For IA, a ‘place-based’ towards ‘flow-based’ landslide ahead

Much will be said in the special issue on the extent to which changing frameworks should lead to more forward-looking impact assessments in the twenty-first century. In principle, we know some cornerstones of change, such as strong environmental signals (water scarcity, climate change, biodiversity loss), an individualized communication in ‘social’ media and individually perceived ‘truths’, an electrified transport sector and industry, artificial intelligence and big data, and an ongoing globalized world (Retief et al. 2016). This allows me for specializing within this overall setting, linking impact assessment (IA) towards a vividly emerging topic of research and discourse: Environmental and socio-economic effects over large distances, the ‘telecoupling’ (Liu et al. 2013) of our global (land use, governance, etc.) systems, triggering a shift from ‘territory to flow’ (Sikor et al. 2013).

The approach ‘provides one way for linking place-based analysis of land change with process-based analysis of land governance’ (Oberlack et al. 2018, p. 16). Our national, regional and local environments have become ever more interconnected to larger trends in production, consumption, or investment far away (Munroe et al. 2019). For commodities, think of rare earth materials, for consumption of food, and for inflowing capital of Chinese interventions, for example. At the same time, ‘telecoupling’ can be driven by capitalized corporations with little governmental intervention (ibid.). As a synonym for ‘telecoupling’, a term coined mostly by the work of Liu et al. (e.g. 2013), ‘teleconnections’ (Challies et al. 2014) can be used as well, and ‘flow-based’ refers to Sikor et al. (2013) as a synonym for ‘process-based’ (Oberlack et al. 2018).

Would not IAs need an adjustment from foremost ‘location-based’ to more ‘flow-based’ IA approaches? Yet, it seems we may have missed this presumably ground-breaking shift. What may result from my letter is an outspoken call for future catching-up. In the following, I will introduce the ‘telecoupling’ conceptual framework in a nutshell, look shortly backwards to relevant IA foundations, and will conclude with hypotheses on IA’s challenge to better cover teleconnections in the 21^st century.

The telecoupling framework concept

The telecoupling framework (Liu 2017, among others) covers environmental and socioeconomic interactions over distances, be it between countries or within states. According to Sun et al.’s (2017) conceptualizaion, it entails five interrelated components: systems, which can be sending, receiving, and spillover systems; agents, that is decision-making entities involved; causes that generate the telecoupling and alter its dynamics; and resulting socioeconomic and environmental effects. Spillover systems can be in the trade sector. One example is that of countries whose trade was affected (USA) by alternatively emerging market actors (Brazil) in terms of soybean exports towards China (ibid.). Spillover systems also matter when the global commons come into play, be it the atmosphere as a carbon sink or the rainforests’ sequestration potential. The framework has been applied to understand key issues within a globalized world, such as land-use change, food systems, fishery and trade (Liu 2014; Eakin et al. 2017; Carlson et al. 2017; Friis and Nielsen 2017a, 2017b), ecosystem services (Schröter et al. 2018; Liu et al. 2016), conservation (Gasparri and Waroux 2015; Carrasco et al. 2017; Raya Rey et al. 2017), migratory species (López-Hoffman et al. 2017), energy sustainability (Fang et al. 2016), or water (Liu et al. 2016; Deines et al. 2016). Telecoupling pathways may cover, for example:

• spatial flows: e.g. species migratory pathways (e.g. salmon migration), invasion biology or relevant impacts as collisions with wind farms of migrating bats from the Baltic countries to southwestern destinations crossing mid-Europe (Voigt et al. 2012)

• temporal flows: e.g. in the case of peak times of renewable energy generation (cf. Deane et al. 2015) when electricity from wind and solar facilities may be exported from Germany versus net imports of fossil and nuclear energy from neighbours in other periods

• network patterns: e.g. pipelines (like between Finland and Estonia, Russia and Germany), or transmission grid systems with sometimes predominant one-way vectors as the planned major North-South high voltage connections in Germany (as the SuedLink Tennet¹ project)

• matter fluxes: e.g. the global pathways of soybean (or palm oil) with its vast land use and environmental implications as deforestation (Sun et al. 2017; Lenschow et al. 2016; Liu et al. 2013) or the international pathways of the aluminium industry, from mining to manufacturing overseas (Fearnside 2016)

• natural resource flows: e.g. the manifold water transfer projects worldwide, such as within Brazil (Pena de Andrade et al. 2011), the California Water Fix project, which would transfer water from the northern to southern parts of this US state, facing criticism. Or think also of sand extraction in India, driven by land reclamation for further urbanization in Singapore, for example (Torres et al. 2017)

• transboundary hazards: e.g. those triggered by oil spills or nuclear disasters, such as the Chernobyl case in 1986 (Steinhauser et al. 2014).

