Summary of Working Paper No. 12-1995

II.4.1, II.4.4 & II.4.5: Linkages and impact hypotheses concerning the Valued Ecosystem Components (VEC's) Invertebrates, Fish, the Coastal Zone and Large River Estuaries and Deltas.

By Lars-Henrik Larsen, Akvaplan-niva, Tromsø, Norway.

The 12th Working paper in the INSROP series was completed on May 3rd 1995. The paper is entitled "Linkages and impact hypotheses concerning the Valued Ecosystem Components (VEC's) Invertebrates, Fish, the Coastal Zone and Large River Estuaries and Deltas." and is prepared by Lars- Henrik Larsen and Anita Evenset, Akvaplan-niva and Boris Sirenko from the Zoological Institute, ZISP. The paper has been reviewed by Eike Rachor from the Alfred Wegener Institute.ÌÌIt is part of the Environmental Atlas, the major prerequisite for the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) of subprogramme II. The mapping process was initiated at the Oslo workshop in 1993, where the VECs were selected. The paper presents a total of 18 hypotheses (IHs) on the potential impact of NSR activities on the five VEC's. The hypotheses are evaluated and classified within the Adaptive Environmental Assessment and Management (AEAM) system used for the EIA. Each VEC is also evaluated by a set of impact-effect linkages, divided into four major categories of effects caused by NSR activity on the individual VEC.

Of the 18 different impact hypotheses, 8 are classified as worthy of further research to validate or reject them. The hypotheses worthy of further investigations thus underline the major gaps in knowledge of the consequences of effects, and the distribution of the actual resources and proposals for further work are presented in each evaluation. Although the 10 hypotheses which are not considered worthy of further investigation are only of relatively minor interest, it would be valuable to expand the amount of available data on these hypotheses. Where relevant, suggestions for further research is also given for these hypotheses.