 SCOPE AND BACKGROUND OVERVIEW OF SIERRA NEVADA ECOSYSTEMS AND ASSESSMENT STATUS MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES FOR ECOSYSTEM SUSTAINABILITY INSTITUTIONAL INTEGRATION OF ASSESSMENTS AND SOLUTIONS
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rev. Jun. 17, 1996 © 1996 Regents of the University of California |
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Goal Setting The development of goals is fundamentally a social and political process rather than a technical one. SNEPs contribution lies in defining important dimensions of goalsfor instance, old growth, aquatic biodiversity, community well-beingrather than the goals themselves. Identification of specific goals requires active participation of all stakeholders. Although the need for goals to organize human activity may appear self-evident, the barriers to convening and managing the development of ecosystem goals are enormous. Convening such a process requires common acceptance of the whole ecological and social system, joint understanding of how the system works, and a shared sense of the importance of the values at stake. Lake Tahoe is a good example in that its value is tangible to people, it is related to its watershed through water and sediment flows, and it has loss of clarity as the preeminent problem. Other issues that have a central ecological role and impact on economic value, such as the erosion of biodiversity and fire, may also bring stakeholders together. Public agencies can incorporate collaborative goal setting into their land-management mission. They are already able to contribute technical, legal, and financial expertise to the goal-setting process, and they are also capable of representing and interpreting rangewide and national perspectives. They can also help to convene the full range of stakeholders needed to address issues, ownerships, and jurisdictional and even cultural boundaries. This process may involve trades and negotiations among participants. In so doing, agencies would not direct the goal-setting activities but rather, within legal and practical limits, participate in a manner that allows stakeholders to achieve common understanding and agreement. Funding Management and Restoration The SNEP strategies focus primarily on technical or planning aspects of management and restoration. Generally they do not attempt to specify cost or funding source. The fire and ALSE strategies propose some harvest of timber and biomass. These activities will produce income but may not cover the full cost of the strategies. None of the strategies are likely to succeed unless they look beyond nearby commodity outputs to identify the full range of beneficiaries of their actions and to devise mechanisms to recover a portion of that benefit. For instance, for those activities in the fire strategy that seek to reduce the likelihood of large, severe wildfire, specific beneficiaries that should be included are local property owners, distant metropolitan water consumers, regional air-quality boards, fire-control agencies, and national disaster relief agencies, among others. Successful projects depend on equitable allocation of costs to appropriate beneficiaries and use of appropriate mechanisms to recover those costs. Arrangements for funding and cost recovery associated with implementation of the strategies will require innovative approaches that might include establishing fees or markets or allocating rights to be traded. Enabling these mechanisms may require legislative involvement even while retaining local flexibility. Equally, legislative proposals to permit local or regional cost allocation and recovery should provide opportunities for site-specific experimentation and further modification as these arrangements mature or as the local and regional conditions and objectives change. Regional Context Translation of SNEP strategies into actual policy may proceed more easily through development of regional policies for the different regions of the Sierra. These regions differ in population levels, density, and growth, and in the manner in which they incorporate costs of resource use and environmental risk, governmental coordination, and activism. The pattern of employment, commodity production, and services directly dependent on the Sierra Nevada ecosystem varies greatly across the range; economic linkages clearly define distinct regions within the Sierra. SNEP strategies emphasize different issues in different regions. For instance, the air-quality strategy is important in the southern Sierra, the fire strategy emphasizes the west-central Sierra, and the grazing strategy focuses on the Modoc country and eastern rangelands. Consequently, agencies and other institutions that are critical to the resolution of ecosystem management problems in one region may be much less important in others. Similarly, funding arrangements are likely to vary significantly from region to region. It is, therefore, unlikely that a single model or policy would apply equally well across all regions, except perhaps one that encouraged widespread institutional innovation toward ecosystem stewardship. Monitoring and Adapting To determine if the strategies achieve ecosystem sustainability, someone must monitor. To do this requires a commitment to design, finance, and adapt over the long term. The most effective monitoring programs would generate information on effects at several spatial scales. For instance, the distributed forest conditions strategy attempts to achieve a desired regional condition by implementing treatments incrementally at the watershed level. Monitoring only within watersheds where treatment has proceeded will not answer how well the strategy is achieving the regional condition. Monitoring a strategys results relative to its goals is a necessary part of adaptive management. An open process is necessary to build trust; without it, monitoring can fuel conflict rather than reduce it. In many instances, no single agency or group is available that will be considered impartial by all stakeholders, in part because values influence interpretation as well as methods. Building trust in monitoring processes requires agreement on the choice of methods and multistakeholder (or multiparty) involvement. With particularly sensitive issues, all-party participation in monitoring may also be required. Decision processes must incorporate specific mechanisms for changing the direction of the policy or project. Monitoring data that highlight inadequacies is of little use without a concomitant process for shifting strategies or reallocating resources. The need for institutional flexibility is particularly important. For example, in addressing issues related to the fire ecosystems of the Sierra, unexpected catastrophic fires may quickly change the context of ecosystem management by reducing old growth, degrading watershed condition, or creating new options for fuel management. The importance of monitoring argues for the establishment of a broadly based convener to facilitate range- and regionwide coordination. Organization of such a groupwhether it arises at the local, regional, or Sierra-wide levelmust be structured to fit the need. However construed, it ought to be collaborative in nature, be authoritative in charge, and focus on monitoring local conditions for achievement of rangewide goals and strategies. Such a group, for example, could help to assemble information in the year 2000 to examine improvements or changes in the following:
Also inherent in the strategies is a need for a central caretaker of information to develop and maintain data pertinent to rangewide monitoring and planning. A manager would have responsibility for organizing and synthesizing local databases as part of rangewide systems and would ensure coordination of distributed databases. Decentralized input of information, as well as access to existing data sets, could be obtained through the Internet, with public access available on-line or through public terminals at libraries and other public locations. Decentralized information also would facilitate a system whereby public agencies and others could provide appropriate tools and expertise, together with training on how to employ these technologies, that would enable local governments, other public agencies, and individual citizens to use these sources of information in ecosystem planning and monitoring. 
 
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