyphozoan jellyfish blooms

Whether a perceived increase in the abundance of jellyfishes is related to changing marine environments has been considered primarily using large-scale analyses of multi-species assemblages. Yet jellyfish blooms-rapid increases in the biomass of pelagic coelenterate species-are single-species demographic events. Using published and new genetic analyses and population surveys, we investigate whether there may be a critical knowledge gap between the scales of recent analyses and the scales of natural phenomena. We find that scyphomedusae may show population genetic structure over scales of tens to hundreds of kilometers, that environments vary regionally and locally, and that populations of medusae can display uncorrelated dynamics on these scales. These findings suggest genetic differences between populations and/or environmental differences between sites are important determinants of population dynamics in these jellyfishes. Moreover, the local abundance of medusae may be most strongly correlated with preceding rather than current local environmental conditions, indicating there is a cumulative time-course to the formation of 'blooms'. Broad-scale macro-ecological analyses will need to build from coordinated, long-term, fine-grained studies to synthesize, rather than mask, population-level phenomena in larger-scale analyses. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.

Determining trends and environmental drivers from long-term marine mammal and seabird data : examples from Southern Australia

Climate change is acknowledged as an emerging threat for top-order marine predators, yet obtaining evidence of impacts is often difficult. In south-eastern Australia, a marine global warming hotspot, evidence suggests that climate change will profoundly affect pinnipeds and seabirds. Long-term data series are available to assess some species' responses to climate. Researchers have measured a variety of chronological and population variables, such as laying dates, chick or pup production, colony-specific abundance and breeding success. Here, we consider the challenges in accurately assessing trends in marine predator data, using long-term data series that were originally collected for other purposes, and how these may be driven by environmental change and variability. In the past, many studies of temporal changes and environmental drivers used linear analyses and we demonstrate the (theoretical) relationship between the magnitude of a trend, its variability, and the duration of a data series required to detect a linear trend. However, species may respond to environmental change in a nonlinear manner and, based on analysis of time-series from south-eastern Australia, it appears that the assumptions of a linear model are often violated, particularly for measures of population size. The commonly measured demographic variables exhibit different degrees of variation, which influences the ability to detect climate signals. Due to their generally lower year-to-year variability, we illustrate that monitoring of variables such as mass and breeding chronology should allow detection of temporal trends earlier in a monitoring programme than observations of breeding success and population size. Thus, establishing temporal changes with respect to climate change from a monitoring programme over a relatively short time period requires careful a priori choice of biological variables. © 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.