Social & Environmental Research Institute (SERI), 278 Main Street, Suite 404, Greenfield, MA 01301, USA.
Environ Manage. 2010 Apr;45(4):723-38. doi: 10.1007/s00267-010-9447-9. Epub 2010 Feb 19.
Oil spill contingency planners need an improved approach to understanding and planning for the human dimensions of oil spills. Drawing on existing literature in social impact assessment, natural hazards, human ecology, adaptive management, global change and sustainability, we develop an integrative approach to understanding and portraying the human dimensions impacts of stressors associated with oil spill events. Our approach is based on three fundamental conclusions that are drawn from this literature review. First, it is productive to acknowledge that, while stressors can produce human impacts directly, they mainly affect intermediary processes and changes to these processes produce human impacts. Second, causal chain modeling taken from hazard management literature provides a means to document how oil spill stressors change processes and produce human impacts. Third, concepts from the global change literature on vulnerability enrich causal models in ways that make more obvious how management interventions lessen hazards and mitigate associated harm. Using examples from recent spill events, we illustrate how these conclusions can be used to diagrammatically portray the human dimensions of oil spills.
溢油应急规划人员需要改进方法，以了解和规划溢油事件的人为因素。本研究借鉴社会影响评估、自然灾害、人类生态学、适应性管理、全球变化和可持续性等领域的现有文献，提出了一种综合方法，以了解和描述与溢油事件相关的压力源对人类影响的各个方面。我们的方法基于从文献综述中得出的三个基本结论。首先，承认压力源虽然可以直接产生人类影响，但它们主要影响中间过程，而这些过程的变化会产生人类影响，这是富有成效的。其次，灾害管理文献中的因果链模型为记录溢油压力源如何改变过程并产生人类影响提供了一种手段。第三，全球变化文献中关于脆弱性的概念以更明显的方式丰富了因果模型，说明了管理干预如何减轻危害并减轻相关危害。我们使用最近溢油事件的例子来说明如何使用这些结论以图表形式描述溢油事件的人为因素。
