Dealing with Cumulative Biodiversity Impacts in Strategic Environmental Assessment: A New Frontier for Conservation Planning

Abstract

Biodiversity impact assessments under threatened species legislation often focus on individual development proposals at a single location, usually for a single species, leading to inadequate assessments of multiple impacts that accumulate over large spatial scales for multiple species. Regulations requiring ad-hoc assessments can lead to "death by a thousand cuts," where biodiversity is degraded by many small impacts that individually do not appear to threaten species' persistence. Spatial prioritization methods can improve the efficiency of decision-making by explicitly considering cumulative impacts of multiple proposed developments on multiple species over large spatial scales. We present an assessment approach and a unique case study in which spatial prioritization tools were used to support strategic assessment of a large development plan in Western Australia. The application of the approach helped identify relatively minor alterations to development plans that resulted in reductions in biodiversity impacts and informed expansion of the protected area network. Using these tools to assess trade-offs between conservation and development will help identify planning footprints that minimize biodiversity losses.

Understanding the effects of different social data on selecting priority conservation areas

“…One could use expert elicitation or stakeholder analyses to identify weightings for both social and biodiversity features (e.g., by assigning species relative weights based on their status in threatened species legislation at regional and national scales or defining Conservation Biology Volume 31, No. 6, 2017 the degree of species' endemism based on the proportion of species' national distributions that occur in the study area [Whitehead et al 2016]). Biodiversity data we used (i.e., SNES layers) were coarse representations of species occurrence.…”

Integrating spatially realistic infrastructure impacts into conservation planning to inform strategic environmental assessment

“…We then incorporate direct and diffuse infrastructure impacts within an SCP framework to show how outputs of spatial prioritizations might inform SEA (Figure ). Others have proposed to link SCP outputs to SEA (Kiesecker et al., ; Whitehead et al., ), but, like most historical EIAs, failed to consider indirect impacts (Jaeger, ). By linking outputs to the different steps of the EIA mitigation hierarchy and explicitly building in diffuse variable impacts, our framework supports identification of priority areas for avoiding, mitigating, or offsetting impacts of infrastructure development and operations.…”

“…During SEA, spatial prioritization can identify areas of high biodiversity value where development should be avoided (Bekessy et al, 2012). When overlaid by the proposed development footprint, outputs indicate areas for targeting minimization or restoration efforts (Whitehead, Kujala, & Wintle, 2017). Because threats (e.g., development footprints) can now be incorporated directly into spatial prioritizations (Santika, McAlpine, Lunney, Wilson, & Rhodes, 2015;Tulloch et al 2015), outputs can also inform the last step of EIA mitigation by indicating the location of conservation priorities after habitats are degraded .…”

Collaborative conservation planning: Quantifying the contribution of expert engagement to identify spatial conservation priorities

“…The approach has spurred the development of spatial prioritization tools for identifying priority areas for conservation actions (e.g., Zonation, Marxan) (Kukkala & Moilanen, ), and is being increasingly employed with the growing availability of biodiversity data and progress of analytical approaches (McIntosh et al., ). Originally conceived in the context of reserve design to achieve more representative networks of protected areas, spatial prioritization is being applied to a broad range of conservation problems, including targeting management actions (Cattarino et al., ; Maggini et al., ), development planning (Kiesecker, Copeland, Pocewicz, & McKenney, ; Whitehead, Kujala, & Wintle, ), and biodiversity offset design (Kujala, Whitehead, Morris, & Wintle, ).…”

“…© 2019 The Authors. Conservation Letters published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. spatial prioritization is being applied to a broad range of conservation problems, including targeting management actions (Cattarino et al, 2018;Maggini et al, 2013), development planning (Kiesecker, Copeland, Pocewicz, & McKenney, 2010;Whitehead, Kujala, & Wintle, 2017), and biodiversity offset design (Kujala, Whitehead, Morris, & Wintle, 2015).…”