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Feds want to develop long-term plan for entire North Slope that would allow for adaptive management BLM, USGS proposing science strategy to look at all of slope; plan would be based on long-term science plan, include state, local agencies, public Kristen Nelson PNA Editor-in-Chief
The Bureau of Land Management has been monitoring industry exploration activity in the northeastern National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. When planning work began for a proposed lease sale in the northwest NPR-A last summer, the agency and others began to talk about how they could look at the whole North Slope ecosystem, at the whole puzzle board, not just some of the pieces.
BLM has a Resource and Monitoring Team for the northeastern planning area of the NPR-A, evaluating the effectiveness of mitigation and stipulation measures required of companies working in the area. What the agency is looking at now is a structure built around a comprehensive science plan for the entire North Slope, with public and science groups advising an executive committee to which the on-the-ground team would report and make recommendations.
In November, BLM brought in the U.S. Geological Survey, and March 21 the two sat down with other federal agencies to talk about the federal side of how such a science strategy might work. As new development proposals are considered for different areas in NPR-A, BLM said March 24, it needed to expand the existing Resource and Monitoring Team. “One option is to develop a scientific plan that encompasses the entire North Slope ecosystem and involves federal, state and local agencies, and the public,” the agency said.
“The recent release of the cumulative impacts study by the National Academy of Sciences complements the strategy we are currently undertaking,” BLM State Director Henri Bisson said.
Now that more federal agencies are looking the proposal, the next step will be involving state and local agencies. What will the future look like? The idea developed last summer, with an environmental impact statement moving forward for the northwest NPR-A. BLM began to think “that we really ought to be looking across the North Slope” with studies of the effects of mitigation, BLM wildlife biologist John Payne told Petroleum News Alaska March 25.
Payne, who is BLM's Alaska wildlife/threatened and endangered program manager, said BLM was asking, “How do we really determine the effectiveness of the mitigation and stipulations that are placed on industry? How do we identify what kind of studies are needed for the future?
“And, probably from a biological point of view or an ecological point of view, what do we want NPR-A to look like 25, 50, 100 years from now?”
Development has been chaotic in the Lower 48, Payne said, but because of Alaska's remoteness and it has been slower here and as development goes forward “we have an opportunity to plan with industry what the slope will look like into the future,” accommodating industry and other uses including subsistence, wildlife and the marine environment.
There are also natural changes occurring, Payne said: “The North Slope is a fairly dynamic system and … changes do occur. … And the idea is to identify and quantify what the natural changes are and then what the acceptable changes for human evolved activities ... that are occurring up there.” Structure with a vision BLM asked, Payne said, how this could be organized: “How do we bring interested parties together to move forward with a structure that has a vision, rather than focusing on an individual part of the environment?”
That vision, he said, would be “very much what the National Academy of Sciences proposed here and that's looking at an overall North Slope science plan that may have a life of 25 to 50 years.”
The focus would be on what needs to be inventoried and monitored to determine what mitigation is effective.
“And finally, where we don't have data existing that we may need for the future, what are those data needs?”
BLM has started on that, Payne said, with a contract signed Dec. 1 for a data gap analysis that will be completed June 1. That analysis looks not just at North Slope data, but at what has been done across the circumpolar Arctic. A lot of information has been gathered in Russia, Payne said, information that “because of the vegetation and the environment, is very much applicable to what we do on the North Slope.”
Once the data gaps are identified, and the agency knows what science is missing, a science plan can be developed.
The science strategy, built around a comprehensive science plan, would be managed by an executive oversight group from the involved federal, state and local agencies with input from a public advisory group, from a science advisory team and from the Resource and Monitoring Team on the ground. Research and Monitoring Team in place “We may use our current Resource Advisory Council,” Payne said. The council is already in place and would fit in nicely, he said, as well as avoiding trying “to recreate the wheel” for a public group. That decision has not been made. Payne said Resource Advisory Councils were used in a similar structure in a four-state area in the Southwest U.S.
The Biological Resources Division at USGS is a possibility for the science advisory group. Again, no decision has been made. “But the purpose of this group would be to advise the executive oversight group or the management group on science-related issues. In other words, they're the peer review, if you will, for good science, regardless of whether the science is proposed by industry, the government, state, private, universities.”
What's already in place is the Research and Monitoring Team.
Payne said there has been some confusion about the team, with some people thinking it is gone.
The Research and Monitoring Team is not gone, Payne said. “It's just a different authority.”
“These are the people that are on the ground and these are the people making recommendations of what needs to be done.” Under the proposed science strategy, the team would make recommendations, “using the science plan as the sideboards. These recommendations then would be forwarded to the executive oversight group … which in turn would make decisions based on the priorities, management priorities…”
Once the structure is in place agencies can go for funding to Congress and the state Legislature and perhaps private groups like the National Science Foundation and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, Payne said. Adaptive management In addition to having a long-term view, this structure would allow for adaptability.
“It's a structure that would allow for change, it's not static,” Payne said. “It will allow for adaptability … adaptive management.”
This structure “opens the door for technology … technology application on a broad scale. If industry feels that somewhere in the world they have a better way to do something, it opens the door for them.”
Adaptive management is not easily implemented under the current system, he said: “We have fixed stipulations. We have fixed mitigation.”
Payne said the present system works in some cases — in some cases it probably works very well.
“But we have no real good system to say when are changes needed,” he said. “And how do we implement those changes. And that's what this (proposed) structure allows us to do.”
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