Abstract
Management and regulatory agencies face a wide range of environmental issues globally. The challenge is to identify and select the issues to assist the allocation of research and policy resources to achieve maximum environmental gain. A framework was developed to prioritize environmental contamination issues in a sustainable management policy context using a nine-factor ranking model to rank the significance of diffuse sources of stressors. It focuses on contamination issues that involve large geographic scales (e.g., all pastoral soils), significant population exposures (e.g., urban air quality), and multiple outputs from same source on receiving environmental compartments comprising air, surface water, groundwater, and sediment. Factor scores are allocated using a scoring scale and weighted following defined rules. Results are ranked enabling the rational comparison of dissimilar and complex issues. Advantages of this model include flexibility, transparency, ability to prioritize new issues as they arise, and ability to identify which issues are comparatively trivial and which present a more serious challenge to sustainability policy goals. This model integrates well as a planning tool and has been used to inform regional policy development.
Highlights
Regulatory agencies around the world face a wide range of environmental contamination issues
This study presents the development and validation of a framework to prioritize 117 environmental contamination issues in the Waikato region of New Zealand from a sustainable management policy context
There are three key differences that can be made between this ranking model and traditional source-pathway-receptor Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs): (1) The framework of this model is all-encompassing, in the sense that it first sets out a comprehensive list of discharge-based source categories within which any specific environmental contamination issue can be allocated
Summary
Regulatory agencies around the world face a wide range of environmental contamination issues. The intensification of agricultural activities results in another important diffuse source of anthropogenic contaminants in agricultural soils due to the use of significant quantities of fertilizers and pesticides to optimize production and achieve food security targets [4,5] Atmospheric deposition is another key source facilitating the transport and dispersion of pollutants and materials in the atmosphere either through precipitation or deposition in dry weather [3,6,7]. The focus is on contamination issues that involve large geographic scales (e.g., all pastoral soils), significant population exposures (e.g., urban air quality), or multiple instances of the same source (e.g., 8000 former sheep-dip sites). Such issues are not managed under specific discharge consent provisions but may be subject to current or future regional planning rules. Outcomes of the results are discussed in relation to their implementation by staff of the relevant government organization for environmental protection (Waikato Regional Council) to decide research priorities and inform policy development
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