Strategies for integrating scientific evidence in water policy and law in the face of uncertainty.

Understanding how human actions and environmental change affect water resources is crucial for addressing complex water management issues. The scientific tools that can produce the necessary information are ecological indicators, referring to measurable properties of the ecosystem state; environmental monitoring, the data collection process that is required to evaluate the progress towards reaching water management goals; mathematical models, linking human disturbances with the ecosystem state to predict environmental impacts; and scenarios, assisting in long-term management and policy implementation. Paradoxically, despite the rapid generation of data, evolving scientific understanding, and recent advancements in systems modeling, there is a striking imbalance between knowledge production and knowledge utilization in decision-making. In this paper, we examine the role and potential capacity of scientific tools in guiding governmental decision-making processes and identify the most critical disparities between water management, policy, law, and science. We demonstrate how the complex, uncertain, and gradually evolving nature of scientific knowledge might not always fit aptly to the legislative and policy processes and structures. We contend that the solution towards increased understanding of socio-ecological systems and reduced uncertainty lies in strengthening the connections between water management theory and practice, among the scientific tools themselves, among different stakeholders, and among the social, economic, and ecological facets of water quality management, law, and policy. We conclude by tying in three knowledge-exchange strategies, namely - adaptive management, Driver-Pressure-Status-Impact-Response (DPSIR) framework, and participatory modeling - that offer complementary perspectives to bridge the gap between science and policy.

Browning of boreal lakes: Do public perceptions and governance align with the biological foundations?

Browning of surface waters, also known as brownification, is a process of decreasing water transparency, particularly in boreal lakes surrounded by intensively managed forests and wetlands. In this paper, we review the ecological consequences and ecosystem-based management (EBM) of browning through a systematic review approach and adopt an interdisciplinary approach to formulating new governance of this complex phenomenon. To understand the effects of browning on the recreational value of freshwaters, we present primary survey data on public perceptions of recreational fishing tourists on water quality in Finland. We identify a need to develop EBM beyond the EU's Water Framework Directive (WFD) to fully account for the extensive implications of browning. We also highlight the need for a better understanding of the within-lake microbial processes to estimate the browning-associated changes in the greenhouse gas balance of lakes. Tourist perceptions of the quality of waterbodies in Finland were largely in agreement with the general proportion of waterbodies classified in a good or excellent ecological status class, but these perceptions may be detached from biological quality assessment criteria. Consequently, we suggest that the EBM of inland waters should improve the utilization of information on not only biogeochemical processes but also users' perspectives on aquatic ecosystems beyond the EU WFD.

Governing complexity: Integrating science, governance, and law to manage accelerating change in the globalized commons.

The speed and uncertainty of environmental change in the Anthropocene challenge the capacity of coevolving social-ecological-technological systems (SETs) to adapt or transform to these changes. Formal government and legal structures further constrain the adaptive capacity of our SETs. However, new, self-organized forms of adaptive governance are emerging at multiple scales in natural resource-based SETs. Adaptive governance involves the private and public sectors as well as formal and informal institutions, self-organized to fill governance gaps in the traditional roles of states. While new governance forms are emerging, they are not yet doing so rapidly enough to match the pace of environmental change. Furthermore, they do not yet possess the legitimacy or capacity needed to address disparities between the winners and losers from change. These emergent forms of adaptive governance appear to be particularly effective in managing complexity. We explore governance and SETs as coevolving complex systems, focusing on legal systems to understand the potential pathways and obstacles to equitable adaptation. We explore how governments may facilitate the emergence of adaptive governance and promote legitimacy in both the process of governance despite the involvement of nonstate actors, and its adherence to democratic values of equity and justice. To manage the contextual nature of the results of change in complex systems, we propose the establishment of long-term study initiatives for the coproduction of knowledge, to accelerate learning and synergize interactions between science and governance and to foster public science and epistemic communities dedicated to navigating transitions to more just, sustainable, and resilient futures.

The Role of Social-Ecological Resilience in Coastal Zone Management: A Comparative Law Approach to Three Coastal Nations.

Around the globe, coastal communities are increasingly coping with changing environmental conditions as a result of climate change and ocean acidification, including sea level rise, more severe storms, and decreasing natural resources and ecosystem services. A natural adaptation response is to engineer the coast in a perilous and often doomed attempt to preserve the status quo. In the long term, however, most coastal nations will need to transition to approaches based on ecological resilience-that is, to coastal zone management that allows coastal communities to absorb and adapt to change rather than to resist it-and the law will be critical in facilitating this transition. Researchers are increasingly illuminating law's ability to promote social-ecological resilience to a changing world, but this scholarship-mostly focused on U.S. law-has not yet embraced its potential role in helping to create new international norms for social-ecological resilience. Through its comparison of coastal zone management in Australia, Finland, and the Netherlands, this article demonstrates that a comparative law approach offers a fruitful expansion of law-and-resilience research, both by extending this research to other countries and, more importantly, by allowing scholars to identify critical variables, or variable constellations associated with countries' decisions to adopt laws designed to promote social-ecological resilience and to identify mechanisms that allow for a smoother transition to this approach. For example, our comparison demonstrates, among other things, that countries can adopt coastal zone management techniques that integrate social-ecological resilience without fully abandoning more traditional engineering approaches to adapt to environmental change and its impacts.