Biological invasions: A growing threat

Issues in Science and Technology, Summer 1997 by Schmitz, Don C, Simberloff, Daniel

Lacking at the federal level are leadership, coordination of management activities on public lands, public education, and a strong desire to prevent new invasions. A parallel may be seen in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with its missions of preventing new invaders, monitoring outbreaks, conducting and coordinating research, developing and advocating management practices, recommending and implementing prevention strategies, dealing with state and local governments, and providing leadership and training. Perhaps the federal government could develop an analog for invasive plants and animals. A high-level interdepartmental committee might serve much the same function-perhaps an enlarged version of the Federal Interagency Committee for the Management of Noxious and Exotic Weeds or the Aquatic Nuisance Species Task Force with a greatly expanded mission.

Independently of such structural changes, we must enhance state and federal programs in order to use agency personnel more effectively, develop nationwide consistency and cost effectiveness, conduct risk analysis, review and develop legal and economic policies, lower administrative costs, and eliminate duplication of effort. For instance, because APHIS budgets are prepared two years in advance, it is difficult for the agency to fund adequately an immediate response campaign. Also, basic research on an introduced species reflects the curiosity and idiosyncrasies of individual academicians and is not focused or coordinated very well.

Complicating the policy issues is international trade, the single greatest pathway for harmful introduced species, which stow away in ships, planes, trucks, containers, and packing material. Increased trade produced by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) is bound to increase the problem. Of 47 harmful species introduced into the United States between 1980 and 1993, a total of 38 came in via trade.

Under NAFTA and GATT, restrictions claimed as measures to protect the environment can be challenged before the relevant regulatory body, which will decide whether the restriction is valid or simply protectionist. In GATT's case, the body is the World Trade Organization (WTO), which ruled in an analogous case that the European Union could not prohibit imports of beef from cattle treated with hormones. The WTO ruled that evidence of a health threat was insufficient.

For NAFTA and GATT, species exclusions are to be based on risk assessments, many of which require judgment calls by researchers. The effects of introduced species are so poorly understood and the record of predicting which ones will cause problems is so bad that one can question how much credence to place in a risk assessment. Also, the growing complication of risk assessment methods makes them less meaningful to the lay public and perhaps less responsive and relevant to policy needs. Particularly in controversial cases, as in many concerning introduced species, agreement by all parties is unlikely. Further, assessments are expensive, costing as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars, and funding sources are not established.