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Biological Bottom Line
CALFED has set ambitious and broad goals for Bay-Delta restoration but Gary Bobker thinks they need to get more specific. "Without specific restoration objectives, any improvement to the environment could be viewed as acceptable," says the Bay Institute activist.
But "any" improvement isn't what Bobker and others in the Environmental Water Caucus are after. Now that CALFED has 10 alternatives for balancing Bay-Delta water supply and environmental concerns on the table (see opposite), many in the caucus are finding themselves at a loss to evaluate their respective environmental value. "Without a clear vision and measurable targets of where we want to go in terms of restoration, in terms of reversing species declines or reaching some level of ecosystem health as opposed to merely maintaining the patient on life-support, how can we proceed?" says Bobker.
CALFED's Dick Daniel says many of the specifics Bobker is after are covered in a newly released and much more detailed description of the program's 10 alternatives. But he acknowledges that there are still gaps in the science, in historical accounts of past resources, and in CALFED's ability to conclude that some specific degree of restoration would represent a functional ecosystem. "We're still open on how to set goals and measure performance in achieving them," says Daniels.
This leaves the environmental caucus' technical staffs burning the midnight oil to generate what Bobker calls a "framework for an ecosystem restoration plan." This framework, as he envisions it, might create two tiers of quantifiable restoration targets. The first tier would consist of short-term, fairly specific targets aimed at restoring natural processes (such as flow and habitat) to the extent necessary to meet established recovery criteria for species of concern. Such targets might identify minimum amounts of acreage to be restored of certain types of fish habitats, for example, or set threshold flow levels necessary to transport endangered fish during sensitive periods. The second tier would focus on longer-term and larger scale ecosystem level targets that might focus, for example, on establishing partial or full equivalency to conditions at some less ecologically-disturbed time in past.
Progress toward both types of targets could be evaluated based on a set of ecological indicators of ecosystem health, says Rod Fujita of the Environmental Defense Fund. Over a hundred such indicators have already been put on paper as a result of scientific workshops co-organized by the Fund and the Institute (March 1996 draft report now available).
"Setting a biological bottom line seems to be a challenging task no one wants to start," says Bobker."We think CALFED can't come up with a defensible product until they've got it, and we're trying to take the first step."
Contact: Gary Bobker (415)721-7680
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