Risks for the Black Sea marine environment as perceived by Ukrainian stakeholders: A fuzzy cognitive mapping application

Scientific modelling and socioeconomic approaches are increasingly combined, promising a more effective and reliable approach towards sustainable use of marine resources. Presently several integrated approaches to marine governance are designed and tested within international research consortia. However it is plausible to assume that present societal understanding of environmental goods and services is fuzzy and lacks articulation. Bottom up decision-making needs to integrate this societal understanding of goods and services succeeding through public participation better compliance of environmental policies. Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping (FCM) was employed as the proper methodology to reveal Ukrainian laypeople perceptions on the Black Sea ecosystem resilience, risk factors and future perspectives. Therefore, a generic model for environmental management was constructed by augmenting the individual FCMs drawn by 29 laypeople. The graph theoretical indices were calculated and the collective cognitive map produced by augmentation. At the condensed FCM, after the initial 52 concepts clustering, a total of 26 concepts with 145 connections among concepts were obtained. The most central concept in the collective map was the Municipal Solid Waste and the most mentioned variable was Coastal Development. Stakeholders do perceive circular systemic processes regulating the system’s behaviour. A number of scenarios were run using the FCM inference process. Results document that simple policy interventions aiming at controlling only one or maximum two parameters of the system are perceived as having no impact at all at the final state of Black Sea ecosystem.