Developing an environmental assessment framework in the Pacific In collaboration with the Secretariat for Pacific Regional Environment Program (SPREP), Heath Kelsey, Tracey Saxby, and Adrian Jones traveled to Samoa (Tracey and Adrian will be there until the end of this month) to help develop an environmental assessment framework for Pacific Island Countries. This current work [...]
Continue Reading »May 9, 2012
April 18, 2012
Chesapeake Bay 2011 report card release at Baltimore Harbor
The following remarks were made at the 17 April 2012 release of the Chesapeake Bay report card: Welcome to the 2011 Chesapeake Bay report card release. My name is Bill Dennison, and I am with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science or UMCES. For the past six years, a group of scientists associated [...]
Continue Reading »April 5, 2012
April 3, 2012
Environmental report card workshop in Surfers Paradise, Australia
Sponsored by the Australian Water and Environmental Research Alliance (AWERA), a workshop on environmental report cards was held near Brisbane, Australia. This workshop focused on how environmental report cards have emerged as a technique to integrate data and provide feedback to a wide range of stakeholders as to the ecosystem health of a particular region. [...]
Continue Reading »April 2, 2012
Streamlining environmental reporting in the Pacific region
In March, Bill Dennison, Heath Kelsey, and I traveled to Nadi, Fiji to facilitate a workshop aimed at streamlining environmental reporting in the Pacific region. The 2010 Pacific Islands Forum Leaders’ and Forum Economic Ministers’ directive on reporting acknowledged the need to streamline global, regional and national reporting to reduce the reporting burden at the [...]
Continue Reading »March 28, 2012
Innovations in Environmental Synthesis, Reporting and Governance: Part 12 – Questions From the Seminar
QUESTION: Hi, Adam from the Department of Environment. Thanks for the presentation. One of the key messages I got which was really cool was that you think that it’s important to synthesize as you go through the research. I want to know the challenges in terms of synthesizing and sharing knowledge and data before publishing. [...]
Continue Reading »March 26, 2012
Innovations in Environmental Synthesis, Reporting and Governance: Part 11 – Conclusion
One of the things I would like to leave this conference with is some ideas about how we can collaborate between Chesapeake Bay and Australia. Let’s figure out how we can collaborate and work together. I’ll give you an example that I’ve thought up with some other folks at the University of Queensland. We can [...]
Continue Reading »March 23, 2012
Innovations in Environmental Synthesis, Reporting and Governance: Part 10 – Innovations in Governance/BaySTAT
This is where Governor O’Malley came in and he created BayStat. This was based on tracking nutrient and sediment reductions. Our eutrophication problem is over-enrichment of nutrients creating dissolved oxygen “dead zones”. O’Malley puts together an interesting assortment of people. We sit on a monthly basis with the Secretary of Natural Resources, the Secretary of [...]
Continue Reading »March 21, 2012
Innovations in Environmental Synthesis, Reporting and Governance: Part 9 – Innovations in Governance
The last thing I want to talk about is innovations in governance. This is a story I want to start in New York City, where there was a guy called Jack Maple. He always had a bow-tie and a bowler. He was a transit cop, policing the subways and buses in New York. He started [...]
Continue Reading »March 19, 2012
Innovations in Environmental Synthesis, Reporting and Governance: Part 8 – Environmental Report Cards
Report cards are also a great way to bring together disparate groups. An extreme example is that the US State Department was trying to mediate some dialog between Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan when Armenia and Azerbaijan were technically still at war. So we got together with them, and we put up this first map of [...]
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