Estuary environmental flows assessment methodology for Victoria

This report sets out a method to determine the environmental water requirements of estuaries in Victoria. The estuary environmental flows assessment method (EEFAM) is a standard methodology which can be applied consistently across Victorian estuaries.
The primary objective of EEFAM is to define a flow regime to maintain or enhance the ecological health of an estuary. The method is used to inform Victorian water resource planning processes.
The output of EEFAM is a recommended flow regime for estuaries. This recommendation is developed from the known dependence of the estuary’s flora, fauna, biogeochemical and geomorphological features on the flow regime. EEFAM is an evidence-based methodology. This bottom-up or ‘building block’ approach conforms to the asset-based approach of the Victorian River Health Strategy and regional river health strategies.
EEFAM is based on and expands on FLOWS, the Victorian method for determining environmental water requirements in rivers. The list of tasks has been modified and re-ordered in EEFAM to reflect environmental and management issues specific to estuaries. EEFAM and FLOWS can be applied
simultaneously to a river and its estuary as part of a whole-of-system approach to environmental flow requirements. Like the FLOWS method, EEFAM is modular, and additional components can be readily incorporated.

Official development assistance and impact assessment, theoretical and practical frameworks

Official Development Assistance (ODA) remains the most prominent development instrument for allocation of foreign aid with the aim of promoting prosperity in developing countries. This includes economic, political, and social development, and most significantly poverty alleviation. However, it needs to be noted that the positive impact of ODA on recipient countries economic, social, political, and other forms of development is not a foregone conclusion. As such it is subject to diverse interpretations, value claims, perceptions, and a range of indicators. Thus, ODA has it proponents and opponents. As such the need for an assessment of the impact of ODA, be it positive or negative, remains a subject of discourse amongst academics, practitioners, aid agencies, politicians, governments, and other stakeholders. The purpose of this chapter is to bring to the fore and to unpack some overarching issues, which will be taken up in following contributions from different vantage points. The focus will be on foreign aid, and development theory and practice in the contemporary social, political, and economic environment.

Regulatory impact assessment: the forgotten agenda in ODA

Although Regulatory Impact Assessment (RIA) has attracted significant attention from OECD, the EU, and governments in developed and developing countries, little is known about its application within the domain of foreign aid. To clarify this claim: There is extensive evidence in the public sphere that countries that are donors of Official Development Assistance (ODA) are using RIA as a tool for improving their regulatory framework within a context of their development assistance. There is evidence that Multi Lateral Development Banks (MDB) provide technical assistance (TA) to recipient governments for the development and application of RIA systems and structures (see ADB 2010, 2012).

Impact assessment: from theory to practice

Foreign aid is intended to be a major contributor to poverty reduction. However, significant questions arise as to the capacity for development funding to contribute to human development, through service provision, through advocacy, through actions and interventions that change power relations, change the social and institutional arrangements that reinforce inequality, threaten or reproduce well-being, and prevent the fulfillment of human rights. In conjunction with questions about what aid “does,” there is equal focus on how it does it. Questions of efficiency, effectiveness, transparency, accountability, social license to operate, relevance, and many others are all embedded in contemporary aid discourse and practice. The aim of this volume was to contribute to a critical understanding of Impact Assessment (IA) clearly informed by contemporary development theory and practice. There is a significantly increasing push for impact assessment, across the whole aid architecture. This is exacerbated by a much stronger focus on value for money, and accountability – to taxpayers specifically in the context of public funds, and donors in an increasingly competitive NGO environment. As was noted by many authors, since the GFC, a significant number of donor governments have reduced or are considering funding reduction for bilateral aid agencies and their contributions to multilateral aid agencies. At the same time they imposed a more stringent and rigorous requirement focusing on “aid-for-trade” and “value-for-money” strategies. There is a drive to ensure the positive impacts of the grant or loan in a sustainable manner.

Development aid: regulatory impact assessment and conditionality

The purpose of this paper is to examine how Regulatory Impact Assessment (RIA) can contribute to decision-making processes of Official Development Assistance (ODA) loans and grants. The point of departure for the discussion is the phenomenon that RIA, within a context of ODA, is applied by International Finance Institutions mainly in the context of Development Policy Loans, to introduce or strengthen country systems for Regulatory Impact Assessment. However, ODA grants, and loans, particularly when specific policy or regulatory conditions are attached to them, significantly impact economic and social conditions within the beneficiary country. This article examines what role RIA can play in facilitating a coherent decision-making process affecting the ODA allocation within a context of conditionalities requiring the introduction of new, or changes to existing, policies and regulations. The discussion considers the nexus between development aid effectiveness, conditionality and ownership, and RIA. The article argues a justification for applying RIA to ODA loans and grants which carry regulatory and policy conditionalities.

Community participation in HIA: discords in teleology and terminology

Core HIA documents, researchers and practitioners assert the significance of community participation in health impact assessment. Despite the rhetoric, there has been little critical examination of the role of community participation in HIA. Knowledge and debate regarding what constitutes community participation and how it may best be achieved is often confused and opinion is divided as to its usefulness and appropriateness for HIA. This paper does not seek to argue the merits or drawbacks of community participation; rather, the authors explore the origins and character of the current discord around public participation in HIA and provide a lexicon for moving practice and discussion forward. The authors argue that the origins of the participation problem stem from: (1) unexplored tensions within the Gothenburg consensus paper and other formative documents in the development of HIA; (2) inherent tensions arising from the dual origins of HIA, specifically Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and Healthy Public Policy (HPP); and (3) a lack of rigour and clarity relating to the terminology of community participation where community participation is used as a 'catch all' phrase for every situation without critical examination. In order to move debate forward, the authors advance a model, the Typology of Public Involvement in HIA, for guiding discussion of community participation. This model comprises a set of context-specific HIA approaches with varying degrees of public involvement. The model also presents a suite of defined terms for understanding and discussing participation.

