Muddying the waters: The science of protecting the environment during dredging

AbstractPredictions of environmental impacts from dredging during port development often involve uncertainty, leading regulators to instigate ‘adaptive management’ and increasingly extensive compliance monitoring programmes. In many cases, monitoring has become very large yet it is not clear we are learning much from this, either about what impacts are or how to monitor these more effectively. As such, approval conditions requiring monitoring risk become ‘green-tape’ whereas they should be driving a scientific process to learn about how to manage dredging better. Using the ‘Predictive Links’ programme for the Gorgon LNG plant development as an example of how more can be made from compliance monitoring, we outline three ways to improve: asking better questions, making more use of past data, and making data more freely available. Industry itself should take the lead in all three of these areas by becoming involved in research and committing to making data publically available.