Scale and EBM

Ecosystem-based management (EBM) is a dynamic process, focused on understanding and managing ecosystems across a range of organisational (eg iwi, hapū and whānau; local councils, regional councils and central government agencies), spatial (eg local, regional, national) and temporal scales (eg past, present and future effects).

Despite the importance of scale, scale-dependency in different disciplines, and the interactions between them, is rarely explicitly stated and acknowledged as affecting both the decision-making process and its success.

While some Sustainable Seas research explicitly focuses on producing results for different scales, there are gaps in understanding of how EBM can be achieved across a variety of scales. Scale also influences components that may have to change if jurisdictional boundaries or management resolutions are changed, such as the prediction of impacts from cumulative interactions, the return periods of events for management, or the creation of spatial and temporal rules for consenting.

To support development of decision-making practices that explicitly identify scale and scale-dependencies to increase the success of EBM decision-making processes we are:

1. Reviewing existing knowledge of scale dependencies from other Sustainable Seas projects.
2. Analysing scale-dependencies, specifically in the legal-policy, ecological, socio-psychological, mātauranga Māori and economic realms.
3. Creating visual summaries to aid understanding of cross-scale implications and contribute to robust, transparent decision making.