Expanding tools and perspectives to consider ecosystem service concepts in Superfund site management decisions
Citation:
Sharpe, L., M. Harwell, James Harvey, Tamara Newcomer Johnson, G. Ferreira, S. Kim, AND B. Pluta. Expanding tools and perspectives to consider ecosystem service concepts in Superfund site management decisions. The 2024 Annual SDP (Society for Decision Professionals) Conference & Workshops, Arlington, VA, April 15 - 18, 2024.
Impact/Purpose:
An ongoing collaboration between tool developers, modelers, risk assessors, and project managers, co-led by researchers focusing on ES tools and risk assessors focused on contaminated site management, has made meaningful progress in incorporating ES concepts and tools in contaminated site cleanup and reuse. The approach taken and the results thus far are of interest to other organizations interested in shifting or expanding the tools and approaches used in their own decision processes. The annual meeting of the Society of Decision Professionals is an ideal forum for sharing our work with a wider audience.
Description:
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Superfund program is responsible for the assessment, cleanup, and reuse of some of the most contaminated sites in the United States. The primary goal of the Superfund program is to protect human health and the environment; the work itself is regulatory and legislatively prescribed. While the concept of ecosystem services (ES; i.e., the benefits that humans receive from nature) is not a part of Superfund processes, the EPA identified potential connections between ES concepts and remediation and redevelopment of contaminated sites in 2009 and has been applying those concepts in cleanups for over a decade. In addition to regulatory hurdles, the organizational separation of those developing ES tools and those responsible for managing Superfund sites was another challenge to incorporating ES concepts in management actions. An ongoing collaboration between tool developers, modelers, risk assessors, and site project managers, co-led by researchers focusing on ES tools and risk assessors working on Superfund sites, has made meaningful progress in incorporating ES concepts and tools in contaminated site cleanup and reuse. These advances include developing generic guidelines for incorporating ES into ecological risk assessments, identifying the value-added aspects provided by incorporation of ES, developing ES tools in response to manager needs, identifying concrete steps to support Superfund staff in effective incorporation of ES tools into their work processes, and conducting multiple case studies as practical demonstrations of this incorporation. These tools include the Final Ecosystem Goods and Services (FEGS) Scoping tool (supports prioritization of stakeholders and ES), the EcoService Models Library (supports identification of relevant ES models), the FEGS Metrics Report (supports identification of relevant and meaningful ES metrics), and the Ecosystem Services Portal (assists decision makers in identifying the most appropriate decision support tools for their needs; https://www.epa.gov/eco-research/ecosystem-services-portal#/paths). This paper will discuss how this collaboration works, the co-development of decision tools and frameworks, and how the incorporation of ES concepts impacted outcomes in case study examples.