Moreover, we need not only to study (Tonini and Liu 2017) but to identify relevant response mechanisms too, to limit unintended implications of telecoupled systems and establish relevant mitigation and governance approaches (Lenschow et al. 2016; Challies et al. 2019). This might involve international agreements such as the International Convention for the Control and Management of Ships’ Ballast Water and Sediments (IMO, enforced September 2017) which aims to limit unintended biological invasions, for example. For the IA community, it will be important to consider whether and how IAs might play a role in the implementation of such international agreements.

IA’s place – (and state-) based origins

The making of IAs emerged substantially from industrial pollution and hazards, with Ohio’s burning Cuyahoga River substantially influencing US NEPA² (1969/1970), for example. This orchestrates the predominant local references of IA, shaping project and ‘place-based’ IAs until today. Moreover, once the American civil society had realized the vast state capacities in water infrastructure planning (Schudson 2018)³, for example, a second pillar had basically signalled its upcoming: IA’s of plans and programmes. Colorado rivers’ programmatic transformation into a chain of reservoirs raised voicing. Arizona’s ‘Lake’ Powell and Nevada’s ‘Lake’ Mead and the Hoover Dam still testify such strategic public investments. Europeans call relevant IA’s Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) nowadays. The EU came along with a screening list of certain plans and programmes, in-state, nationally bound. At least, UNECE Espoo Convention⁴ (adopted 1991, set into force 1997) acknowledges transboundary IA obligations; it pinpoints on mutual information of neighboured projects and plans.

The ‘place-based’ fixation of IAs seems narrow-minded and arbitrary. What, if the local effects of projects may display the minor side of the coin, resulting in our turning a blind eye to major effects over long distances? What if ‘spill-over systems’ come into play along supply chains, be it land and water grabbing (Breu et al. 2016), or in outer space? We miss supply chains in our (SEA, EIA) screening lists.

Land acquisition in foreign countries and our import of agricultural products comes along with an appropriation of freshwater resources, pinpointed Rulli et al. (2013). They used a hydrological model to assess the rates of freshwater (rainwater, irrigation) grabbing – ‘at alarming rates (p. 892)’, revealing Africa as the most grabbed continent (ibid.). For instance, have you ever studied where the plutonium has been mined and pre-processed before it fuels a European nuclear power plant (Winde et al. 2017)? Not only the absolute figures matter but the net balances of uranium production against the reactor-demand. Out of the total figure of uranium mill tailings generated until 2013 (2353 million t), 46% of the tailings were located in Africa (16, ibid.). Whilst the pivotal drivers are located in the beneficiary nations, the, so to speak, outsourced Uranium impacts do not show up once a European nuclear reactor applied for an approval or lifetime expansion.

Overcoming IA’s ‘silo’ that is ‘place-based’ paradigms

Thinking in ‘silos’ needed to give way in nexus thinking, concluded Chen et al. (2018) in terms of interregional trade effects on land use and water withdrawal. Not much of that matters in the making of IAs, with its to a substantial degree IA uncovered agricultural sector (Köppel et al. 2018). As long as the relevant consequences, be it opportunities or risks, are not brought into the bigger picture, the public will remain unaware of the global North’s African or South-American footprint.

Still a fossil fuel, natural gas is often considered as a ‘bridging’ resource towards a more sustainable energy system (Kumar et al. 2011), replacing coal and oil combustion in power plants and for heating, inter alia. Like for Sweden in Gothenburg⁵, Germany plans liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals, to contribute to an increased European import of natural gas. Opponents argue this might jeopardize the energy transformation towards renewable energies, and the climate obligations due to the Paris Agreement⁶.

With a focus on Germany as the receiving system, Höll et al. (2019) studied to which extent LNG flows have been covered by environmental governance, and to which degree these flows are considered in project appraisals and impact assessments. Natural gas, once liquefied, can be transported via ship over large distances, thus challenging major pipeline projects as in the case of the much-debated NordStream pipelines between Russia and Germany (Bouzarovski and Konieczny 2010; Vihma and Wigell 2016). LNG’s ‘sending system’ is located to a substantial degree in Quatar, or origins from the dynamically growing US market (Wachsmuth et al. 2019). Then in the US (e.g. Texas) often horizontally extracted (‘fracked’) gas is transported via pipelines to the liquefaction plant. In liquid state, it is 600 times less voluminous and easier to transport. Once shipped to the receiving system in Europe, it becomes re-gasified, stored, and fed into the gas network to be combusted towards electricity and heat.

Unintended spillover effects are the key arguments opposing the trade of LNG. Despite lower CO₂ emissions during combustion as fossil energy from coal or oil, its upstream emissions from exploration and drilling or fugitive methane emissions in the supply chain can contribute significantly to climate change (Wachsmuth et al. 2019). Such losses and the energy consumption of liquefaction, transport and re-gasification combined determine LNG’s climate relative competitiveness (e.g. Gilbert and Sovacool 2017).

