Abstract
Ever more extensive use of marine space by human activities and greater demands for marine natural resources has led to increases in both duration and spatial extent of pressures on the marine environment. In parallel, the global crisis of decreasing biodiversity and loss of habitats has revitalized scientific research on human impacts and lead to methodological development of cumulative pressure and impact assessments (CPIA). In Europe alone, almost twenty CPIAs have been published in the past 10 years and some more in other sea regions of the world. In this review, we have analysed 36 recent marine CPIAs and focused on their methodological approaches. We were especially interested in uncovering methodological similarities, identifying best practices and analysing whether the CPIAs have addressed the recent criticism. The review results showed surprisingly similar methodological approaches in >50% of the studies, raising hopes for finding coherence in international assessment efforts. Although the CPIA methods showed relatively few innovative approaches for addressing the major caveats of previous CPIAs, the most recent studies indicate that improved approaches may be soon found.
Highlights
The marine environment is at risk from multiple human activities such as overfishing, chemical contamination by hazardous substances, inputs of nutrients, physical modification, etc., in addition to climate change, leading to impaired environmental conditions (Lotze et al, 2006)
This review has five specific objectives: (1) To compare and find similarities in the structures of the cumulative pressure and impact assessments (CPIA) methods; (2) to evaluate the selection of ecosystem components included in CPIAs; (3) to evaluate the links between human activities, pressures and associated impacts in the CPIAs; (4) to compare the methods in estimating potential impacts; and (5) to find good practices in validating the CPIAs
The synergistic and antagonistic effects were mainly assessed in those CPIAs which used ecosystem models, but in one study synergistic effects were inserted into an additive model by defining pressures enhancing the effects of other pressures (Certain et al, 2015)
Summary
The marine environment is at risk from multiple human activities such as overfishing, chemical contamination by hazardous substances, inputs of nutrients, physical modification, etc., in addition to climate change, leading to impaired environmental conditions (Lotze et al, 2006). The global assessment of human impacts by Halpern et al (2008) fostered a wave of impact assessments in the world’s seas (e.g., Selkoe et al, 2009; Ban et al, 2010; Korpinen et al, 2012). Many of these assessments followed the same methodology as in the global assessment, new approaches were found (e.g., Andersen and Stock, 2013; Knights et al, 2013), old approaches were re-assessed (e.g., van der Wal and Tamis, 2014) and spatial accuracy of the assessments increased
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