Tender for the Programme - South West Catchments Council

DRAFT
South West Regional NRM Strategy – Ancillary Document
7. Further discussion on emerging threats
Horizon planning 4 is a workshop approach that has been developed fairly recently, allowing a group of
people with shared interests to explore changes that might impact on their area of interest in the near to
mid-term future, whether through human-induced or other causes. Generally specialists from a range of
fields participate to ensure that as broad a range of factors as possible is discussed. Often, such sessions
identify and highlight issues that are unlikely to have otherwise been discovered.
A group of scientists from around the world have been implementing the approach since 2009 to identify
emerging issues for conservation, highlighting 15 key issues in an annual report. The latest of these
identified four trends that have some relevance to the South West NRM region (Sutherland et al. 2011):
Human denial of long-term threats
Global responses to climate change
Transformation of oceans and domestication of marine species
Hydraulic fracturing
In addition, NRM stakeholders in the South West region have identified a number of other issues through
direct consultation or at a workshop held in Bunbury on 2011. Each of these issues is discussed in more
detail below.
7.1 Human denial of long-term threats
A number of authors have argued that it is a predictable and natural human behaviour to deny long-term
threats to human quality of life and health, such as climate change and biodiversity loss (Rees 2011). As
an example, social responses to HIV-Aids consistently indicate that a large proportion of society will deny
scientific evidence and that individuals will only change their behaviour when they personally experience
serious, immediate impacts. It should therefore be expected that society will respond to climate change in
a similar manner, and indeed, the proportion of people denying climate change in the USA is now
increasing.
Worse still, social psychologists suggest that denial is expected to increase both in extent and intensity as
scientific evidence of a threat from phenomena such as climate change or biodiversity loss accumulates 5 .
This expected behaviour has major implications for much of the work conducted in the NRM field,
particularly when combined with the ever-growing aspirations of people in developing countries for a
“better life” that inexorably lead to increasing consumption levels.
7.2 Decreasing rainfall
The only global agreement with specific targets to control greenhouse gas emissions, the Kyoto Protocol,
expires at the end of 2012. Failure of negotiating parties to reach agreement on a successor means that it
is now almost inevitable that any new agreement will take effect some time after the Kyoto Protocol
expires. It is even possible that a global agreement is not feasible. Nevertheless, local efforts to reduce
emissions will probably continue in many countries. Under a global agreement, there might be
opportunities to optimize or target emission reduction mechanisms, particularly those designed to reduce
deforestation or enhance carbon storage in natural systems, which might also benefit native species.
Without an overarching global agreement, it is unclear which mechanisms will be available to ensure that
4
5
Or as Sutherland et al (2010) put it, “Horizon scanning is the systematic search for incipient trends, opportunities and
constraints that might affect the probability of achieving management goals and objectives. Explicit objectives of horizon
scanning are to anticipate issues, accumulate data and knowledge about them, and thus inform crucial decisions.” It is a
technique widely employed in the health sector, as well as business and in the defence forces, but has not been widely used in
the fields of conservation and natural resource management.
Dickinson, J.L. 2009 The people paradox: self-esteem striving, immortality ideologies, and human response to climate
change. Ecol. Soc. 14: 17
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