Environmental Change and Variability

There are a number of problems associated with environmental assessment and monitoring, all related to environmental change. Very often the information on which the assessment is based is for a limited time frame..

There is a need to distinguish between actual environmental change and "normal" environmental variability within the environment; in many cases the impact of environmental damage does not show itself until well after the damaging activities have taken place, and there is a need to look at the cumulative impacts of many minor activities that individually are not significant, but together may form a major threat.

- Change and variability

All systems exhibit environmental variability - weather patterns result in seasonal and annual variations. The concern is for environmental change - where factors such as climate change or human activities result in irreversible changes to the environment. Unless a long term perspective is taken, long term variability can be mistaken for irreversible change and development interventions can seek to address non-existent problems. There is a need to try to assess any changes that can be seen to have occured within a longer term time frame related to the variability of the system.

- Resilience and Delayed Response

Even where "change" has occurred, the effect may be temporary; the environment may recover with minimal intervention if the pressure is removed - an example of environmental resilience. Conversely environmental resilience can also mean that there are few overt signs of environmental change, until the effects are so major that the environmental situation has irreversibly changed - delayed response. By the time environmental damage is clearly apparent, it may be too late to do anything about it.

- Cumulative and Incremental Affects

The scale of individual livestock management units is generally small; a family owned herd, a family owned mixed farm, a commercial pig production unit. The impact on the environment of individual decisions taken at this management level is also generally small; a few trees cut for fodder, compacted soil in a few fields, or a single stream polluted. The environmental assessment therefore needs to take a strategic view of a development process rather than a single development intervention.

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