Germany, as a major receiving market, has banned ‘fracking’ so far, avoiding potential risks of groundwater contamination, earthquakes, impacts of sand mining for fracking fluids, etc. It shifts such risks to Texas, inter alia, and risks a lock-in to fossil fuels. German LNG related environmental governance is mostly targeting towards the terminal construction, whilst LNG shipping emissions at the high seas and transport distances matter on top (Wachsmuth et al. 2019). Neither for the substantial extraction emissions (ibid.), and its (E)IA exclusions in states like Texas in the US, nor for the on-shore transportation and combustion, impacts are effectively covered by governance instruments. On the end-user side, a substantial carbon tax might matter, yet with the latter still reluctantly under debate in Germany at the time of writing.

Privatization has been a constituent pillar of neoliberalisation (Holmes and Cavanagh 2016). As far as the receiving system in Germany is concerned, the national natural gas grid plan is developed by private operators, and not a subject to public strategic planning and environmental assessment. Köppel et al. (2018) compiled a shadow list of plans and programmes in Germany, which will not be submitted to any SEA, inter alia on the grounds that they also are considered as ‘private’. We plan road and rail infrastructure in comparatively strict detail at a federal level in Germany but turn a blind eye to the strategic planning and programming of national airport and port infrastructure (ibid.).

What must come together, must come together

In Germany, also the major electricity grids, more and more important due to the energy transition, are firmly in the hands of a few TSOs (Transmission System Operators). In contrast to the gas sector, this is backed and directed towards a federal agency, conducting a nationwide planning process with a two-stage SEA procedure (Rehhausen et al. 2018). Yet the key points for the expansion scenarios and network requirements maintain largely elaborated by the handfull of private TSOs beforehand.

It may be obvious to integrate telecoupling effects into environmental IA via cradle to grave life cycle analysis (Loiseau et al. 2018), and a supplemental gap analysis towards any projects’ not only local, ‘place-based’, implications. However, satisfying research results and practical applications towards a reasonable interface between both approaches (LCA/EIA) are lacking to date. This has to do with the different logic of both instruments and their methodological design. Furthermore, if the European Eco-Management and Auditing Scheme (EMAS)⁷ took sufficiently into account supply chains, a reasonable interface of EIA and EMAS approaches may also represent a certain step forward.

Wisdom of the roots

Whenever doubts about the success of the IA endeavour torture me, I enjoy a glance into the roots, especially the spirit of the early years. Much comes down to how our role model US NEPA had been set up in the aftermath of the environmental and civil rights movements in the 1950ies and 60ies. In the context of supranational responsibility, there is the basically encouraging Executive Order 12114 on ‘Environmental Effects Abroad of Major Federal Actions’, signed by president Carter on 4 January 1979. Inter alia, it addresses major federal actions significantly affecting the environment

• of the global commons outside the jurisdiction of any nation (including Antarctica, and the oceans and weather and stratospheric conditions), and

• of a foreign nation which is not participating with the United States in the activity and which is not otherwise involved in the action.

The golden 1970s – but what has remained of it in practical terms? To be honest, that would be worth an interesting study. Still, there are obvious examples to be found. The final environmental impact statement for the (then planned) Mars 2020 Mission of NASA was prepared in accordance with Executive Order 12114. Inter alia, ‘… basic descriptions of the troposphere and stratosphere, global population distribution and density, … and a brief discussion of background radiation and the global atmospheric inventory of plutonium are included’ (3–21). A concern of the Mars mission involved launch vehicles’ accidents that could result in the release of radioactive material.

Executive Order 12114, or at least its spirit, integrates the global commons, which often suffer in terms of ‘spillover systems’. It wisely states: ‘A minor fraction of the dollar volume of US exports will require environmental reviews under this Order.’ The Espoo Convention focuses on the obligations of its signatories to notify and consult each other on major environmental impact across boundaries. Again, this convention seems to be pursuing a ‘place-based’ approach, based on cross-border effects of neighbouring countries’ actions. At any rate, the Espoo Convention might serve as a starting point when it comes to an embedding of the telecoupling challenge into IA.

Much might be hold against my writing here. The letter has not been based on comprehensive research efforts so far, and thus misses evidence on the hypotheses raised. It remains rather safe to say, however, that we are facing nothing less than a shift from only ‘place’- and public-based regimes towards ‘flow’- and often corporation-based ones. I daresay a landslide shift, and one that impact assessment must follow, transforming its logics and framings towards a teleconnected world. Otherwise, IA might just get sidestepped from what exactly constitutes the 21^st century developments.

Notes

1. https://www.tennet.eu/de/unser-netz/onshore-projekte-deutschland/suedlink/.

2. https://www.epa.gov/nepa.

3. http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674986930.

4. https://www.unece.org/env/eia/eia.html.

5. http://www.lnggothenburg.com/.

6. https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement/the-paris-agreement.

7. http://ec.europa.eu/environment/emas/index_en.htm.