Histological alterations in the Antarctic cod, Trematomus bernacchii from Davis Station, East Antarctica

During the summer season 2009/10, a comprehensive environmental impact assessment of the sewage discharge was conducted at Davis Station in the Vestfold Hills region of East Antarctica. As part of this project, a survey of the histology of liver, gill, gonad and muscle tissues in the Antarctic rock cod Trematomus bernacchii from nearshore sites in the receiving environment close to Davis Station in was completed. Fish from 4 sites were examined; 1 site adjacent to the Davis Station sewage outfall (within 500 m of the point of discharge), 2 sites approximately 2 km from the outfall (Anchorage Island and Antennae farm), and 1 site approximately 10 km away from the outfall and adjacent to an Adelie penguin population (Kazak Island). All fish sampled from the sewage outfall site exhibited significant histological alterations in all major tissues. Fish from the other 3 sites showed some alterations in either gill and/or liver tissues. Pathological abnormalities present in all fish collected near the sewage outfall included: extensive multifocal cysts of unknown etiology with necrotic liquification; multifocal granuloma with associated inflammation; coagulative necrosis in the liver; and lamellar hyperplasia with associated proliferation and lamella fusion of the gills. Results of this work form part of a weight of evidence approach alongside ecological monitoring, chemical analysis, ecotoxicological testing and dispersal modelling of the discharge plume which is being used to inform and direct upgrades to the Australian Antarctic Divisions operations and current sewage discharge practises at Davis Station.

Direct evidence of histopathological impacts of wastewater discharge on resident Antarctic fish (Trematomus bernacchii) at Davis Station, East Antarctica.

During the 2009/2010 summer, a comprehensive environmental impact assessment (EIA) of the wastewater discharge at Davis Station, East Antarctica was completed. As part of this, histological alteration of gill and liver tissue in Antarctic Rock-cod (Trematomus bernacchii) from four sites along a spatial gradient from the wastewater outfall were assessed. All fish within 800 m of the outfall exhibited significant histological changes in both tissues. Common pathologies observed in fish closest to the outfall include proliferation of epithelial cells with associated secondary lamellar fusion in the gills and multifocal granulomata with inflammation and necrosis as well as cysts in the liver. Fish from sites >800 m from the outfall also exhibited alterations but to a lesser degree, with prevalence and severity decreasing with increasing distance from the outfall. This study highlights the value of histopathological investigations as part of EIAs and provides the first evidence of sub-lethal alteration associated with wastewater discharge in East Antarctica.

Evaluating the impact of an environmental education programme; an empirical study in Mexico.

This study draws on information from 11 in-depth interviews, two focus groups and 72 written questionnaires to evaluate an extra-curricular environmental education programme on forestry designed for preparatory school students from a small rural community in Mexico. Specifically, the study assessed the impact of the programme on the ecological knowledge of 72 students. Qualitative feedback suggests that students learnt about forestry, acquired greater awareness of the importance of conservation for the local environment and enjoyed the participatory teaching methods used in the programme. Quantitative results show a positive and significant association between the number of times a student participated in the programme and the student’s ecological knowledge. Students who participated in the programme once had a 16.3% higher knowledge on ecological concepts and knew, on average, 1.5 more local forest plants than students who never attended it (p<.001). Findings suggest that the inclusion of participatory environmental education programmes in preparatory schools would improve the acquisition of ecological knowledge. Further research could consider the consistency of the findings by replicating participatory methods presented here and by using an experimental research design.

Environmental design : incorporating a rating tool into the design of commercial buildings

Environmental performance assessment or green building rating tools for commercial buildings are one of the more recent responses to encourage green solutions for commercial buildings. This paper discusses the initial stages of a research project that looks at the impact of a rating tool, such as Green Star, on design. There are numerous ways in which an architect can design commercial buildings, but environmental design solutions have consistently failed to become accepted practice. Therefore, how will this tool be incorporated into the building design process? Developed to assist the designer can the inclusion of a rating tool such as Green Star provide an effective framework to encourage the inclusion of environmental design strategies in commercial buildings? A field study, recording the design process of a commercial building, anticipates that a whole building assessment approach towards design, as proposed through the Green Star Rating Tool, will provide an effective framework to set and monitor design targets in order to optimise the environmental design goals in commercial buildings.

Ecologically sustainable development and architecture: the impact of rating tools

The concept of Ecologically Sustainable Development (ESD) has become an important issue – albeit often scarcely applied – in the design of commercial buildings. To encourage the adoption of sustainable strategies in the practice of design and to address the environmental problems caused by these developments, governments and organisations of various countries have proposed the adoption of scorecard rating tools to inform designers of the impact of their decisions and to present a way of establishing project goals and objectives early in the design process. In Australia, the recent introduction of the Green Star Rating Tool (Office Design) is believed to provide the architects with a ‘whole-of-building’ assessment of the environmental impact of their design by creating a checklist against which to benchmark performance. This paper follows the design of a commercial building, evaluating the impact of Green Star in the overall process. The results of the study suggest the need to include the use of scorecard rating tools in a more integrated model, where ESD is considered at every stage of design and construction rather than being a separate component applied only to promote the ‘greenness’ of a building. Rating tools can be an asset to the design team, provided sustainable requirements are reinforced throughout the entire process.