Indicators and ratings for the compatibility assessment of conservation actions

The authors propose a way of tackling the difficulty to deal with compatibility, namely on what concerns the aspects linked with the multiplicity of components involved and the diversity of criteria that can be called to integrate an assessment procedure. The paper aims at providing a management instrument having the compatibility model as its central operative tool. The guiding concepts of this instrument are supported in criteria of technical, operational, environmental, social and cultural types. The complex notion of compatibility is here decomposed into simpler and workable parameters called compatibility indicators, similarly to what other disciplines call as performance indicators or environmental indicators [European Environment Agency, Environmental benchmarking - from concept to practice, Environmental Issue report no. 20, 2001 Luxembourg, Expert group on Urban Environment, Towards a local sustainable profile: European common indicators, European Commission 2000, HQE2R - INDI (INDicator Impact) model EU-project HQE2R contract EVK4-CT-2000-00025]. In order to make it possible to integrate the different parameters in the overall assessment of compatibility and to give each parameter the role that it effectively has in the final (in)compatibility, the paper proposes a system of translating the diverse quantifying units or descriptive terms into a uniform system, thus allowing the integration of components that are intrinsically inhomogeneous in nature. The translation tool is called the rating system and it consists of qualifying the position of a given action in a rational grading between 0 and 10, for each Compatibility Indicator, according to its potential as inducer of negative (harmful) effects for the conservation objectives. With this rating system properly defined, it is possible to integrate the identified indicators into a quantifiable unified assessment designated as the incompatibility degree. Specific tables containing indicators and ratings are presented for illustrating the basic assumption of the proposed methodology. (c) 2007 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.