PARENT SESSION
Special Session - Multiple Scales for Sustainable Results - Morning Session Friday, April 2, 2004 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM Apollo Room 7

This session will highlight recent research that incorporates the use of multiple scales and innovative environmental accounting to better inform decisions that affect sustainability, resilience, and vulnerability at all scales. Effective decision-making involves assessment at multiple scales and quantification of the full range of environmental costs and benefits associated with multiple decision-criteria. Work on a Regional scale contributes to local decision-making by extending the horizon such that environmental stresses that progress across the landscape (e.g. land use change, atmospheric deposition, spread of non-indigenous species) can be evaluated within the context of current and future cumulative stresses. Similarly, small localized actions add up to regional impacts (e.g. permitting of small point sources of atmospheric pollutants, linking of green space to provide habitat for migratory species) and are therefore important for maximizing opportunities and heading off actions having only short-term benefits.

Using landscape indicators to evaluate opportunities for cross-media environmental trading. KING, DENNIS M. ^1,2 and WAINGER, LISA A. ^1,2, ¹ King and Associates, Inc., Solomons, MD, USA² University of Maryland, Solomons, MD, USA

ABSTRACT- Regional environmental trading systems are being seriously considered to achieve a wide range of regional environmental goals. Some of these trading systems may involve out-of-kind trades that involve different types of environmental gains and losses in different regions or states. The potential to gain from such trading is based on the fact that conditions are not uniform across landscapes resulting in differences in costs and environmental gains from certain activities. Important locational differences are associated with the proximity of activities to landscape features and the vulnerability of nearby habitats. This research examines how indicators of regional landscape differences can help determine the logical geographic range of trading areas, and establish rules and units of exchange that take the most advantage of regional landscape differences. Special attention is paid to the pros and cons of broad-based cross-media trading, such as possible air/water quality trading between states. The paper will: 1) identify specific regional indicators of how land use/land management changes and changes in air and water emissions at different locations are likely to affect various local, regional, and state-wide environmental goals and the costs of achieving them; 2) identify a series of typical trades and examine how regional indicators can be used to predict and/or influence trade outcomes; and 3) provide specific recommendations regarding the types of trades that have the most potential, rules and units of exchange that can be used to manage trading, and ways to measure and manage the environmental risks associated with this type of trading.

KEY WORDS: trading, indicators, landscape, cross-media, applications