ID: 1727
Presenting Author: Ian Stewart
Session: 604 - Everything Everywhere All at Once: Harnessing Holistic Impact Assessment
Status: pending
Data management for holistic impact assessment for offshore wind that uses modular design to integrate academic, government, industry and community interdisciplinary research.
This paper presents a recently created data management framework for holistic impact assessment (IA) for new offshore wind (OSW) development in Atlantic Canada. Holistic approaches to IA face both capacity and coordination challenges, requiring the resources of many areas of expertise across biophysical, engineering, computational, social and human sciences so as to facilitate interpretative integration. Capacity and coordination challenges can increase the risk that such inherently information-dense processes will falter, including through inadequate information or misinformation.
These are especially daunting challenges in the case of complex, dynamic, socio-ecological systems that typify OSW projects. Holistic IA must take account of the many connections over different spatial and temporal scales between land and sea, between people and place, the complex dynamics within and between ecosystems, and the various communities deriving livelihoods from them.
Drawing on lessons learned from other OSW jurisdictions internationally, the framework here presented envisages a novel application of modular design to leverage academic, government and industry capacities that are coordinated across disciplines, augmented by advances in data science, to support an holistic approach to IA.
This framework is designed also to enable better flow and interpretation of information between project-level and regional and strategic assessments in support of cumulative effects assessment, widely acknowledged as a persistent challenge facing IA in the OSW sector.
Dr. Ian Stewart is Associate Professor of Humanities at the University of King’s College, Nova Scotia. He has spent several years of academic research and practice in the IA space.
Coauthor 1: Brad Covey