Sea-mining decision was deaf to scientists
Marine scientist Dr Andrew Wright says seabed mining off Taranaki’s coastline was allowed without scientific support.
OPINION: Here in New Zealand, as we watch events unfold in the United States and the United Kingdom, many may feel a sense of detachment.
Partly this is due to distance and the fact that New Zealand will probably only be tangentially affected by Brexit and the workings of the current US Administration and Congress. Partly this is because we can do little about it anyway.
However, there is also a feeling that such things couldn’t happen here. New Zealand is just better than that.
The problem is that the effectiveness of alternative facts in swaying public opinion begins, in part, with a growing disregard for scientists and the information they provide to the world. Unfortunately, the seeds of such efforts are beginning to bear fruit here.
Last month, the New Zealand Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) approved a controversial application from Trans-Tasman Resources Limited (TTR) for consent to mine a large area of the seabed off the Taranaki coastline over 35 years.
Seabed mining, especially on this scale, has never been done before anywhere in the world. Regardless, it was the EPA’s job to determine if the TTR project could be undertaken while protecting the environment.
TTR aided the EPA by providing an impact assessment that, in the words of dissenting members of the Decisionmaking Committee (DMC), ‘‘largely ignored’’ their responsibilities to adequately describe the environment and outline the residual impacts after their proposed mitigation measures.
The main issue is that there is very little reliable information on the environment within the project area and the animals that inhabit it.
This all leads to considerable uncertainty, which dissenting DMC members noted required them to, ‘‘favour caution and environmental protection’’ in making their decision. However, those DMC members favouring the project took a different view.
For example, the DMC accepted TTR’s supposition that operational noise pollution would not have any impacts on whales and dolphins beyond 23km from the mining as the noise would have dropped below a particular level. However, the threshold used was derived from expert opinion applicable to US law in the late 1990s.
It focuses on behavioural impacts only and does not consider ‘the cocktail party effect’, where communication becomes more difficult as background noise levels rise.
Unfortunately, scientists have yet to come up with a satisfactory alternative threshold.
Regardless, once the level was selected, TTR’s noise expert provided a model that demonstrated that the project would meet this target. However, the source level, which was based on a much smaller operation, was perhaps too conveniently identical to the largest possible level that could be used and still meet that selected threshold. Moreover, this model was only required because some earlier testimony on behalf of TTR actually failed to conform to basic laws of physics.
Opposition experts highlighted the flaws in the data collected on the smaller operation and expressed their concern over uncertainties, but these were summarily dismissed without any attempt to add additional measures to address the uncertainties.
In contrast, TTR limited their discussion of impacts primarily to whales and dolphins that had been sighted in the area most commonly. While this sounds reasonable, the problem is that there have been no properly designed systematic surveys in the area, which means that areas without ad-hoc sighting information cannot be assumed to be devoid of whales.
Despite this lack of data, TTR dismissed information from stranded, or ‘beach-cast’ animals, amazingly with support from government scientists, due to the fact that they are likely sick and thus cannot be assumed to indicate that animals are present in the region to any real degree. While this uncertainty is technically correct, published scientific reports elsewhere in the world indicate that strandings are in fact a reasonable predictor of animal occurrence.
The dissenting DMC members agreed with this, noting that a ‘‘lack of data is not a proof of absence’’, however the prevailing opinion decided in this case not to accept the information, due to the uncertainties involved.
This uneven handling of uncertainty may appear to be reasonable in the face of the need to make decisions. At least until you realise that the TTR project was approved in a 2-2 vote, after essentially the same project was dismissed in 2014. Committee chairperson Alick Shaw held the casting vote.
And it is strange that a decision by an agency tasked with the protection of the environment should be swung by an individual who, when leaving the Labour Party in 2000, declared himself to be ‘‘unashamedly pro-business’’.
I believe that it is this political leaning that shaped the disparate treatment of scientific uncertainty in the TTR decision – the downplaying of accepted scientific information in favour of more limited and, in my opinion, convenient expert opinion.
The long established and scientifically supported precautionary principle – to do no harm in the face of uncertainty – was cast aside. Even the opportunity to learn about the project and its impacts before revisiting the decision in, say, five years was passed up. This is how it starts. Before you know it you are in a sea of alternative facts and active disinformation.
The TTR decision may yet be challenged in the courts. It also remains a far cry from the extremes of antiintellectualism driving destructive political paths elsewhere in the world. But make no mistake, the seeds are there. New Zealand must take care to protect not only its environment but also its scientists and the integrity of supposedly science-based decisionmaking processes.
Failure to do so may very well allow the politicising of science to take hold here as well.
Dr Andrew Wright is a marine mammal expert at the University of Canterbury who specialises in the effects of noise on marine mammals.