From Metaphors to Formalism: A Heuristic Approach to Holistic Assessments of Ecosystem Health.

ABSTRACT: Environmental policies employ metaphoric objectives such as ecosystem health, resilience and sustainable provision of ecosystem services, which influence corresponding sustainability assessments by means of normative settings such as assumptions on system description, indicator selection, aggregation of information and target setting. A heuristic approach is developed for sustainability assessments to avoid ambiguity and applications to the EU Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) and OSPAR assessments are presented. For MSFD, nineteen different assessment procedures have been proposed, but at present no agreed assessment procedure is available. The heuristic assessment framework is a functional-holistic approach comprising an ex-ante/ex-post assessment framework with specifically def

SUBMITTER: Fock HO 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4980027 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature