Mapping Wilderness - Concluding Remarks

Global estimates of wilderness reserves have declined rapidly over the last 300 years, largely due to human population growth and demand for food and resources. And human population, now at seven billion people looks set to rise further still to nine billion or more by 2100. Sustainability and resilience are not just words that apply to resources, but to the whole planet including wilderness. Our concluding chapter makes cogent and clear arguments in favour of wilderness protection and rewilding as one means of maintaining a healthy global ecosystm, contrary to some of the ideas of the green modernist movement that puts people at the centre and which believes that technology and human ingenuity will come to the rescue. While some of the policy mechanisms to do this are already in place (e.g. REDD+) we suggest that these require better and stricter application informed by mapping campaigns. Despite wilderness being a largely fuzzy concept, lines on maps are needed to protect natural ecosystems and their wildlife. We conclude with a review of the chapters in the book and how they, together, address these concerns, before making some predications as to future developments

Resolving issues with environmental impact assessment of marine renewable energy installations

Growing concerns about climate change and energy security have fueled a rapid increase in the development of marine renewable energy installations (MREIs). The potential ecological consequences of increased use of these devices emphasizes the need for high quality environmental impact assessment (EIA). We demonstrate that these processes are hampered severely, primarily because ambiguities in the legislation and lack of clear implementation guidance are such that they do not ensure robust assessment of the significance of impacts and cumulative effects. We highlight why the regulatory framework leads to conceptual ambiguities and propose changes which, for the most part, do not require major adjustments to standard practice. We emphasize the importance of determining the degree of confidence in impacts to permit the likelihood as well as magnitude of impacts to be quantified and propose ways in which assessment of population-level impacts could be incorporated into the EIA process. Overall, however, we argue that, instead of trying to ascertain which particular developments are responsible for tipping an already heavily degraded marine environment into an undesirable state, emphasis should be placed on better strategic assessment