Applied Ecosystem Services, LLC

Natural resource companies, particularly in extractive industries, are expected to comply with standards of environmental stewardship and sustainability. Financial institutions subscribing to the Equator Principle require evidence of such compliance when considering project funding. Mining companies constrained by low commodity prices and difficulties in obtaining financing benefit by demonstrating their adherence to these concepts. Stewardship and sustainability concern the natural environments in which the project operates. Two inter-related ways of demonstrating the company’s commitment are the appropriate analyses of their environmental data and the smooth operation of their environmental department.

Environmental management systems (EMS) are policies directing how the company complies with statutory and regulatory environmental constraints on its operations. The Equator Principles (EP) are a financial industry benchmark for determining, assessing, and managing social and environmental risk in project financing. Implementing the former adds value to the company and increases investor confidence that the latter are reducing social and economic risks. Download the PDF.

Regulated industries need environmental data to support complex and contentious permit applications, demonstrate that operations do not adversely affect the natural environment, and effectively address concerns of regulators, other stakeholders, and the public. Environmental data are ephemeral: if they are not acquired at a given time they are gone forever. The costs of sampling, measuring, and counting are minor compared to their potential value. Unfortunately, such early actions are not the norm.

Environmental data are the foundation for all natural resource operations. They are the scientific basis for environmental impact analyses by public lands management agencies. Mining, energy generation and transmission, and livestock grazing all depend on the environmental impact assessment being based on appropriately collected, analyzed, and interpreted data. Point source water discharges require permits: a National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit for discharge directly to any surface water or a Water Pollution Control Facility (WPCF) permit for discharge to the ground and not directly to surface or ground waters.

Environmental laws, statutes, and implementing regulations have two specific pur- poses: forecasting future conditions and determining cause and effect. The analytical models applied to existing environmental data sets do not provide results that explic- itly address the two purposes. They leave decision-makers confused, uncertain how to justify a decision, and suffering paralysis by analysis as they ask for more results that prove to be ineffective. This document explains how environmental data are analyzed (wrongly and correctly), why the analytical approaches differ, and why knowing the details makes you more effective in managing environmental data for your operations.

Every company with a dozen or more employees can gain many benefits from having—and using—an environmental management system (EMS) tailored to their specific needs. The EMS does not require ISO 14001 certification to provide direct and indirect cost savings benefits. Download the PDF.

R.A. Fisher, a British biologist and statistician created the statistical foundation for testing experimental hypotheses in the 1930s. Environmental data are observational measurements, not experimental measurements. Therefore, the analytical models applied to experimental data produce incorrect results when applied to environmental data. Download the PDF.

Water quality discharge permits require periodic measurement of water quality constituent concentrations to document compliance with permit conditions. In addition to correctly including concentrations below the analytical method’s detection level when describing the distribution of these concentrations there is great value for operators and environmental regulators in properly analyzing the temporal aspects of these data. A single concentration, particularly when it exceeds a standard’s threshold, lacks context and does not assess an operation’s interactions with the natural environment; it is a temporal and spatial snapshot.

Most people are familiar with statistical hypothesis tests such as the t-test and ANOVA to analyze whether two or more samples (from a parametric distribution) came from the same population. The nonparametric equivalents (Wilcoxon and Kruskal-Wallis tests) are less familiar but equally robust. What is not always clear is that these models are applied to one or more response variables; e.g., chemical concentrations that result from natural or anthropogenic causes. They do not answer the question of why these values were observed.

The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) as implemented by EPA and state regulations requires monitoring of ground water chemistry and statistical analyses of these data. The latest revision of the EPA’s statistical guidance document is 887 pages long (plus supplements) and has been augmented by a Webinar because the statistical analyses are not simple or easily understood by non-statisticians/data analysts. Some commercial software is sold to perform these analyses, but like all other statistical software it does not ensure that the user completely understands how to select models to apply or can properly interpret the results.